I struggled for a bit with what to put in the little black bar at the bottom of the page. I poked around at some websites that I like the design of. Two had the little copyright symbol, and one didn’t.

I like the copyright at the bottom because it seems more “professional”. But mindlessly mimicking professionalism is dumb. If I actually paid the $35 and registered my site with the Copyright Office, then I’d put that down there in a heartbeat. Still, I don’t seem to need to do that in order to justify the symbol:

The use of the copyright notice is the responsibility of the copyright owner and does not require advance permission from, or registration with, the Copyright Office.

But, really, do I care if someone uses my design or words? No.

There are three things that I want down there:

1. Notice that I was the one who designed and implemented the site.
2. What year it was “born” (might be cool in 20 years to show that gabedurazo.com has been around that long)
3. “Gabriel Durazo”, to help search engines link this site with my name. “Gabe Durazo” (URL) and “Gabriel J Durazo” (In the header) both point here no problem, but not “Gabriel Durazo” yet.

But if I have those three things, I may as well toss in a &copy and be done with it.

Okay, I’m going to say the blog is nicely mixed into my site now. It wasn’t so bad, really, but I really had to brush-up on my CSS. As I mentioned before, I made a new theme to integrate it. Probably about 95% of the changes were done in the theme’s index.php, header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php, and my stylesheet.

I had to dip into the wp-includes directory to modify just one file category-template.php, and that was only to change the wp_list_categories() function. Ordinarily it outputs a list with class — I’m forgetting now — but I changed it to my “sidebar_item” class, so that it would behave the same as the other items in my sidebar. I’m afraid that change will get wiped out if I update WordPress, though (which is part of the reason I’m making this post!)

In case you’re interested, this is the state of my php files:

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I think I’ve mostly incorporated the blog! I’m pretty happy with the results, really. I have to figure out what to do about that stupid sidebar with all the archives and everything. It’d be easy enough just to remove it, but it’s pretty handy.

Getting it to float off to the right is trickier than I would have thought. Now it’s just kinda hanging out down below. Oh well. That’s for tomorrow.

Then I have to fix up the comments and a few other little tweaks, but all-in-all, I think it’s looking pretty nice. You should have seen this page before! It was just the generic theme. Now it’s got a nice gray background, a crazy dog at the top, etc.

I’ve finally set up a blog at my site. Great. Now I’m one of those people.

Anyway, I don’t count on anyone reading it, so don’t you worry about that. I will use it more as a place to keep track of what I’ve done to get this site going, and random thoughts I have that I’ll want to remember for the future.

I suppose I can make predictions, too, and then point to them in the future (deleting all the ones that fail, of course…).

First order of business: Integrate this blog with my site. Time to delve into the WordPress php!

Great, the integration is going well. I made my own theme and have been modifying its index.php and header.php files. I’m mostly posting this just so I have two posts to work with in making the theme. Cheers!