You don’t want to know how much time I’ve spent messing with the appearance of my blog. The process I went through to acquire my current theme was reminiscent of when I used to have a Xanga account in middle school. I used to take layout templates from various sites and manipulate the HTML in order to make my page appear exactly how I wanted it to. That is essentially the same process I went through today. There were a lot of themes to choose from but, I was not completely satisfied with any of them. Although I’m happy with the theme I’m currently using, it does not have the same colors, font, borders or header as when it was first installed.

After I made my page pretty I installed the Plugins recommended by Dr. Oblivion which included Subscribe to Comments, Twitter Tools, Akismet and Google Analytics. I didn’t have issues with the majority of these however, as promised, Twitter Tools was a pain to set up. I did think it was funny though that after the Plugin was first installed on WordPress there was acknowledgment that the entire process “is awkward and more complicated than it should be.”

Finding a decent Flickr Plugin was slightly more difficult. When I mentioned in a previous post that I encountered issues uploading photos from Flickr to my blog, Ben Rimes recommended a great site that listed a variety of Flickr Plugins. I found FlickrRSS RU, the Flickr Plugin I’m currently using, on this site.

FlickrRSS RU is great because it was easy to set up, especially in contrast to Twitter Tools. Unfortunately I don’t think I’m going to be able to stick with it because, to my understanding, the FlickrRSS RU Widget only has one display option. I am happy with the way the photos are displayed, however, I am still looking for a Flickr Plugin that will let me choose a specific set to display and not just automatically show all my pictures. My goal is to find a way to display my Daily Shoot photos and exclude the rest of my Photostream. I will work more on this and then provide an update.