I spent hours last night, into the wee hours of the morning in fact, and then more hours again after breakfast today trying to get a new theme working on MomReviews. Why a new theme? What was wrong with the old one? *sigh* People, I don’t know what it is. Table for Five runs just fine. The only reason I ever changes themes on that blog is that I get bored looking at the same one day after day after day. MomCooks runs fine, the theme I’m using isn’t even technically current with the newest version of Wordpress, but it runs just fine so I don’t mess with it. And this blog gives me no trouble at all.

But MomReviews? I just don’t know what it is! I find a theme I like, I get it all customized the way I want it with my sidebars and everything, and without fail, I will log in one morning and find that something has gone all wonky. This last time, I found a theme with colors and details that I just loved, but it had two really narrow sidebars. A friend spent who knows how much of her personal time tweaking the background image and widening the sidebars, and for a while, it looked great! And then one day, I realized that there was a tag cloud sitting up in the header! I didn’t even have the tag cloud widget dragged into either sidebar. I kept taking more and more things out, and yet there it was. Finally I found a really generic theme and slapped it on there just so my readers would have something normal to look at.

But I got tired of looking at the generic theme, so I tried going back to the other one. I combed through every single theme file until I found that the footer.php file had tag cloud code in it. I took it out, saved, refreshed, and that darn tag cloud was STILL THERE. So I went off a new search for a new theme. I ran through pages of Wordpress Themes until I found one I liked. It was clean, simple, nice colors, but it had a Flickr photoset embedded in one of the sidebars, and the photos? Were of an Asian girl wearing almost no clothing. NICE. Just what a blog about products for kids should have I took that code out - and the whole dang sidebar disappeared. I put it back in, and tried again more carefully, making sure I was deleting any div tags or anything, and again, taking out that Flickr code made the sidebar disappear. GAHHHH!

Finally at about 1:00 AM this morning I found another one that worked, and a friend who was up chatting with me on MSN Messenger helped me get my banner image installed. I got a few hours of sleep, and then after breakfast, I set to work getting the sidebars fixed. While the theme does use widgets, it also has some things coded into the sidebars. And once again, taking them out messes everything up. *bangs head* Without switching to the freaking WP Default theme, I don’t even know what to do! You’d think after three years, I wouldn’t have these kinds of problems.