Gentle Wisdom is now running with the new Twenty Eleven theme on self-hosted WordPress 3.2. Well, not precisely. In fact it is using the Twenty Eleven Child with Sidebar Support theme which Chris Aprea kindly released, in response to my comment (which he deleted) on a previous post on his blog. This child theme has almost entirely overcome the issues I had with Twenty Eleven, which I posted about yesterday. I have also customised the header image, and copied across the widgets from the old Twenty Ten, with a few minor changes.

The changes Chris made only in the child theme affected the 1000+ posts on this blog, not the pages. I have had to edit my pages manually to select the sidebar theme. But as there are only 18 pages here that has not been a big task.

Thank you, Chris.

One other small issue: in Twenty Eleven borders appear around all my images. I would prefer no borders, unless I specify them. It doesn’t work to include “border=”0″” as an the HTML img attribute. I would also prefer less white space at the top. I guess these would be easy CSS changes. Also at some stage I would like to put the words “Gentle Wisdom thoughts on life from Peter Kirk, a follower of Jesus” on top of the image rather than in a large white space above it, but that would probably be a more difficult change.

If anyone finds a problem with this site as newly set up with Twenty Eleven, please let me know, in a comment or through the contact form.

Meanwhile, as Brian LePort reports, Google is preparing to discontinue its Blogger blogging platform. And about time too, I would say. Most Google products are really good, but Blogger has always been an exception. I moved this blog from Blogger to WordPress in 2007 and have never regretted it. What Google really needs to do is replace Blogger with a high quality product of its own – which it could base on the WordPress open source code. In the article Brian links to the news is in fact only that Google is going to rename Blogger and link it to its new Google+ social network. But there is a link to older news of a major overhaul of Blogger. That would be good, but I am not expecting to move back to any new Google platform in the near future.