Social Media Hot Tub

Whew! Getting quite the education here…

Did you ever fall in love with the perfect blog theme only to discover after loading it, that it simply won’t do what you need it to do? Same thing happened to me about five times today.

Toadpress (by Jinsona) had a frog in silhouette, serving as a type of a splash page. I know, I know. Believe, me, it annoyed me so much, I couldn’t imagine a potential reader would stay with me long. It was really beautiful, though, and went with  the “tub” part of my online venue’s persona.

I had to throw the amphibian out with the bathwater.

Then there was “TV Retro” from Amazing Wordpress Themes, which had such a clean look (except for the verbage at the bottom advertising college loans or some such thing. I don’t know what’s at the bottom of my current theme – don’t look!). I also loved the graphic of a torrent of water pouring out of the telly. Problem was, it wasn’t widget ready, as it turns out. The worse problem was the amount of time all this was taking me to figure out.

Next I tried this really crazy looking theme called “Garden 3.0,” which I was ready to live with. I think I was going for “edgy” at that point, because that’s how I was starting to feel. Its fatal flaw was really mine. It had fields for ads and flickr that I didn’t want to appear, and I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of them.

Mashable came to the rescue, however, with its “20 Great Free Wordpress Themes” article. Here I found my new love, “Deep Red.” Check in tomorrow to see how the honeymoon’s going.

Now, if anyone could tell me how to get the text to wrap around the photos, they’d be my hero.

(Heroes are fickle: A dragon captured a young maiden and put her in the tower. He told her if she could charm any of the passing knights-in-armor, she’d be a free woman. He gave her a burlap sack slip to wear. As each suitor rode by, she waved and smiled. Finally, the dragon took pity on her and said, “Miss, knights don’t stop for damsels in dis dress.”)

Note: Read my July 25 post, “Even a warrior princess needs rescuing sometimes” to find out how I solved the text wrap issue…with a little help from a friend.
And – shudder to think – alas, the butterflies do not a lasting relationship make… Well, me with the butterflies, yes, but that’s a different story.