i’m sure that everyone has noticed the fun that i’m having here; fiddling around with blog themes, uploading them, examining, studying and altering the code to get the themes to work properly and have the features i like to see. i have reached a point where i’d like to try my hand at designing a wordpress theme or ten. technical difficulties and the lack of an image editing tool such as adobe photoshop or the ‘poorman’s photoshop’ like coreldraw, are going to stand in the way of my doing that for a while because the design elements need to be specific in size; and none of the tools i have right now fit that need. so i’ll be working on getting those in the coming months. If you have any suggestions on that, please let me know in comments.

As you can see by the proclamation above left, George Washington Proclaimed ‘it is the duty of all nations to acknowledge the Providence of Almighty God.’ He is calling in that proclamation for people to THANK GOD IN PUBLIC on Thanksgiving. This is something the revisionists are trying to belittle, ignore and ridicule in their attack on the ‘white patriarchy’, but for those of us who don’t live in the caves of Idioataria, we all should at least be looking for themes that more clearly represent the values we are talking about as we engage in this culture war with atheists that want to wipe us out of the public sphere. I personally am battling on many fronts to save those values.

What drove me to think about all of this is the lack of traditional-looking Wordpress and blogger Thanksgiving themes that are available for free.

There are fall-oriented themes, pumpkins, cornocopias, even themes with cute little cartoons of pilgrims and indians. There are ‘global warming environmental’ ones, ones that celebrate Islam, Hunduism, Buddhism and everything that doesn’t use the “C-word”. But there is nothing that reflects the majority of people in American today; the time-honored Christian values based on history and the founding fathers of our great nation during the month of November. This is something I would like to celebrate; namely, George Washington and presidents that followed him, have supported a time of Thanksgiving in November, going back to the days of the Pilgrims.

The other problem I noticed is the same gap and lack of themes out there for the celebration of Christmas and Easter. Granted, a lot of artsy types are liberals who would rather produce anarchist themes or depressing all-black themes, anti-war themes, and themes that espouse a hatred for Christian values, but what is the problem with just announcing what you’re about? I think too many people have taken the secular road, but that is against biblical principles. God commands us to be the ‘light of the world’.

I retired the Halloween theme until next year (designed by some outfit in Romania I now find), and now have one up called ‘papyrus’ which you can see in the theme switcher (screenshot below).

The Papyrus theme was interesting to me because the ancient dead sea scrolls were written on papyrus. The Coptic Christians of Egypt wrote biblical manuscripts on papyrus, which is one of the historical reasons I am so fascinated with the plight and Islamic persecution of the Egyptian Copts, today. I tweaked it a little bit, because some of the code was mis-placed and caused the theme to be broken, and I also thought that there should be some type of script on the design because it’s supposed to have the illusion of being written on papyrus. If you’re logged into your blog and have the papyrus theme activated, there are no ‘edit’ links for the posts or the comments, so I’m working on fixing that. Overall, though, I liked the large font choices already on “Papyrus” and the wide width of the design for content, it’s similar in that way to the Halloween design in that it’s simple and has only two columns, but it also has its problems.

That’s one of the issues I’ve found with these freely available themes that people have so generously provided; the fact that the themes aren’t always plug and play; and you have to add things, get rid of some things, and tweak it just to get it to appear correctly, and then if you’re particular like me, you still need to add things to get it to your own liking.

Another one that I thought was lovely was Dewantis Dandelion…but I have been having a heck of a time getting it to work properly, so although I fixed several things, I retired it until my frustration ends and I can get back to it.

There is a page up that’s blank here called Flight 93 Memorial, where I am hoping I can put an aggregator up for Flight 93 posts. Unfortunately there is a lot of information about what an aggregator is, but not a place where I can learn about how to create an aggregator; like they have at Prolife blogs. I’m hoping one of my readers can point me in a direction to learn how to do that.

That will be some time down the road, but what has intrigued me the most is that there seems to be a big gap where the designs are concerned. There are very few religious designs, or those visually representing Conservative Values and Christianity and/or Judaism. So I intend to try and change that down the line.

I have a lot of studying to do of the code, and you will see me switching different free skins in and out while I learn my way around. Right now I’m collecting royalty-free images that have a Christian significance for holidays like Christmas and Easter that will do the trick down the road when I have my imaging software in place.

I suppose you could say this is just a thoughtful post that includes the blogging things that I’m doing that most of the people in my life are unaware of.