All right my five faithful readers, I’m done with searching for and installing a new default theme for the blog. It has been sitting in the Theme Switcher for a while now and some of you curious types might have seen it already. But at this point, all my tweaking is complete and the new theme is ready for the prime time. If you haven’t done so already, select the “Dark” theme from the theme switcher and poke around the site with the new theme. Hit the more link below to find out about all the changes made and other things I thought you should know about.

The first thing you’ll notice about the new theme is that it’s very Web 2.0, isn’t it? Well ok maybe the first thing you’ll notice is how blue the theme is. Did I ever mention I LOVE BLUE? I can’t get enough of all the blueness that the theme offers. The theme is fluid all right but only for resolutions 1024×768 and above. Below that, you will have to side-scroll. Sorry guy. All right let’s get down to a point-by-point analysis of the new theme along with quirks and additions in this and other themes.

1. Google Advertisements are back! Yes they had gone missing on Fluidity3c and I earned zilch during that period. I’ve added them to both Fluidity3c and Dark. There aren’t too many. One vertical banner in the sidebar along with a Firefox button and one horizontal banner after individual posts. I’ve tried my best to blend them in with the respective backgrounds so that they don’t look too out of place.

2. Theme Switcher no longer a drop-down! On Fluidity3c and on Dark, the theme switcher is now a regular list item. That’s because I have only 5 themes so the ugly drop-down wasn’t necessary. In “Dark” the theme switcher can be found near the bottom, right above the footer, along with the last 10 recent posts.

3. Archives page added! I now have a full archives page on Fluidity3c and Dark. It lists archives first by month and then post-by-post. I couldn’t get it to work on the other themes so they still have the old drop-down (Neo-Sapien) and full list (Quentin). I should change Quentin to drop-down archives. Also in the sidebar for Dark and Fluidity3c, the archives section lists the last few and then has a link called “More Archives” which takes you to the aforementioned page. The Archives page for Fluidity3c is a little messed up because it’s missing the two sidebars. I haven’t figured out a way to get them back but just use the navigation buttons on the header to go back to the home page or wherever.

4. Ultimate Tag Warrior added! I installed a couple of new plugins, prominent among them being UTW. I’ve always felt that my categories were too broad. Instead of expanding them to crazy lengths, I just added tags. Click the tags and you will be presented with a list of all posts with those tags. It doesn’t work with all themes and I haven’t completed tagging all the posts yet.

5. Links in Fluidity3c now in orange! I figured it was hard for readers to distinguish between regular text and links so I made the links the same orange as the sidebar links/post titles. Should make life easy, heh!

6. Fewer posts on the home page! Yes, Dark displays only the last five posts on the home page. That’s because I figured 10 recent posts would’ve made the “Recent Posts” thingy at the bottom redundant. Also, to keep things neat, I’ll use the tag more often!

7. Logo and Favicon! The new logo is custom-designed (thanks for the applause guys) but it can change sometime in the future. The favicon could change too.

Anyway, I think that’s a good enough changelog for now. If you notice something I missed, well, then you’ve already found it so congratulations! Enjoy the new theme and keep giving me those 5 hits a day guys! I really appreciate it.