Where's the middle ground?
I finally started updating the styling of my MT blogs to give a more personal feel to the sites and almost straight away I have a question: Where is the middle gound? At the simple "point and click" end of things we have Style Catcher (and taking it even further the non-customizable themes in vox). At the DIY end we have styles-site.css.
Where is the solution for when you want to start with a basic layout and make gradual changes until you hit your sweet spot?
My original thought was to use the "minimalist" theme and then make a few simple overrides; except that it duplicates a lot of stuff and you end up having to recode most of the sheet just to override the font… What about base-weblog.css? That's what the official themes use as a base, so it must be a good beginning, right? It certainly saves effort over fully redisigning from scratch but a few fundamentals are missing; like the fact that the two-column layouts don't display as two columns…
What I have ended up doing here is importing base-weblog.css and defining the alpha and beta divs for my chosen layout (two-column-right). It would have been nice if the default stylesheet took this approach rather than containing most of base-weblog.css making modifications a pain. I know; I have spotted a niche and I should fill it. Unfortunately lack of motivation coupled with lack of intellectual property rights to my own code make that a non-starter.
A bit about the style. This was someting I was thinking about for a beekeeping blog, but I'm doing that over at vox and they don't have customizable themes over there. The altruistic nature of a single honey bee has a number of parallels with individual developers in open source projects or individual routers in large networks so I thought the theme idea could be applied here.
The logo is five interlocking hexagons representing the comb structure build by the bees for raising young and storing winter provisions. The colours represent the standard marking colours for honey bee queens used to make it easier to spot her as well as indicate her age. The first colour should actually be white but because the honey bees visible spectrum is shifted further into the blue than ours I've used violet (kind of an in-joke for beekeepers I guess).
Currently the style fails miserably in internet explorer. Not sure if I will fix that or not.