I like the theme I chose, called Admired. It looks best with Google fonts, which you can select from an impressive control panel, but those really only looked right on my own computer, so after a few days and a few gasps I’m sticking with Arial. What I absolutely love about this theme is the advanced section in the control panel that let me add my own CSS. I still needed to add support for my own JavaScript files, and having played extensively with a WordPress Mu server about 3 years back I knew I wanted to do it the right way from the start. Firebug quickly showed me the Admired theme already had jQuery running, but in noConflict mode. A major reason I set up my own WordPress site was to have access to the templates… using Chris and Jeff’s advice in the article linked above I made two minor changes to header.php, which look a little different than theirs but I’ll document them elsewhere a bit later (short version: I saw that jQuery would be turned off with another setting, so I fixed that). I intend to blog on Firebug at some point, but almost everything I know about it I learned from the jQuery For Designers site linked in the Design menu in my right column… don’t wait for me, folks!

So far I’ve used the CSS to add classes like the drop caps (which need to be adjusted for Arial now), some varied font sizes and my bibliography, and in concert with the JavaScript it does my help popups.^?

The only bad news was some I could have intuited in advance… this WYSIWYG editor filters out “invalid” code. I wanted to put a rel=”whatever” inside a <sup>, which really is invalid and I guess I’m glad it stopped me. But it also removes aria-pressed=”true” and role=”tree-item” which are not invalid, simply unknown (to too many, see previous post!). I’ve been offered a bit of help with that one, and I’ve figured out a way to avoid it altogether, but both will require more time than I have right now, both to explain and to implement. Stay tuned!

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