Squirrel Tao

Rounded Sassy MediaWiki Skin Available for Download

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Sun, 14 Jan 2007 19:39:59 +0000

I’ve become overly obsessive about making MediaWiki skins or something, because this morning on impulse, I started making a new color scheme for the Rounded Blue MediaWiki skin I made yesterday. Once I had started, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop until I was finished, or else it would bug me. I had really intended to do other things today, but I can’t concentrate on anything else, anyway, now that I have become so obsessive about making skins the last couple of days. The good news is that I was able to change the color scheme of the Rounded Blue skin with very minimal effort. That should show readers how easy it is to customize a skin. Just change the colors in the image files, change the background color, change the background image or get rid of it, change the link colors and change the button and bullet colors if necessary. If necessary, adjust the positioning of the content area and the left column up or down, along with the p-cactions div tag. Voila, a new look.

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New Rounded Blue Edition MediaWiki Skin Available for Download

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 22:17:51 +0000

Today, using my own MediaWiki skin as the basis, I altered it to make it look like the Rounded Blue Edition WordPress theme. It is available for download. Click here to go to the download page and view a small thumbnail screenshot of the Rounded Blue Edition MediaWiki skin.

To use it, just unzip it and upload it into your MediaWiki installation’s skins directory. The path to the stylesheet is relative: skins/roundedblue/main.css. Change the path if for some reason the stylesheet is not being applied. You’ll find the path in the roundedblue.php file, in the HTML head section, right underneath the title tag.

The Photoshop images that are used for the header background image, the rounded corner content boxes, etc. are available at itcouldbethisone.com for download.

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More Than One Way to Skin a Wiki

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 11:59:00 +0000

I’ve finally gotten around to creating a custom skin for the Living Philosophy Wiki. Now it has the same look and feel as the Squirrel Tao blog. Like the Squirrel Tao theme, it is based upon a customization of the Rounded V2 WordPress theme by Ghyslain Armand. In the process of customizing my wiki skin, I’ve also integrated the blog with the wiki, so that both share a navigation bar in common.

The First Stumbling Block - A Broken Stylesheet Link

I had started to create a custom skin several times in the past, using the instructions that can be found on the Jnana Base wiki, only to encounter a problem after Step 8. That is, I would make a copy of the default monobook skin and rename it. I would change “monobook” to my own skin name, everywhere the word “monobook” appeared within my own skin php file. I would upload my new skin and set my personal preference to use this skin. Voila, I would excitedly preview my work only to see completely unstyled HTML, all laid out in one single column, in Times New Roman, with huge H1 headings and the whole bit. It turned out that the link to the stylesheet was broken.

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Another Brown Website

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Tue, 12 Sep 2006 11:29:07 +0000

Before seeing the rounded-v2 theme by Ghyslain Armand, I would never have considered the color brown as a main color to use in a website. Now I love it. It allows darkness in a color scheme without reverting to the old neon-on-black look of early websites. It has a sophistication about it that black sites are often lacking. Very dark sites that are almost, but not quite, black can also have this kind of sophistication. Black can still look sophisticated, too, depending upon how it is used in the overall design, of course. Generally, though, dark sites tend to me to look amateurish or outdated if not well-done. Since choosing brown for my new design, I notice other brown sites more these days. Another brown website I found today is a blog on the 9Rules network, LeliaThomas.com. Lelia is an artist, and she showcases her portfolio in her blog.

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Squirrel Tao Redesign

Jennifer Franklin Elrod — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 16:49:04 +0000

I’ve been a busy squirrel over this three day Labor Day week-end, redesigning my Squirrel Tao theme, as well as testing and integrating numerous WordPress plugins and retagging and recategorizing all of my posts. Last night, I went live with the Squirrel Tao makeover. My reasons for the redesign, so soon after launching Squirrel Tao, were several. First, I had become dissatisfied with the minimalism of my previous theme. It came to seem not only boring, but also constricting in its very elegance.

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