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.

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

This week I created a new theme for WordPress from ground up. I started the design of this theme with the following ideas.

• Keep every end tag in the same file where it was started. The themes I looked at, including the default WordPress theme had tags crossing over multiple files or templates. I made a choice not to cross over any HTML, PHP or other tags across multiple files and templates. If a tag started in a file, it will end in that file. This was pretty difficult to accomplish because all the samples I looked at for had code spilled all over the files. Luckily the organization of these files were very well documented at WordPress.org.
• Reuse the code. Whether it is PHP or HTML, I tried to reuse them by placing them in small PHP files. In the style.CSS file which is the main theme file, I have categorized, used shortcuts and grouped styling. May not be perfect, but it is very compact.
• Extremely small size. I consider this very important because most of the world still does not have broadband connection and a quick page load will be appreciated by people who do not have a good Internet connection. I made the images as small as possible, though I have plans to make them even smaller. Code reuse allowed me to cut down on the overall code size. I have no fancy code in the theme that you cannot find at Codex. So, I did not add any comments for things that are already explained elsewhere. The size of the WordPress default theme is about 90KB. This theme is about 37KB including a 14KB screen shot and 8KB of page images. That leaves about 15KB of code. WordPress classic theme with no images itself is about 26KB.
• At least XHTML 1.0 compliance. This was easy. But then I wanted to make it XTML 1.1 compliant. This was tough enough. Right now if the browser is FireFox or W3C Validator, it will spew XHTML 1.1 compliant output. Everything else has a small quirk.Image map area is not XHTML 1.1 compliant because every other browser needs the “name” attribute for the map tag. Internet Explorer 7 is the worst of all. It even needed an illegal character ‘#’ for usemap attribute of the img tag. With some HTTP header modifications and dynamic attribute generation, I have accomplished perfect XHTML 1.1 compliance for FireFox at least.
• CSS 3.0 compliance. I did not have to make too many changes to the completed code to get there.

Once I completed the initial theme look, feel and functionality, I started testing every link and function on four browsers on Windows and 2 browsers on Linux. Then I submitted the site on W3C validator for XHTML and CSS and that when I found the incompatibilities. I even thought FireFox had a bug and filed it at bugzilla. It turns out that FireFox was just being strict as required by the specification.

I have not looked at the plugins or how to support plugins in the theme. I will add it as soon as I learn about them.

A screen shot of the theme is below. If you would like to have a complete look at the theme, you can view it here. The site is published on a server sitting at home on my cable connection. It may be a bit slow. I will publish the theme after a bit more tinkering with images to reduce the sizes. The content at this site was imported from here. Let me know what you think about the theme.

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