Catshanghai

My blog (www.catshanghai.com/blog) looked like a train wreck at various points on Wednesday, because I was trying to configure different themes to work with the new logo that Miss Gao drew for me.

Wordpress offers many different themes to change the look and feel of a blog. It is all based on CSS, but some of the newer themes offer support for ajax and javascript sidebar widgets.

I wanted something that was minimal and could be easily tailored without too much CSS pain. After experimentation with hemmednoajax and barthelme I found the WP Andreas theme. So the credit goes to Andreas Viklund. I replaced the banner image with a Shanghai skyline and decluttered the sidebars, setting up widgets to display the logo, links and previous posts.

I wanted my logo to be a fun, line drawing of a cat. I found a few examples from the Internet and Miss Gao produced some images for me to choose from. I chose the one above, but asked her to add the famous Pearl Tower as the cat’s tail. She drew the logo on paper, which I scanned and then edited using Fireworks, Freehand and Paint.net. The scanned image was a bitmap, but I wanted to simplify it by using the trace tool in Freehand. I saved the image as a png file to preserve its transparancy. The trouble with png files is that the file sizes are large and IE 6 does not render the transparency. I had to use Paint.net to fix this by adding a background and converting it into a jpeg. I displayed the logo in a text widget by writing html.

Now my blog has a theme I am not ashamed of, including a logo.