{"id":2168,"date":"2011-06-29T16:34:39","date_gmt":"2011-06-29T15:34:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/?p=2168"},"modified":"2011-07-04T14:05:11","modified_gmt":"2011-07-04T13:05:11","slug":"thesis-my-cool-new-wordpress-theme","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/29\/thesis-my-cool-new-wordpress-theme\/","title":{"rendered":"Thesis &#8211; My Cool New WordPress Theme"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve used the same Ocadia theme on my blog for 4 years and to be honest it was looking rather tired.  Apart from anything, it was very thin!  One of the reasons for this was that 800&#215;600 resolutions were still quite common 4 years ago.  They&#8217;re not any more and I wanted something wider (steady!).  I&#8217;ve popped a picture up of what it used to look like below.  I hope you&#8217;ll agree that it&#8217;s a big improvement.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/colinmcnulty.com-old-template.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-2169\" title=\"colinmcnulty.com-old-wordpress-template\" src=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/colinmcnulty.com-old-template-300x286.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"300\" height=\"286\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/colinmcnulty.com-old-template-300x286.png 300w, https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/colinmcnulty.com-old-template.png 772w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a> In fact, that&#8217;s the first thing that my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/tips\/thesis\">new Thesis Theme<\/a> fixes for me.  The old theme never handled floating images properly and I always had to manually edit the HTML to get images to align left or right with wrapped text.  There are several other cool things I discovered about Thesis too, in no particular order:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Thesis makes changing how your blog looks sooo easy!<\/strong> Whilst some basic coding skillz (to manage the hooks) are useful, it&#8217;s certainly not need and any novice can very easily customise the look and feel of their WordPress blog with ease.<\/li>\n<li> I no longer need the Canonical URL&#8217;s plugin as Thesis handles these automatically (canonical urls are a way of telling google how to handle the same content on different urls, that inevitably comes with having a WordPress blog).<\/li>\n<li>I no longer need the SEO Title Tags plugin, as that functionality comes out of the box too.  Although having to manually migrate to the new Thesis title fields was a slight pain.<\/li>\n<li>I no longer need the Ultimate Google Analytics plugin, as Thesis handles that automatically too.<\/li>\n<li>That&#8217;s <strong>3 plugins I can get read of<\/strong>, which can only increase the speed of the site, which is something else I&#8217;m hoping to see an improvement on.<\/li>\n<li>Thesis makes it easy to migrate from a development \/ test wordpress blog, to live, through the ability to export and import all the Thesis options.  That&#8217;s very useful.<\/li>\n<li>Having post Teasers on the home page is lovely!  \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<li>The Multimedia box has some interesting possibilities, I look forward to experimenting with that.<\/li>\n<li>It automatically highlights my comments with a blue background, which is very nice.<\/li>\n<li>The <strong>Thesis support is awesome<\/strong>!  Because it is a premium theme, there are lots of people prepared to put time into supporting it and so far I&#8217;ve found 5+ answers already on the web, for every question I&#8217;ve had.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/tips\/thesis\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2172 alignleft\" title=\"Thesis Theme Banner\" src=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/06\/thesis-125x125-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"125\" height=\"125\" \/><\/a>I could go on but won&#8217;t. All in all, <strong>I&#8217;m very pleased with the way it&#8217;s turned out<\/strong>.\u00a0 It&#8217;s taken me about 2 days to get it installed on a test site, sort out the layout how I want, do all the customisation and changes I wanted, fiddle with plugins settings, do a backup, test the migration process and deploy it to live (having spent 15+ years in IT, I&#8217;m super cautious these days!). I have to say, I&#8217;m pretty impressed with <a href=\"http:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/tips\/thesis\">Thesis<\/a>, and if I ever had to do another blog, I&#8217;d definitely start out with it.<\/p>\n<p>However, there&#8217;s always the chance that I&#8217;ve mucked something up, or something has broken.\u00a0 So if you spot any problems, please do comment below and I&#8217;ll get them fixed pronto.\u00a0 Enjoy!<\/p>\n<p>Oh finally, when I was redoing the AdSense code (Google Ads on this blog)<strong> I enabled image ads for post pages <\/strong>like this (you may see one below, or you may see a text ad, it&#8217;s Google that decides what goes there).  I&#8217;m hoping they won&#8217;t be too intrusive, but if you get annoyed by them, do let me know.  The reason they are there is simple: the very meagre revenue they generate (literally pence per day!) pays for the hosting of this site at the end of the year.  If I ever get rich enough to not care about the odd \u00a3100, I may well take them off, lol!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve used the same Ocadia theme on my blog for 4 years and to be honest it was looking rather tired. Apart from anything, it was very thin! One of the reasons for this was that 800&#215;600 resolutions were still quite common 4 years ago. They&#8217;re not any more and I wanted something wider (steady!). [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":161,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[271,10],"class_list":{"0":"post-2168","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-crossfit","7":"tag-thesis","8":"tag-wordpress"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/161"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2168"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2168\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2168"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2168"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.colinmcnulty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2168"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}