Comments on: WordPress.com Blogging: Changing Themes

By: timethief

timethief — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 18:57:59 +0000

Yes, this can only be done by purchasing an annually renewable CSS editing upgrade and doing the work yourself.
http://en.support.wordpress.com/custom-css/

The correct place to post for that kind of support is here. > http://en.forums.wordpress.com.

Vigilance is NOT a narrow theme. It’s a full width theme so if you expand it to suit yourself then those who are viewing it on the most common screen resolution sizes will have to put up with a using a scroll bar at the bottom in order to view the whole site. When any blogger does that to me I click out of the blog and do not return.

I am using the most common screen resolution size which is 1024×768. People using widescreen (if you are talking about big, wide monitors) are actually quite rare.
1024×768 — 40.28%
1280×1024 — 16.97%
1280×800 — 16.89%
1440×900 — 7.71%
1680×1050 — 4.28%
800×600 — 4.01%

That means over 78% of people are on screen resolutions of 1280px width or less. So you may want to take that into consideration.

By: Lauren

Lauren — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 16:05:01 +0000

Does anyone know how to change the fixed-width on Vigilance to make it a bit wider, still fixed, just not as narrow?

By: timethief

timethief — Thu, 06 May 2010 20:21:20 +0000

@Rachel
Not really. My replies to forum questions make me aware how often I forget the simple things and keep me humble too. ;)

By: rachel

rachel — Thu, 06 May 2010 17:48:09 +0000

Brilliant answer! So simple when you know the ropes, eh? Grateful, Rachel

By: timethief

timethief — Thu, 06 May 2010 16:30:19 +0000

Hi Rachel,
Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate hearing that what I blog about is valuable to my readers. The answer to your question is: Every blogger needs a private test blog.

As we can have as many free wordpress.com blogs as we want and as we do not want to set our blogs to keep search spiders and visitors out while we are customizing a new one getting a test blog is the way to go.

I use mine not only for testing possible theme changes and trying out their features, but also for trying any new widgets or other additions I am considering making to my main blog. Once I can see what the outcomes will be on my test blog then changing my main blog only takes a few moments and my readers are not negatively impacted by the changes.

By: rachel

rachel — Thu, 06 May 2010 14:47:17 +0000

timethief,

I’ve been tooling around your wonderful blog (and I also appreciate your friendly “bottom postings”) and haven’t yet found an answer to this question: How do I keep my current theme up and running while I prep my new theme for the unveiling? I’ll need more time for rearranging and tweaking Pages and Widgets than is provided by simply pushing the Activate button. Thanks much.