Journalized Blue

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Update 7 Dec 2008: This theme is super­seded by Journ­al­ized Theme ver­sion 2.7. Please use that ver­sion from now on.

Update 12 Nov 2008 There is a new Beta ver­sion 2.7 avail­able to try, see the theme page for details. Please down­load it and give it a try.

This ver­sion is now defunct and will no longer be maintained.

On this page you can find the latest ver­sion of my blog lay­out and col­our scheme as a WordPress theme.
Click­ing the thumb­nail below will show you a full size screen shot of the theme in action.
screenshot of journalized theme

This release incor­por­ates many of the fixes and changes sug­ges­ted by people try­ing the theme.

You can down­load the files from here: journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.tar.gz (tar ball for unix or sim­ilar users) or journalized-blue-theme-1.0.3.zip (zip file for Win­dows users).

To install simply expand the archive on your local machine. You should have a dir­ect­ory called ‘journalized-blue’. Upload the dir­ect­ory and the files within it to your wp-content/themes folder on your server. Login to your blog’s admin­is­tra­tion pages and go to the Present­a­tion page. The new theme should be lis­ted there ready for you to select. If not check the per­mis­sions on your uploaded files.

Enjoy! The theme is licensed under the GPL. So you may modify it and dis­trib­ute it. Please let me know if you use it, modify it, etc. If you have any ques­tions leave a com­ment on this post with your ques­tion. Com­ments are mod­er­ated so you won’t see your com­ment immediately.

What’s Changed?

The main changes in the themes are these:

I’ve added miss­ing tags to the main sec­tion of the theme. That is, the ‘Pre­vi­ous Entries’ and ‘Next Entries’ links after the main con­tent. I’ve also added in the Next and pre­vi­ous story links above the post when you are look­ing at an indi­vidual post.
In the side bar I’ve removed all the get_links() and get_linksbyname() calls and sub­sti­tuted a single call to get_links_list().

I’ve adjus­ted the CSS to dis­play the nes­ted unordered lists from the call to dis­play like the h4/rightsidesection com­bin­a­tion we had before.

I’ve added a page tem­plate for pages like this one with slightly dif­fer­ent lay­out for the con­tent. There are some minor bug fixes on the pages and I’ve added the the fix for aligned or floated images not dis­play­ing in Inter­net Explorer.

Update: 27/06/2005
Because the side bars are nar­rower on Journ­al­ized blue than Sand or Winter, the cal­en­dar on the right hand side doesn’t quite fit.
A quick cure is to change the pad­ding in the cells. You need to edit the table#wp-calendar td rule in style.css
Go to line 307 and change the 3 pixel pad­ding to 2 pixels. It should end up like this:

table#wp-calendar td {
    padding: 0px 2px;
    color: #000000;
    text-align:center;
}

I’ll issue a new ver­sion as soon as I’ve incor­por­ated another fix and some recent changes.

85 thoughts on “Journalized Blue”

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  3. Hey Mike,

    See my above pingback(s) for kudos!

    I just installed this theme, and I noticed some­thing odd on the archive box. On my cal­en­dar, the week­day head­ers have medium grey back­ground, and there is a sim­ilar medium grey band below the last week of the month – except below Thursday (middle day of the week on both our cal­en­dars) is the “nor­mal” light grey back­ground, same as the rest of the side­bar. I haven’t had a chance to look at any of the code yet, and the cal­en­dar looks fine on your J-Blue page. Just won­der­ing if you had any ideas off the top of your head.

    Thanks again for a great-looking theme!

    JIm
    http://sonicchicken.net/blog/wordpress/index.php/index.php?wptheme=Journalized+Blue

    Reply ↓

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  5. Pingback: SonicChicken weblog » Blog Archive » Tags support finished on J-blue

  6. Hey Mike,

    Per the ping­back above, I’ve got patches for J-blue on this post to sup­port the tags plu­gin, if it is installed.

    I’m very stoked about tags. Check out this link for all my posts hav­ing a “journalized-blue” tag. All the fea­tures of cat­egor­ies (except hier­archy), and allows authors to cre­ate new tags on-the-fly!

    Jim

    Reply ↓

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  10. I manu­ally changed the comment.php for the part where the tex­tarea is formatted:

    style=“width:98%” cols=“100%” rows=“10”

    to

    cols=“50” rows=“10”

    as a quick fix.

    Is there a prob­lem with the style sheet?

    Reply ↓

  12. Mike! I my Journ­al­ized Blue theme just star­ted going crazy. I can’t fix it even if I replace the right-side php. Any ideas to help would be greatly appreciated!

    Tim

    Reply ↓

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  16. Hey, I have a ques­tion and I apo­lo­gize for its naiv­ete.
    How do I get my links to show up in the side­bar? All the other themes I have tried just bring them over but it seems there must be a trick to using yours.

    Thanks!

    Reply ↓

  17. Hi Michael,
    are you using the latest ver­sion of the theme? It should be ver­sion 1.03 for Journ­al­ized Blue. The earlier ver­sion didn’t do links in the stand­ard way, and so they didn’t auto­mat­ic­ally show. The new ver­sion fixes that.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  19. We’re using Journ­al­ized Blue at http://www.alabamawatch.com. Thanks for a great look­ing theme!

    I’m hav­ing a prob­lem since first installing it. It worked great and everything was as it should be at first but then I star­ted adding links and ads in the side­bars. Some of these are javas­cript, some are php, and some are just html. Some­where along the line the page title came off cen­ter and bul­lets in the posts stopped working.

    I fixed the title tem­por­ar­ily by modi­fy­ing header.php and put aster­isks in front of bul­lets. I’m going to start tak­ing things out of the side­bars until the prob­lem goes away but I thought that I’d post here first on the chance that you’ve seen this prob­lem before. Thanks in advance!

    Reply ↓

  21. I hope to put up a busi­ness blog. My big con­cern is that any theme I choose must work OK in Explorer. Will any of the fixes and changes (that you men­tion are com­ing in your next ver­sion) address this issue? I ask because, unfor­tu­nately, almost all my read­er­ship will use a Microsoft browser.

    Any idea of when your new release is com­ing? It’s your theme and it’s a great one and I cer­tainly don’t mean to push. You have to remem­ber, how­ever, that your theme is one of the few that has some real busi­ness application.

    Thanks for any fur­ther info you can provide.

    Reply ↓

  22. Hi Steve,
    The theme works pretty well in Inter­net Explorer out of the box.
    The main issues I can recall are if you add aligned or floated images to your posts (fixed by adding position:relative to img rule) and the com­ment box expand­ing too wide (fixed by spe­cify­ing a fixed size for the com­ment box).

    Most of the other prob­lems people com­ment on are changes they make to the theme which break things. I think I’ve helped every­one fix their problems.

    It will be a short while before I can get another release out. I’m snowed under with work at the moment.

    Give it a try on a test blog, Steve, and see how you get on. If you do have any prob­lems, com­ment here or use the con­tact form and I’ll try to help.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  23. what is the name of this plug-in that you are using for the comments?

    I am using Blue, ive only been able to get the shout box to work, noth­ing else appears to work, or even show up for that mat­ter, I place the file(s) needed in the plug-in, then activ­ate it in Admin, then add the strong to where it needs to go, and noth­ing, noth­ing shows.

    this is what i was told:

    The tem­plates can define their own present­a­tion of stand­ard blocks. It means that it can even ignore some of stand­ard blocks.

    help would be appreicated.

    Thanks

    Reply ↓

  27. I’ve been try­ing to use this as a starter tem­plate for my site, and so far, so good — it’s fun as an ama­teur try­ing to learn the ins and outs of CSS. Last night, though, I noticed that the right-side link list titles aren’t respond­ing to their

    Reply ↓

  30. Hi High!

    The fact that the title is a link is more import­ant so the default link style takes precedence.

    To over­ride that you need to add a rule to style.css

    .storytitle a {
    font-size: 150%;
    }

    You can set your own size of course.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  32. Hi, Nice theme and I’ve been cus­tom­ising it just a but but cred­its are still there. But I was won­der­ing am I alowed to use it for the rest of my site? I don’t use wordpress for it. I’d just remove the php and then would it still need to keep it as a .php file? thanks and your credit part wil still be there.

    Reply ↓

  33. Oh and one other thing… What do I need to do to make the side bars and all the con­tent boxes stop grow­ing lar­ger in IE and going over each other if fire fox it is fine as long as I keep it full screen, I think it is some­thing to help the view in small win­dows. This is not a really big prob­lem because I use Fire­Fox all the time but I’d like it to stop doing weird things. Other then that the theme is won­der­ful ! Thanks

    Reply ↓

  37. Mike, I have been check­ing out plug-ins that will let me show the latest com­ments (using your Journalized-Blue theme). From what I can see, what would work best for me is exactly what you have work­ing in the right column of your site.

    What you have run­ning doesn’t seem to be any one of the plug-ins I’ve been look­ing at. If it is, would you please let me know which one? If it isn’t, would you please tell me what changes I would have to make to your theme to provide this fea­ture in the right column of my site, too.

    Mike, thanks for any help here. It’s a bit late to wish you a Merry Christ­mas but you have my hope that your New Year will be prop­er­ous and healthy.

    All the Best,
    Steve

    Reply ↓

  39. Hi,
    this may or may not be related to JB but any way how do you get TrackBack’s dis­played? as a link or text. Cur­rently posts are not like /cat/post_name but ?p=49… Thanks…

    Reply ↓

  40. Hi Joe,

    Track­backs are dis­played as nor­mal com­ments. Or do you mean the track­back URL? If so you need to add

    <?php trackback_url() ?>

    to the comments.php template.

    The non-query string URL is set from the Permalinks panel of the options page. It helps if you have mod_rewrite but it’s not required.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  41. Mike, help… please.

    How would I safely remove the “Web­site” box from “Leave a Reply” in your theme? I would prefer to just have the “Name” and “Mail” boxes appear when a vis­itor wishes to sub­mit a comment.

    Many Thanks,
    Steve

    Reply ↓

  42. Hi Steve,
    You need to edit comments.php in the theme directory.

    Delete (or com­ment out) lines 84 and 85 in the file:

    Line 84 begins:

    <p><input type="text" name="url"...

    and 85 ends:

    ...Website</small></label></p>

    Save the file to your server and try the com­ments. Don’t for­get to logout to see the form fields.

    Reply ↓

  43. Hey Mike,
    I love your theme and I have really enjoyed play­ing with it. For some reason, it freaked out on me tonight. Both the left and right columns moved over to the cen­ter of the page. I made no changes to the tem­plate, but it seems to do this in both Fire­fox and IE. Any sug­ges­tions on how to fix this?
    Thanks,
    Scott

    Reply ↓

  44. Hi Scott,

    The prob­lem is your post “Mon­ster, Career­Builder & 24″ is full of spuri­ous div tags which don’t have cor­res­pond­ing close div tags. These are blow­ing away the format­ting for the side bars.

    You should remove those extra divs in the post and just rely on blank lines between para­graphs being turned into P tags by WordPress.
    Mike

    Reply ↓

  46. Hi,
    Nice theme…
    On my site the main menu’s con­tent (internal links) used to stay on the left side but I removed the pages code and after I did that now it’s centered. How do I get it back to the left side? Thanks.

    Reply ↓

  48. Hmm, that may be a prob­lem because there’s a script that switches what is shown needs that and if I did left­side­Sec­tion it would hide all of the sidebar’s con­tent… So I’m think­ing that I’ll have to add that to the style sheet. Thanks…

    Reply ↓

  49. Joe,
    It works fine if you add the class to the lefn div. The javas­cript hide/show still works, but the list is styled like the rest and no bullets.

    You can also add a left­side­Sec­tion div around the pages list to style that the same too.

    I tried it on a saved copy of your page and it worked fine.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  53. Hi I got an error with this theme :
    ’s are sup­posed to have the bul­lets but on my blog they end up centered left and with out the bul­let. Any way to fix this only on the centreb­lock? Thanks…

    Reply ↓

  54. Hi Mike,

    I am a fresh user of WordPress.
    I tried to use your beau­ti­ful theme.
    Unfor­tu­nately, I got only the cent­ral column with the fol­low­ing messages :

    Warn­ing: main(): Unable to access leftcolumn.php in /home/ilblieg/news/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue/index.php on line 68

    Warn­ing: main(leftcolumn.php): failed to open stream: No such file or dir­ect­ory in /home/ilblieg/news/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue/index.php on line 68

    Warn­ing: main(): Failed open­ing ‘leftcolumn.php’ for inclu­sion (include_path=”) in /home/ilblieg/news/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue/index.php on line 68

    Warn­ing: main(): Unable to access rightcolumn.php in /home/ilblieg/news/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue/index.php on line 69

    Warn­ing: main(rightcolumn.php): failed to open stream: No such file or dir­ect­ory in /home/ilblieg/news/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue/index.php on line 69

    Warn­ing: main(): Failed open­ing ‘rightcolumn.php’ for inclu­sion (include_path=”) in /home/ilblieg/news/wp-content/themes/journalized-blue/index.php on line 69

    The line 68 and 69 are :

    include_once(‘leftcolumn.php’);
    include_once(‘rightcolumn.php’);

    Both the files are in the dir­ect­ory and are 777ed …
    Any hint ?

    Thanks a lot,

    Chris­tian

    Reply ↓

  55. Hey Mike, I love your theme. I’ve been using it for my pod­cast for a while now. I’ve installed the new ver­sion of WordPress and your beta Journ­al­ized theme to go with it. So far so good. I like the many options that can be cus­tom­ized from within the menu sys­tem, although I’m happy to exper­i­ment and poke around in the CSS files and oth­ers as well. I really like the cus­tom­iz­a­tions of two/three columns too!

    I’ve got one thing I haven’t been able to find. I want the top header sec­tion to have the same lovely blue back­tound rather than the cool grey one. I can’t find where to change that. see:

    http://FirstPersonShow.net/b2/ and you’ll see how much bet­ter the blue would look with the logo for my site there.

    cheers in advance to Mike or any­one else who reads this and offers a suggestions!

    –Kevin

    Reply ↓

  57. Kevin,
    I’m glad you like the theme.
    To get the header back­ground you want, find the #headerblock sec­tion in skins/blue-skin.css and change

    background: #cccccc;

    to be

    background: #4488cc;

    Hope this helps,
    Mike

    Reply ↓

  60. Hi Mike. Why, on a smal­ler screen res­ol­u­tion, does my right side­bar is com­ing to the cen­ter. How can i change this.

    And how do i decrase the space between my cen­ter part and the sidebars?

    Thanks in advance!!

    Reply ↓

  61. Hi Mike,

    Great theme! It is the only theme I found the at is appeal­ing and professional.

    I’m a new­bie and was able to down­load it with no problems.

    My ques­tion are:

    How do you add the affil­ate ads on the right or left columns?

    Is there a way to change the the title from lower case to both upper and lower? example. http://www.MyWebsite.com

    Thanks!

    Johnny

    Reply ↓

  62. Hi Mike… just won­der­ing.. if your theme is com­pat­ible with the new release of wordpress wid­gets?? thanks.. you’re them is so clean and very cool on the eyes… this is def­in­itely a high bar you’ve set for other design­ers… Nick

    Reply ↓

  63. Hi Mike,
    I abso­lutely love your theme. I am hav­ing an issue I can’t seem to resolve. My main header has dropped below the left and right columns. Any idea how I can bring it back flush with the top?

    Reply ↓

  64. Hi Splatty,
    I looked on your URL, but couldn’t see any­thing wrong. I did notice that you are using the first ver­sion of the Theme. There have been a couple of updates since that ver­sion. I won­der if one of those might fix.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  65. Hi Nino,
    I was in the pro­cess of adding wid­get sup­port to the new theme a couple of months ago. Unfor­tu­nately I hit a snag with get­ting the css to work for the non wid­get way and the wid­get way. Sadly, I haven’t worked on it since.

    I will get back to it eventually.

    Reply ↓

  66. Mike

    You have solid centre block, all grey for your con­tent on this web­site. Your down­loaded theme con­tains sep­ar­ate grey centre blocks instead of one solid centre block. How do I change your down­loaded theme to have this one solid centre block?

    Reply ↓

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  73. HI Mike, again, sorry.
    I got the header work­ing but now I am hav­ing trouble with the cen­ter block. I tried to change the pos­i­tion of the cen­ter­b­lock css but It appears that the cen­ter­b­lock pos­i­tion is decided upon the pos­i­tion of the date head­ing above it. I don’t know where to find that date head­ing in the css. ie:what is it called?

    also, the mar­gin codes ie:0px 210px 20px 190px;
    Is there a site that explains what each of these relate to.

    Reply ↓

  76. Mike…I did it.…
    I dis­covered it was because of the head­erb­lock set­tings. I had the width set to be more than my new head­mast so once I set it to just about the same..the cen­ter­b­lock could shift up..it all worked out. yippee…cheers and thanks for your time..Laurie

    Reply ↓

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