At any rate, the Featured Content Carousel deactivated the slide-box on my main page, making me think it was broken.  I decided that this had happened because of the upgrade to WordPress 3.0 and decided I needed a new 3.0-compatible theme.  So I looked and looked — the theme I originally tweaked (Revolution Office) apparently no longer exists — and found something called Work Place from Press75.com looked the closest to my theme.

Bought it; installed it; realized it was never going to work without major tweaking.  Complete waste of $75!

A little more poking around on the web and I discovered that the Revolution Office theme on which I based my theme stops working correctly if the Featured Content Carousel is installed and activated.

Deactivated the plug-in.  Problem solved.

I’m still out $75.

My understanding of PHP was somewhat limited when I first downloaded the Revolution Office theme.  I’d occasionally done some really minor tinkering, but nothing on the scale that I’ve had to do here.  In addition, it took me a couple of days to realize that I had to create “.php” files with particular text in the first few lines to create a “Template” and then to figure out how to connect that to a “Page.”  Frankly, I’m fairly proud of myself for figuring it out.

I think the design of RickHorowitz.com is pretty much where I want it to be right now (except for one thing).  The content needs to be modified, but the design is 99.9% complete.

The one thing that’s missing — and I will be amazingly and super-hyper-incredibly grateful if someone out there can supply me with information on this — is that I can’t seem to get the Blog page to be the way I want.

I’m fairly certain from what I’ve been able to read so far that the problem is caused by the fact that my primary page — the page you see when you type just RickHorowitz.com and nothing else — utilizes the Revolution Office main page, stripped of the bottom box. I wanted a cleaner design and I wanted the primary Blog to be a secondary page.

Well, I managed to get it to a secondary page, but I can either print full-posts-only, using the_content(), or I can get shorter versions with the_excerpt(). Using the_excerpt() means that people will have to click on the title of the post to read the entire post. This is because the_excerpt() doesn’t recognize and utilize the WordPress tag.

It’s about 1:30 a.m. here now and I’ve been at this since around 5 p.m. today, trying to finalize the design, so I think it’s time to “throw in the towel” for the night.

Hopefully, either some good soul will leave me the answer before I can get back to it, or I’ll find it myself in the next few days. I’d hate to think I can’t have a properly functioning Blog page without a site redesign!

The image may, or may not, be actually used within the post itself.  That doesn’t matter.

Sizing the image at 400 x 300 pixels seems to work for all such images except the larger one in the bottom box of the main page (which no longer exists since I’ve modified the theme to exclude it).

This means that you should designate a separate post, with a separate image, for each of those locations.