Every time I think I’ve found the perfect theme for one of my blogs, something goes wrong with it. This time it’s with MomReviews, I had this theme I loved called “Greeny”, with great alternating bars of color dividing the header from the body and the main column from the sidebars, and it was working just fine until I had a designer friend widen the sidebars and increase the size of the background. I don’t think she did anything wrong, but the theme is not working correctly at all. The permalink structure is messed up, the widgets are doing weird things, and I just want people coming to the site to see a clean, easy to read and easy to navigate page.

SO, since this is my “test” blog for themes, it might look a little strange while I work out how to replace the header with my own for MomReviews. I swear, some days I just want to go back to the Wordpress Default theme!

I’m always looking for new ways to entice readers to subscribe to my blogs’ feeds, add my blogs to their Technorati Favorites, sign up to get my feed by email, and add my posts to social bookmarking sites. Feedburner has the links for the feeds, Wordpress has a plugin for the social bookmarking, but there are lots of people posting graphics in the “Web 2.0″ style that are really eye-catching.

But what I’m wondering is, do readers really use bookmarking icons? For example, at the end of this post you’ll see the graphic that says “Bookmark” with icons that link to Digg, Delicious, Stumble, and more. But do readers actually use them? Or do readers who regularly submit posts to Digg or Delicious or who often Stumble posts have their own methods for doing that? I know that personally, I use the Stumble toolbar to Stumble posts, and to be honest, I never use Digg unless someone I know emails me and asks me to Digg something for them.

And yet, I have the bookmarking plugin on all my blogs. I think at the least, the icons will remind people that hey, I want to Stumble this post or add it to Digg or whatever. Then they can use their own methods to do so. On my other blogs I get a ton of traffic from Stumble, so I plan to keep the icons on my blogs for now. What about you?

Just when I was getting ready to take a deep breath and upgrade my sites to Wordpress 2.3.3, I see that on March 10th, they are releasing version 2.5. Sheesh! I had so many problems the last time I upgraded, I don’t think my heart can handle that kind of stress again so soon

I know there are some Wordpress users that are still hanging on to versions from the 2.0 releases, because of the stability. But then I read on the WP site that the upgrades fix serious security flaws, and I think cripes, what if my sites got hacked or something?

I think I’ll stick with this version I’m using now, which is 2.3.1, until I see how 2.5 works. I knew that publishing blogs using Wordpress meant accepting a certain amount of responsibility as far as keeping the code upgraded, but right now I say if it ain’t broke, I ain’t fixin’ it.

I’ve uploaded a new theme to play with, I’m trying to see if I can use my new found Photoshop skills to make a custom header for Momreviews. I think this one might work if I can jazz it up with some better colors.

I’m playing around with a new Wordpress theme to install on a different blog, this is pretty much my “test” blog. So things might look a little weird here today!

Question-Why is the Technorati button showing up above the Searchform, even though I’m listing it BELOW the code for the Searchform? Hmmmm…..