Lyrical Spark Redesign in Progress

Despite it being Exam time, I find myself with unusual amounts of free time so I have been posting a lot recently; this is my sixth one in seven days. Anyways, I’ve been pretty bored lately so I decided to play around with some of the encoding which led to as Citrus put it, my blog exploding. After correcting that fiasco by foregoing the study time I probably should have been doing, I decided to just mess with the theme code and nothing else.

First, I decided to work on mitigating some spam problem. Technically, Akismet has been catching all the trackback spam but cleaning out the spam queue everyday got tedious so I installed a plugin to block and delete unvalidated trackbacks. Also since I am paranoid, I also added the math spam protection feature. The plugin is old and hasn’t been updated in forever but I have had trouble with captchas displaying correctly on other people’s blogs so I thought that this was the best and most straightforward alternative.

Illacrimo is a beautiful theme but its missing some of the little things that most other themes have. I decided to use Citrus’s blog, Taishou, to test out some changes in case I screwed up again. The first thing I did was to add support to display the publishing time which was relatively easy. I also added support to display the tags at the bottom of posts. I then reorganized my tags and categories to take advantage of the increased tag support but I still need to add them to half of my posts.

When I finished, Citrus informed me later that Taishou didn’t display correctly in IE. I didn’t realize that because it looked just fine in Firefox and Opera. It turns out that it was just a minor div tag problem so I fixed that so it will look fine in IE now. However in IE, when the tags go on to a second line, the tag image does not display correctly. I will fix that eventually but it’s a really minor detail that won’t affect readability or navigation. I suspect that I just need to fix somethings in the stylesheet since I haven’t actually done that yet.

Yesterday, I spent OVER 9000 hours in MS Paint making a logo for Lyrical Spark since I suck at Illustrator. If it wasn’t painfully obvious already, I modeled it after the Nanoha StrikerS logo. The background for the header is the same as before but the new logo makes it look a lot more professional unlike the good old days back on Blogger. Please check above to see Lyrical Spark’s first header. I miss the old rotating banners though so I have to add that back in during the summer.

Lastly I added category icons that display below the post date. Unfortunately, I could not get them display more than one vertically without screwing up the page formating so I need to look into that later as well. For now, I will be using Negima icons until I roll out my Touhou theme later on during the summer. Please look forward to it!