Don’t forget Mr. Ruthsarian!

His blog is titled The Forgettable Mister Ruthsarian, and if you’d like to look at some nice CSS layouts, his are not copyrighted: “© Nobody. All CSS/HTML is released into the public domain.” Don’t let the empty blog fool you, the layouts are easy enough to find.

I’ve spent the last few days—um, let me correct that—Barbara and I have spent the last few days recoding his Skidoo Too layout to work with WordPress 1.2.2.

Ruthsarian’s templates appear to only be XHTML and CSS, no php or solution that works instantly with WordPress. Getting it to work on this blog involved cutting and pasting the relevant out-of-the-box WordPress 1.2.2 index.php commands into the appropriate areas of Ruthsarian’s index.html page, then saving that as index.php. The calendar was quite difficult for us, the WordPress CSS #wp-calendar instructions added to the bottom of Ruthsarian’s CSS seemed the best solution. We were able to format the calendar using only his CSS, but it wasn’t quite as flexible or advanced as the WordPress solution.

Perhaps if we understood CSS better, we could have simply added a few instructions to Ruthsarian’s solution.

I still have some issues to resolve, comments and their headings don’t appear with the same size fonts and colors as the main page. I just noticed that, and haven’t yet looked into it. I guess I’ll need to check pingback and trackback aesthetics, as well.

When I’m done, I’m going to pass the template on to anyone who’d like to use it, likely with Ruthsarian’s mint green color scheme, but I don’t think this template for WordPress is done yet.