New wordpress theme: Talian
Posted on August 18, 2007
Filed Under blog, computers, design, interweb | 17 Comments
I’ve been looking for a new wordpress theme to replace squible for a while now. With my limited understanding, squible was not ‘widget-ready’ and not wordpress 2.0+ compatible. It’s a shame really, because it was unique and suited 99% of my requirements (archives = the 1%). The main designer, Theron Parlin, has moved on to other things so that’s fair enough, I guess.
The main advantage of squible was that the current information was ‘above the fold’ (to use a newspaper analogy) while the ‘back story’ (flickr, lastfm, facebook etc) was beneath ‘the fold’. Using ‘above’ and ‘below’ the fold, I’m talking about the user having to scroll down the page. A viewer would visit my blog and see the ‘current’ news (posts and comments) on the main page. ‘If’ they wanted more info, they could scroll down the page (beneath the fold) and find out more info about me. This approach made sense to me?
Now, I’ve discovered the talian theme by Steve Arun. On first view, it looks really promising but I’ll have to customise it a bit. For example, I prefer ‘weighted categories’ rather than a simple, straight list of categories because a simple list really ‘lengthens’ the page and it doesn’t allow the viewer to see what’s important to the blogger. One advantage of this talian theme (which it shares with squible) is that it shows the recent comments at the top of the front page. In other words, it’s easy for visitors to see what’s interesting and what’s not. I’m just going to add a gratuitous emoticon here 
to see what happens because squibble didn’t handle them properly….
P.S. Talian handles emoticons ok but it may not handle italics (italic test) ok. More testing required…
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17 Responses to “New wordpress theme: Talian”
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1. I don’t think the talian theme can handle the Euro symbol –> € (Edit: Oops, it can!)
2. There are 3 ways to access the archives (in the header, on the left sidebar, and via the ‘Pages’ submenu on the left sidebar. Only the latter one works, AFAIK.
These are first impressions so it’s early days yet.
I’ve also added the Category Cloud plug-in by Francesco Mapelli.
It “is a wordpress plugin that shows categories as a colored tag cloud“. I haven’t worked out yet why the css stylesheet isn’t working on it (i.e. the links in that plug-in look different to all the rest of the links on the website)
Were you able to resolve the italics situation?
I love this theme and that is one of the very few annoyances I wish I knew how to correct.
I haven’t resolved the italics situation. To be honest, I haven’t really tried. I just try to write my blogs without using them
(
test – I’m having trouble posting css code to this post?
Try again…
Under the “em” definition in style.css
1. I changed the font size to 12px
2. I changed the font style to italic
3. I removed the display block command
4. You could change the font family if you wanted to?
I can’t seem to post the css right now so just look at my style.css…
Thank you very much, isadub! I will poke around a bit and make those changes. Will let you know how the results.
You have a great blog, btw. Best regards.
It worked beautifully! Very nice. Thanks again. c.d.
I, too, have had to avoid using italics with this theme, since it blows out the post. I’m not a coder, so I guess I’ll have to wait for someone a lot smarter than me to come up with the fix for this.
I’m also have problems with sub categories – they display as having no parent. Does anyone know how I can fix this? Thanks in advance.
I see you were able to take out the photo that comes with the theme. How do I update a new photo into the theme or be bale to rotate multiple photos? Thanks.
@ Mary,
RE the italics, if you look at the em section in the css, you can change that to your heart’s content. I’m too lazy to do it, sorry.
I don’t know what you mean by sub-categories. Can you elaborate, please?
@ parmamagoo
There should be a div in the css called #put-image-here. If you want to remove it, just delete that div. Remember to backup before changing code!!
To put in a new photo, resize your photo to 480×120px and put it in blog’s images folder. Have a look at the put-image-here div for more info on how the pic is defined.
To rotate multiple photos, you could probably create a flash slideshow and replace the current pic with it. I don’t know if that’d work though?
Finally, backup backup backup before you change and code and don’t blame if it still goes wrong!!
isadub, thanks for suggesting ways to fix the italics bug in this theme (talian), which I otherwise quite like. One question, though: I deleted the display: block command (only) at first, with no success – I had to then go in and delete the following series of commands about top margins, etc to get the fix to work. Now, everything is fine so long as I don’t include italics in a paragraph that wraps around an image – if I DO include italics in such a paragraph, there is a break in the text (at the point where the italics occur) and then the text continues on beneath the photo. Have I taken out something I shouldn’t have?
isadub – I figured it out, don’t waste your time trying to help me fix the problem. In addition to changing the font size to 12 px and the font style to italic, one needs to delete the “clear: both;” and “display: block;” command lines BUT NOT the commands relating to margins that follow thereafter. Problem solved.
Hi Junior,
Thanks for commenting. First off, just let me warn you that I’m not a computer programmer and I didn’t design the theme. So if I break something, don’t sue me!! I just like pressing the shiny buttons on my computer and seeing what happens.
I will try to help as best I can. Can you give me an example on your website? I can use Firefox’s WedDav to try and fix it (no promises). It’s 9pm (2100 hrs) in my country and I’m travelling for the next few days.
So don’t hold your breath! But you did ask and I will try and help.
isadub
Our posts crossed!! Thanks for visiting anyway.
BTW, your ‘about’ link at the top of your page is spelt ‘aboot’. I don’t know if it’s deliberate or a typo?
Hi there.
If you have a moment…
I added the addthis plugin to this theme. Worked great BUT…
it doesn’t work in my categories.
http://www.buildapipeline.com
any help is much appreciated!
Hi Kelly,
I’d never heard of the addthis plugin until you mentioned it. I used 6+ plugins with the Talian theme without any problem.
Sorry.