I'm not very technical, but with the help of Fantastico, a Fredrik Fahlstad theme that I altered with my own graphics, widgets, and some of the tutorials found here, I finally got my site transitioned to a blog.

http://troutunderground.com

Love to hear what you think. Still a few details to clean up (css is not exactly intuitive) but I'm headed in the right direction...

Tom it looks great to me.
Clean and attractive.
The gray text on the light background is a little hard for me to read.

Any website that has a manifesto is alright in my book.

Seriously though, I like it. Love that theme, and the graphics look good. One exception is the second to last one in the Underground Links in the sidebar, I can't read what that one says. something Road Cam?

Also, instead of just having a link to an email address, you might consider using a contact form. Easy enough to do in WordPress using the WP-ContactForm plugin.

Are you planning on integrating the articles into the same theme sometime in the future?

Had some XHTML validation errors, but nothing too serious. Whatever your thoughts about your CSS, at least it validates.

All in all, nice work.

Thanks guys! I agree about the light grey indent text, and will try to find the applicable css. The mailing form plugin is also a great idea.

As for putting my article pages within the theme, I'm not sure I see much point as I like the current presentation, but also - with what will ultimately amount to a couple dozen separate articles and essays - that would seemingly make for a navigation nightmare. Am I missing something, or is there a way to create static pages that aren't on the navigation bar across the top?

In any case, the blog software has already made a difference with reader participation and site viewership, and it's definitely something I wouldn't have tried without the help here (and the arrival of Fantastico).

Thanks!

Take care!
Tom Chandler

It's alright in my book. The setup and designs are awesome. The colors are great. It is easy to get around. I know a few people that might enjoy your website. I will email them right now.

Great Job! It's awesome...

Like the site.

A couple of comments:

The following text:



is almost completley hidden in your banner image. Its white text on that yellow background. Did you mean to hide it?

You might see if you can modify the image element in your css to give it a border so your text doesn't run into it.

I don't love justified text. It can make it hard to read (but I use it on my WordPress blog. I plan on switching it, but haven't yet).

I removed "Powered by Wordpress" from my blog's footer. My view of it is this: with so many hackers out there looking to exploit various software items, no reason to advertise what software you are using. I acutally include a link back to WordPress, but I don't use the standard "Powered by Wordpress" text, so a hacker doing a google search for "powered by wordpress" won't come up with my blog in the search results. That is very very very minor, but it is something I'm trying to to to keep my blog off of the hackers' radar.

Nice site! I love the upper sacramento river. We were waterskiing there last spring with some family. Actually we waterskiied there over Thanksgiving break a couple of years ago. That was pretty cool. People back home in Utah couldn't believe we had gone waterskiing over Thanksgiving.

Thanks guys! I took some of the advice (had my first comment spam attack last night, so I threw on the contact form plug-in), and agree about most of the rest. Stuff I need to clean up in my "spare" time, though if any of you could find some of that for me, I'd really think this place was special... 8-)

If you aren't using the Spam Karma plugin you should be. It has prevented all but one spam from making it to my blog.

I'm going to second the Spam Karma 2 plugin. It is available at:

http://unknowngenius.com/blog/wordpress/spam-karma/

It has blocked over 1200 comment spams on my blog, and has only allowed 2 or 3 that it shouldn't have. That is a pretty remarkable success rate.

I'm lazy with fighting spam (I only recently started filtering spam to my email). Two days ago my WP site got slammed with over 700 comment spams in the space of a few hours. Ended up banning a bunch of IPs, but I should get around to installing Spam Karma.

You won't be sorry Tim. Been using it for over a year.

Thanks again for the comments. I'm using the Akismet plug-in and the other one (name escapes me) that tries to block the spambots on the front end. So far, I seem to only be getting spam from one group (those English cell phone jerks) and I'm hoping I got the lid on before things go out of hand.

Akismet has caught every spam so far, and it's largely idiot-proof, so I'm standing pat for the moment.

Thanks again!
Tom Chandler