It’s kinda funny how MToD came to be in the first place. In 2008 I was looking for WordPress themes for another project I was working on and stumbled across that gorgeous bull staring at its own image and I just had to have it. Didn’t matter that I wasn’t actually working on my own blog at the time. Nope, not at all. Oh great. Now if I want to use this theme, I’ll have to get a new domain name and I spose I’ll have to keep a blog while I’m at it. I decided on mythoughtoftheday.com and in May 2008, it launched with this “Bull” theme.

Now I had to live up to the MyThoughtoftheDay’s name. I figured with so much nonsense and mayhem going on in the world, how difficult could it be to actually generate a single post everyday? Unfortunately, between May 2008 and November 2008, I wasn’t posting everyday (more like once a week) and there were quite a few upsets in my life that made it difficult to find time to generate any posts. Oh, and did I mention that I’d fallen out of love with my template?

By January 2009 I was in a better position where I should have been able to post a few times a week, and still I didn’t. I had run out of patience with cutting and resizing images, adding the images to the post and then having to go back in and customize its position; because it was only two columns I had an extremely difficult time keeping the length of the page balanced and deciding which items I wanted to keep in the left column, etc. etc. Once again, I abandoned my blog.

In July 2009, the company that the site was hosted on closed down and I’d lost my entire blog. Even for sporadic postings, I had over 160 thoughts that I shared with the world. Gone. I spent several hours putting MToD back together with its original “Bull” theme and putting back the items that I wanted in the left column and made a few posts – mostly about nothing. At the time I was quite disgruntled about having lost my job earlier that month and just blasted the whole unemployment thing and how CraigsList was really a waste of time and things like that. Between August and December 2009 I’d made quite a few posts and had a couple of nice banners and skyscrapers and it looked like a good site. Kinda. As time went on, I found that as a visitor, I was not all that impressed by the overall design and there was just too much scrolling for my liking. For several months, between December 2009 and now, I went through countless tutorials on how to create or customize a template. They were all so involved and it required the kind of patience I just didn’t have. Not only as the blog owner, but also as a visitor, there really wasn’t anything that kept me wanting to come back to the site. I knew I needed to make a drastic change, but my earlier attempts just didn’t work out.

Yesterday I was out searching for a new WordPress tutorial to help me to at least get the third column into the “Bull” theme. Instead, I came across a site that had almost the exact layouts that I wanted with so many extra features that I would have been stupid to ignore them. And yet, I almost did because they didn’t have the color pallette I was interested in. I wanted browns and golds and yellows just like I already had. At about 2:30pm I downloaded the template that best fitted my needs and began hacking away at it piece by piece until I had it all just the way I wanted it. I had to re-make template graphics and I had to reposition this and realign that. By 8:30 this morning I cried “Uncle” and went to bed.

I had the overall design pretty much exactly the way that I wanted it and I was proud of what I’d done. Undertaking customizing a template on any framework is no small task. In some cases, the same piece of code or the same style has to be added in multiple files; in some cases, a complete rewrite of a piece of code needs to be done; and hours upon hours of testing and checking and double checking to make sure that it all does what it’s supposed to do.

But after 18 straight hours of creating new images and customizing code and styles, I think I’m finally going to enjoy visiting my own blog again. Is it finished? Not by a long shot! I still have quite a bit of balancing to do and some of the images aren’t as perfect as I would like them to be. Anyone who has a website, whether it’s a blog or any other kind of site, it is always under construction; there are always things to change, update and improve upon.

So maybe now I can live up to the name and get back to posting My Thought of the Day!