The Ken Puls Blog

As you can see from reading the frame here, I use WordPress to power the blog. I wasn’t really happy with the skin, though, so I took a browse through the WordPress theme gallery, and found the Cordobo-Green-Park theme. It was exactly what I wanted… only it was green. I really liked the layout, but not the colour.
And so here comes the power of the net. I accidentally found this page, which happens to be all about adjusting this theme to use the exact colours I want!

I’ve never used GIMP before, so didn’t know if I’d like it. I also didn’t know if it would run on Vista. Rather than clutter my PC, I created a new Virtual PC (using a differencing disk off my master), and had a fresh WinXP OS up an running in five minutes. I downloaded and installed GIMP, and followed the awesome instructions at the afore mentioned link to customize my skin. Perfect!

The only comment I have on the tutorial is that I had to do tons of gif and png images, but it didn’t take too long, and I’m way happier with the look of the site now.

Well this sucks… I was writing up a post on using XML to customize the Excel 2007 Ribbon, but WordPress interprets my XML. Nothing I’ve done so far seems to get it to post in plain text. I’m still pretty new to this, but it’s really annoying so far.

20 minutes later…

And WordPress is on a diet! I found the iG:Syntax Hiliter, which is awesome. Super easy to follow instructions to install and configure, even for a non-php and HTML guy like myself.

A further 30 minutes later…

And I’m not so sure. The XML works, but only if I post it right away. If I preview it, it eats it again! Grr… At least I can get something out there though.

Okay, well here we go. I’ve added a blog to my site to give me an avenue to post without feeling the restriction of getting everything perfect the first time. I’m going to share some of what I’m doing, things I see, and some of my opinions on things. If anyone finds it interesting then great. If not, go read someone else’s site.