Download the theme here.

Here is a slightly dark color setting that can be imported to Visual Studio 2010.

Color setting for XML.

Color setting for HTML

Color setting for C#

CSS coloring

Download the slate-v-01 here.

Download the slate-v-011 here.

Here is a completely black one for VS2008.

Updated black setting for VS2008.

Black color settings for VS2010

I have added ads to this site recently. I did not want those ads change the look of my theme. One way to achieve this for text based ads is to have a transparent background. Google AdSense ad setup did not have a way to express that. Backgound color is required is only RGB. All the ads made the site look terrible than it already is. Luckily for me I am not using gradient colors over a large area. The background image is a small rectangle that is tiled. I changed the background color to match the background image and it looks better than standard colors.

If you have gradient backgound spanning a large area or have a background image that is not uniform color try to place ads outside of those areas. You can probably create a bar or box with borders that will blend with the rest of the site. The best way to work around the problem is to come with a color scheme that will allow you to place ads in a more acceptable manner.

Have made more updates to the theme. It now supports threaded comments. It is also widget friendly now. I have replaced the standard sidebar on this site with a dynamic sidebar.  It still is only 38KB in size including the images. Other changes include font sizes and colors for a few elements.

I have been working on a theme update for the site. Current theme settings were created when WordPress was 1.x as far as I remember. My goal is to make it more flexible in width, add support for widgets and more. 

First update planned is to make a flexible width theme with a max limit on width. I am almost halfway through it. Some srange behaviors in IE 8 is delaying the release. Works better in Chrome. Also, I found that XHTML 1.1 validator doesn’t allow empty ul tag. WordPress Sidebar functions return an empty string when there is no content and if you put them inside ul tag it will fail the XHTML 1.1 validation when empty.

I am not able to use language_attributes() function and pass xhtml 1.1 validation. Output has an invalid attribute “lang”. That means I will not be able to publish this theme on WordPress site because the checklist says I should call this function. I called the function with “xhtml” as the argument.

I was creating an iGoogle theme and was looking at the documentation. Then I saw that I could use this developer sandbox Google has released. I signed up for that and used it to make necessary changes to the theme. After I was done with it, I wanted to get out of that because my iGoogle home page did not look like what I had created. There was no documentation on how to do that.

In a google forum found an entry that said I could get out by going to http://www.google.com/ig/sandbox. I went there and it showed the same page. There was nothing that said I am out of it. Sometimes it showed the signup page and sometimes the iGoogle home page. When I signed up, my iGoogle home page got a bunch of tabs and stuff that made it look completely different from what I had. No matter how many times I went to the signup page, my iGoogle page looked the same. 

Then I started removing the tabs and realized that my stuff was hidden below all the tabs got added to it. It did not keep two different copies when I signed in and signed out.

Anyway, here is the link to the theme I created.

If you like themes, you already know about Stardock and Wincustomize.com. I received email notifying the commencement of GUI Champs 2008. You can get more details about it directly here.

I am tired of the default XP themes. At work I tried to install WindowBlinds but McAfee didn’t like it. I had to uninstall WindowBlinds so that I can continue to work. In protest I changed the theme to Windows Classic and turned off theme service. I tinkered a bit with colors and saved it to a theme file. Here is what I came up with.

Classic Theme

I completed my first WindowBlinds theme. Almost all images were created using Paint.NET.

If you have WindowBlinds, you can download the theme here. The theme itself is free.

You can buy WindowBlinds from StarDock, if you don’t have it. There is also a 30 day trial version of WindowBlinds available. Check it out.

Also, please let me know what you think by posting comments over there and rating it.

This is still work in progress and it has been work in progress for a long time. If you have comments, please let me know.
WBA file