Not too long ago, I added a few things to my WordPress installation. Let’s have a look at all the changes I’ve made to make it my own.

First thing I did, of course, was change the style. A while ago, I really like Kubrick and maybe thought of keeping it. Now, after a few months, and traversing to countless WordPress blogs, I hate it. There are too many of them, and I hate Trebuchet MS for anything but song slides for church, and I predict I’ll be hating that pretty soon.

Anyway, the other thing I hate about the style was the shadows and 3D-ish thing at the bottom. Immediately, I took out any images in the style. For a while, I thought that was all I was going to do.

Of course it wasn’t! I still didn’t like it enough to be comfortable with it. I didn’t like Lucida Grande for headings, and I didn’t like Arial either, so to appease myself, I went and downloaded a nice Helvetica and made all the headings Helvetica, Arial, sans serif.

The background you see is Hong Kong at night. If you have a good browser, you’ll see that the content layer has an inverted version and using background-attachment, it flows nicely. That was pretty much the last thing I did to the style.

As I got more and more links, it became obvious that the sidebar was getting way too huge. With the addition of my Recent Linkage list (a plugin, so I don’t have to write a post every time something cool is out there on the interweb), it got unbearable. Since the link to the control panel was near the bottom, I resolved to get this fixed quickly.

I went and split up my sidebar into two columns, and made the main layer thinner. The effect was twofold. Now, my sidebar fit nicely, and the content column was more readable. Very newspaper like, I think.

I began looking at other blogs for ideas of what to add to mine. One really neat thing that I’ve always liked was the idea to make comments posted by me visually distinctive, since this is my site. Added the hat and made it orange and done!

I put off getting a gallery because at the time, I didn’t have that much. Just a few weeks ago, I decided to get a gallery to motivate me to use my digicam more, since it is much underused. I also really didn’t want to get gallery, since it uses nasty tableses and held off getting G2 since it’s still beta. Yeah, I got Gallery 2 and it is wonderful. Fully integrated and all. It did take a while to upload about 4500 files.

I’ve been looking for a plugin to manage my acronyms, because I’d seen it somewhere before. I searched all over and didn’t really come across it until recently. I installed it immediately and enjoyed easy acronym-ing.

Since comments were looking very spacious at the bottom, I wanted to move the comments to the side. That way, they look nicer and you don’t have to scroll down as far. You can also refer to parts of the post without having to jump up and down. Just turn your head a bit now.

Lastly, I wanted to post some equations. That required me to make this blog served as application/xhtml+xml. The last time I tried that, something went horribly wrong and I quickly reverted to text/html. This time, with a patch and all to help me, it would properly serve application/xhtml+xml as well as text/html to inferior browsers. It worked, and now I am able to use MathML.

Very soon, I will be uploading a binary of itex2mml so that I won’t have to use MathML and instead use that lovely TeX syntax that makes it a lot easier to write equations with.