8 Responses

1. Scott

   August 14th, 2006 at 7:55 am

   1

   Voice is so hard to get right in blogging. The tone there was jocular. Nothing rough. Apologies.

   I was just trying to remind people of the complaints folks had with your seven-day challenge. With the Sandbox framework, for example, it is possible to creat something without a great deal of time.

   Yes, the skins are ports (except one or two), but isn’t that some good news? Hopefully by allowing theme designers to take a breather from always having to develop structure and design for a theme, making a cool-looking blog doesn’t have to be an exhausting process.

   I’m not suggesting the Sandbox is now the standard. But it is really fun to skin. If you’ve got an idea of a design and that design doesn’t rely on some complex, new framework, why not skin it? This should be fun. And I hope that Sandbox is.

   Thanks for the nice words, I second the motion!

2. David

   August 14th, 2006 at 8:01 am

   2

   You are right about tone, as my post was not to be confrontational at all, but more of a mocking to you. But I can’t remain professional with emoticons littering my articles.

   I am very happy to see people jumping on board to create things easily and quickly.

   Glad to see you agree with me on it becoming the default.

3. Scott

   August 14th, 2006 at 8:06 am

   3

   Har, har, har! Here’s to confusion!

   That’s quite funny about emoticons in the article. Good, glad we’re still pals.

   I was a little (grumble, grumble) when the first three skins for the Sandbox were K2-based—though I am not knocking K2 or those skins. There are some unique mods of the Sandbox on wp.com, it’s just they’re not publically released.

   Anyhow, actually, thanks for the post. I hope we can actually get the “other side of the coin” opinion from your post. Cheers.

4. Trevor

   August 14th, 2006 at 8:09 am

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   I feel your pain about the lack of original skins for Sandbox, but a couple of ports in a couple of says is pretty good progress. I’ve just wanted to have a k2 “lite version” for a while, and I thought this might be a good way to kill 2 birds with 1 stone, plus I think the k2 look and feel is a really good foundation for making some original themes. I’m hoping to find the creativity to make something more original, but it’s much harder than just making a port!

5. adam

   August 14th, 2006 at 8:47 am

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   the issue with creating original skins is that Sandbox is not yet 1.0. IMO.

   i’m certainly waiting, given the number of changes from 0.5 to 0.6.

   also, literary life is a port of a Movable Type/Livejournal skin. (but by the original designer, at least).

6. David

   August 14th, 2006 at 9:52 am

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   Thanks Adam and Trevor for the comments.

   I agree that not having a 1.0 version can be a little scary to play with, but many times the release schedule is so slow that you have to play with what you can get rather than waiting.

   I am impressed with how fast Sandbox is progressing, and hope there won’t be any more major CSS rewrites in the next few updates…

7. Andy Skelton

   August 15th, 2006 at 4:23 pm

   7

   http://markjaquith.wordpress.com

8. adam

   September 16th, 2006 at 5:15 pm

   8

   well, now you have your first standalone original skin. a work in progress skin for a work in progress theme. i still think the sandbox was a better answer to your challenge than you’re willing to admit. the default may be ugly, but spartan and kubrick would both be decent default choices.