Journalized Sand

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 Journ­al­ized Sand theme for WordPress.
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-sand-theme-1.0.2.tar.gz (tar ball for unix or sim­ilar users) or journalized-sand-theme-1.0.2.zip (zip file for Win­dows users).

To install simply expand the archive on your local machine. You should have a dir­ect­ory called ‘journalized-sand’. 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 susb­sti­tuted 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.

177 thoughts on “Journalized Sand”

  5. Hi mike, I’m zul from malay­sia. Hmm, I like your tem­plate.. Buat, how to man­age the link cat­egor­ies and also its links? Using site admin or must open the theme source code?

    Sorry, my eng­lish is not well.

    p/s: My site is in Malay.

    Reply ↓

  7. Iron­dude,
    I think you would have a great deal of trouble get­ting that header to work well in my theme tem­plate. It is table-based using pre­cise pixel dimen­sions, whereas my theme is flex­ible and will expand and con­tract with the browser width.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  8. Great theme!

    I’m hav­ing some trouble with the get_links_list() call dis­play­ing my link cat­egor­ies cor­rectly in IE. They dis­play fine in Fire­fox & Safari. The h2 tag does not dis­play its own box in the side­bar. Any help would be appreciated!

    Thanks

    Reply ↓

  9. Hi Matt,
    You are right it is broken! I can’t believe no-one has repor­ted it before. I don’t nor­mally work on a Win­dows machine, and rarely in IE when I do, so I have never noticed that problem.

    I checked the cur­rent devel­op­ment ver­sion of the theme, and it is fixed there. Unfor­tu­nately that ver­sion isn’t yet ready for release.

    I will try to isol­ate which par­tic­u­lar set­ting fixes it and pub­lish that fix. Prob­ably later today.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  10. Matt,
    I’ve found the prob­lem. It seems IE doesn’t under­stand as much CSS as I thought! Thank­fully there is an easy fix:

    In style.css make the fol­low­ing change to line 394, near the bot­tom of the file:
    Change

    div#rightside > ul li

    becomes

    div#rightside ul li

    This will fix the miss­ing bor­ders around the groups of links.

    It does leave a double bor­der under the last link in a list. You can fix that by chan­ging the very last rule (for div#rightside ul li ul li) to add

    margin-bottom: 3px;

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  12. Pingback: Blogging My Pursuit » 5 Great Three Column Wordpress Themes

  13. Quick ques­tion. I am using your journ­al­ised sand theme. How do i change the Right Column so that it can list Gen­eral Links, I Read, etc etc? The php file right­column is non-editable in WordPress.
    thanks

    Reply ↓

  14. Hi James,
    Mak­ing the file edit­able is a mat­ter of the right per­mis­sions on the fil­ing sys­tem. Your ftp pro­gram should allow you to change the per­mis­sions.
    How­ever, the fact that you have those sec­tions means that you are using an old ver­sion of the theme. The down­load link on this page is to a newer ver­sion which will auto­mat­ic­ally include all your links in their own sections.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  15. Hello Mike,
    Heres another hard one for you.I have a image as my header and I would like it to aut­mat­ic­ally res­ize accord­ing to screen res­ol­u­tion. How would I do this?
    I guess I hear some people are still using 800×600
    My site was made for 1024×768.
    I have used some code i found on the net and it changes all the images on the page.
    Thanks Man.
    Let Me Know..

    Reply ↓

  16. Iron Dude,

    You could style the width of your header image to be a per­cent­age of the browser width. But it could get ugly real quick!

    Where you have the image tag in your h1 header,
    <img src=http://www.twistedfrogdesign.com/pics/image.jpg alt=':::: Movie Reviews...'>

    you could add a style attribute

    <img src=http://www.twistedfrogdesign.com/pics/image.jpg alt=':::: Movie Reviews...' style="width:100%" />

    Which would make it the full width of the browser win­dow regard­less of the res­ol­u­tion. At extremes of nar­row and wide though, the image may get so dis­tor­ted as to be det­ri­mental to the image of your blog!

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  17. Thanks for all your help in the Past.
    I have another ques­tion for you.
    Is there a way to set up the post Back­grounds to change accord­ing to the cat­egor­ies?
    Would this be too Hard?

    Let Me Know.

    See Ya

    Reply ↓

  19. Just wanted to say thanks for the theme– I altered it alot from the the ori­ginal, but it was very easy to cus­tom­ize. All the doc­u­ment­a­tion on your blog has been great!

    Stop by if you get a chance, and bring some fun links to dump!

    doug

    Reply ↓

  22. Hi Iron­Dude,
    Do you mean in journ­al­ized sand? You coudl edit the con­tents of the div id="header" in index.php and page.php. Or did you mean some­thing else?

    As for the charge, I was think­ing some­where around £25 or a couple of CDs from my wish­list, some­thing like that. It will depend on the com­plex­ity of the site to be converted.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  25. Mike: I´m using your theme, which is great for the pur­poses of my site. I´m a prof­fe­sor at a couple of uni­ver­sit­ies in Buenos Aires, and I cre­ate a site for hav­ing con­tact with my stu­dents. I need to know if I respect the copy­right of your theme. Please, let me know if I have to change any­thing. Thanks for your excel­lent work, this theme is awesome.

    Reply ↓

  26. Hi Car­los,
    I’m glad you like the theme, thank you for the praise.

    You are per­fectly free to make the changes you have made (and more). The license file that came with the theme explains your rights. You can also see the license on the GNU site where it is avail­able in sev­eral languages.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  27. Hi, I love the theme but I’m hav­ing trouble. Whenever I try to change the font size of the @ 2:02 pm.Edit This Filed under Uncat­egor­ized [Com­ments (0)] [link] at the bot­tom of each blog entry it changes the font for the whole page. What am I doing wrong? What do I have to edit to change only the stuff at the bot­tom of the blog entry? thanks

    Reply ↓

  28. Hi Dave,
    You need to add a new rule for the class ‘meta’. For example:

    .meta {
    font-style: italic;
    font-size: 90%;
    }

    That should do what you want. Let me know how you go on.

    Reply ↓

  29. Hey Mike, thanks for respond­ing. Would I put that code in the style.css file? Could you explain this in more detail? I’m only so so with codes. Thanks!

    Reply ↓

  33. Mike, well I got that work­ing but now I need help with links in the blog. When I make a link in my blog the font size is way too big. Where do I change this in the style file?

    Reply ↓

  34. Mike, I changed the font size for the blog head­line (each blog entry’s story name) in this code

    a {
    color: #0000dd;
    font-size: 5px;
    font-family: verd­ana, arial, hel­vetica, sans-serif;
    text-decoration: none;

    but when I do that my links in the blog also take that font size which I don’t want. How do I get around this so I can set my font size for blog links and blog head­line seperate???

    Reply ↓

  37. Mike — 

    Thanks for devel­op­ing the theme. I’m new and inex­per­i­enced, but I’m try­ing. A couple of questions.

    How does one change the font and font size of the title in the header?

    Secondly, in regards to out internal links, is there a way to not show the cas­cad­ing effect of pages? Mean­ing, if I’ve cre­ated a page for pho­tos, but want to cre­ate and link other pages to the ori­ginal pho­tos ‘par­ent’ page…is there a way to not show the sib­ling pages. Hope­fully that’s clear. And yes, I’m look­ing to incor­por­ate a gal­lery of some sorts soon.

    Any guid­ance is appreciated.

    Craig

    Reply ↓

  38. Pingback: my weblog » WordPress Themes : Mike Little’s Journalized

  41. Howdy! I found the journ­al­ized sand theme to be just what I was look­ing for. But can you tell me how to fix the size of the posts? At lower res­ol­u­tions (800×600) the blog posts over­lap the right side­bar. Thank you.

    Reply ↓

  42. Hi there!
    I love your theme and i’m try­ing to play around with it. i don’t know much about CSS..i’m too old school. hahaha.

    but i wanted to add a ban­ner image across the top. I did see the pre­vi­ous posts about this and it didn’t work for me. is there any­way you can help me?

    Reply ↓

  43. Pingback: CT Biz Blogs » Blog Archive » Searching for a new template

  44. Hi,

    I am using my web­site with journalized-sand 1.0 and now i want to use 1.0.2 what files i need to copy to upgrade 1.0.2 i really need your help

    tahnks

    Reply ↓

  45. Hi David23,
    The easi­est solu­tion is to just upload all the files from the zip. I can’t remem­ber exactly which ones changed.
    If you have cus­tom­ised any of the files then you will have to trans­fer those cus­tom­isa­tions, so keep a copy before you over­write them.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  46. Hi,

    Thanks for your reply.I want to put the pre­viousentries and next entries like in your present web­site it should appear the right and left ends what i have to change i have added the code but it is dis­play­ing the pre­vios art­icle name and next art­icle name i don’t want to show the name of the art­icles just pre­viouentries and next entries

    Thanks for your help

    Reply ↓

  47. Hi,

    I want to copy header image in to my blog.Could you please tell me the size of the image i need to upload exactly to fit the header block.Thank you very much for your help.Where i need to change the php code.You can see my blog here http://www.debianadmin.com thanks you very much for youre help.I really need to insert header image with my logo.

    thank you

    Reply ↓

  48. Love the tem­plate. I signed up for a net­firms account and yours was the best style tem­plate. I changed around the col­ors, etc but I’ve made sure to keep the link to this page intact. Thanks for the great set-up!

    Reply ↓

  50. Hi David23,
    The previous/next links are for the multi-post dis­play, like the front page, cat­egory, or archives view. The next/previous links with the art­icle name are for when you are view­ing an indi­vidual art­icle. My blog does exactly that. If you have the latest ver­sion of the theme, that code should already be there.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  51. Hi Mat­thias,
    I’m glad you like the theme, it looks like net­firms are using an old ver­sion of the theme. You should update to the latest, there are some bug fixes in it.

    Be care­ful! It will mean you will have to save copy of your mod­i­fied files and apply the changes you made to the new version.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  52. Hi Mike,

    Finally i have com­pleted my blog http://www.debianadmin.com and please sug­gest me if there is any­thing need to be done and you openion also.I am using your great theme and i found only one some times block for each art­icle is expand­ing over left and right col­oums this is hap­pen­ing only in IE.The ver­sion i am using is 1.0.2

    Thanks

    Reply ↓

  54. The prob­lem with IE is if i put thum­nail images 4 rows and 4 col­oumns my images are not in proper place it will be all over the page instead of the ori­ginal loc­a­tion that is why presently i am giv­ing link to one image with gallary.I really need help to fix this.

    thank you

    Reply ↓

  60. Hi Prem,
    You com­men­ted earlier ask­ing about prob­lems with images in IE. I think at the time you were using a gallery/thumbnail plu­gin.
    But I see you’ve changed the way you are doing images in your posts at the moment. This is pre­sum­ably to get round the prob­lem with images in IE.

    I believe that someone else had a sim­ilar prob­lem with the same plu­gin and that the cure was minor change to the plu­gin code. If I recall cor­rectly, the prob­lem was that the div tags the plu­gin out­puts add an align attrib­ute.
    The fix was to add a position:relative style to the cor­rect div class.

    I hope that makes sense. Get back to me if you need more help.

    Mike

    Reply ↓

  62. I have been study­ing your reply to ques­tion # 53, but still am not sure how to replace the quotes at the top of the left and right columns with my own. I’m very new at this. The theme is ter­rific. Thanks.

    Reply ↓

  63. Hi Ruth,

    You need to go to the present­a­tion -> theme editor once you have logged in to the admin pages. Then select leftcolumn.php from the list of files on the right hand side. You can then edit the sec­tion that begins
    <p><strong>jour·nal</strong>
    to change the quote.

    You need to do the same thing in the rightcolumn.php file too.

    Hope this helps.
    Mike

    Reply ↓

  64. Hi, Mike–
    Thanks for the speedy reply. I haven’t been able to change the quote. Ques­tion # 69 is simil­iar to mine. In #80, you said it had some­thing to do with Word Press using Smart Quotes, which couldn’t be edited so simply. You gave some advice for chan­ging the header, but I don’t under­stand how to apply that advice to the quote boxes. Thanks.
    Ruth

    Reply ↓

  65. Hi ruth, if you send me the words you want to put in the quote boxes and the leftcolumn.php and rightcolumn.php files from your theme, I can add them for you and send them back to you.
    Mike

    Reply ↓

  66. Hi, Mike–
    Again, thanks so much for your help.

    On the left:

    The world is so full of a num­ber of things, I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings
    –Robert Louis Stevenson


    <strong>jour·nal</strong> <i>n.</i> A personal record of occurrences, experiences,
    and reflections kept on a regular basis; a diary.

    internal links:

    <a>” title=“Blog Home”>Blog Home</a>

    cat­egor­ies:

    On the right:

    I have never seen a free people whose liberty is not enrolled in beliefs. To me, the reason for this is that liberty is more the daugh­ter of mor­als than the daugh­ter of insti­tu­tions, and mor­als are the daugh­ters of beliefs.
    –Alexis de Tocqueville


    <strong>95.</strong> <i>We are waking up and linking to each other. We are watching. But we are not waiting.</i>
    — <a href="http://www.cluetrain.com/" title="The Cluetrain Manifesto" rel="nofollow">The Cluetrain Manifesto</a>

    Reply ↓

  68. Mike,

    I just wanted to thank you – it’s a great theme and easy to modify – the thread here is great support.

    I may be back for some advice, but just wanted to say thanks for the theme.

    Larry Hand­lin

    Reply ↓

  69. Hello Mike,

    First of, thank you for Journ­al­ized Sand. I love the theme and am using it to chron­icle my travels.

    See: http://www.sprangleblog.com.

    But I am hav­ing some prob­lems that need advice. I hope I’m doing the right thing by describ­ing three issues in one post.

    1) Please look at this post in Inter­net Explorer — and then look at it in FireFox:

    http://sprangleblog.com/?cat=9

    Note that the thumb­nail graphic does not appear in IE. Yet, the space is defined and when clicked on, the lar­ger graphic dis­plays on a new page.

    Any idea how to fix this for IE, please?

    2) Now please look at the blog home page — doesn’t mat­ter which browser — and see the head­shot thumb­nail. It’s inser­ted using a plu­gin called Simple Pop Up. It works in both IE and FF, so it might be a way to deal with the above issue — how­ever, I can’t con­trol word wrap.

    Any idea how to force that?

    3) finally, I’ve installed a plu­gin called Cus­tom Query String. It exerts con­trol over the order in which posts are dis­played (in this case, for­cing chro­no­lo­gical order rather than blog default “last — first”). It also limts how many posts of a catagory are displayed.

    How­ever — there is no pre­vi­ous or next nav­ig­a­tion. Any idea how to show that?

    If send­ing you server access will help, just ask.

    Again, than you for an excel­lent theme.

    Joe

    Reply ↓

  70. Joe,
    You need to upgrade to the latest ver­sion of the theme (avail­able above) to fix both 1 and 3. Be care­ful to save any changes you have made. You will have to re-apply them to the new ver­sion.
    Item 2 is because the image is neither floated or aligned, which causes the IE prob­lem you see in 1.

    Reply ↓

  71. Maybe my CSS is just ter­rible, but for the life of me I can not find where there is some type of hid­den pad­ding in the header sec­tion. Even if you reduce the pad­ding to 0px, there is still a fat empty space above and below the title. Any idea what the deal is there?

    Reply ↓

  72. Mike,
    great theme, ta. I’ve been using it for quite some time now, and I’ve finally got round to modi­fy­ing it so that it integ­rates bet­ter with the title pic­ture — it does look quite dif­fer­ent, to be hon­est :-) Have a look at my blog for details…

    Reply ↓

  75. Hi Mike,

    I used this theme when I had my first blog and loved it.

    Got out of blog­ging for 18 months and am decid­ing whether I want to do it again so looked for your them again.

    I’ve tried dozens of them. None are as eleg­ant and pro­fes­sional look­ing as yours (many try­ing to be too flashy.)

    So the ques­tion is: will you be modi­fy­ing this theme in order to allow widgets?

    Reply ↓

  76. Hi

    I’m using your theme which I find is really great (my wife uses it also) but I can’t remove the title which seems to show up and over­write the ban­ner image I have put up. I would really appre­ci­ate it if you could tell me how to delete the title (not from the options of course)so that the ban­ner image is clear.

    Thanks

    Reply ↓

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