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13Floor: Part 1 of 87
Last year I purchased a “Lifetime Access” subscription to Elegant Themes, a collection of 87 WordPress themes intended to characterize a variety of content niches and categories. This suite of themes appears to target independent web developers who do not necessarily possess graphic design skills but who need a stable of ready-made themes that they can use to quickly develop credible looking sites with buzzword compliance (mobile friendly, responsive, SEO…).
For a time I kind of regretted the expense. The existential angst of committing to a “Lifetime Access” subscription added to the ennui. I found little use for almost all these themes, which are anything but elegant when you get under the hood and wrestle with acres of bloated and unwieldy CSS code. I do not actively solicit freelance web development work, so it appeared that the purpose of these themes was lost on me.
To get my money’s worth out of the expense I connected two dots: I have far more than enough content to fill 87 web sites, and exploring the idiosyncrasies of all these themes as thoroughly as one individual reasonably can suddenly sounded like a fun thing to do. If I fine tune my Wordpress skills and if I can potentially leverage these ready-made themes for paid freelance work then all the better.
At present I do not intend to make this project a straight review of the Elegant Themes suite of themes, but I see no reason not to comment on the inevitable annoyances and welcome surprises. As of yet I have developed sites using only a handful of these 87 themes. The Payphone Project & Sorabji.NYC use modified versions of Divi, which appears to be the centerpiece of the Elegant Themes suite.
Those sites uses “child” version of Divi. For the purposes of this project I do not expect to modify these themes. My intent with this project is to populate all 87 Elegant Themes in a way that delivers the type of content for which each was intended.
13Floor is a homepage-centric theme which appears intended to function as something akin to a landing page. It does not look like a theme which one would fill with hundreds of postings or a significant quantity of content. 13Floor’s home page claims that 13Floor “comes with five unique colors schemes to help ensure that there is a style that suits your needs”. Those 5 color schemes look pretty similar to me.
Elegant Themes: 13Floor Color Schemes
The sparse quantity of questions posted in the theme’s members-only support forum suggests that 13Floor is one of Elegant Themes’ lesser-used themes. I actually like the way it looks “out of the box”, even if the sidebar headers are clunky and the 3D effect is a bit hulkish.
The first trick I solved involved the red buttons which link from story excerpts on the home page to full content. For some reason the default text for this is “SIGN UP NOW”, a plea which makes no sense for my content. To replace this text one must create a custom field named “Button” and in the “Value” field next to it place whatever text you want to fill the button.
13Floor: Custom Field for Buttons
Unfortunately this bit of text from the custom field does not transfer to category pages, where a generic “Read More” button is placed after each excerpt. I think the custom field text would make the category pages more interesting, and encourage more clicks.
As I mentioned in Terribles, the first content with which I started filling this theme, there appears to be no explanation for why this theme is named 13Floor. One assumes it is a reference to the superstition that 13 is an unlucky number, and on account of that belief most high rises and taller office buildings appear to not include a 13th floor.
This theme, then, evokes an air of mystery by claiming to be that mythical missing space.
If that’s not what it means then I am open to other interpretations.
Listening: Scriabin Sonata #2, Sviatoslav Richter
This track captures the directionless of my life as it existed in 2002 and 2003, and again in 2015. It is an ambling, rambling piece of music, sleepily performed with no particular color or determination by Sviatoslav Richter. I listened to this track over and over when my bedroom was my office and this living room where I work today was mostly empty. Early Scriabin is a puzzle waiting for its solution in Piano Sonata #3.
Fork In Soup
You cannot eat soup with a fork. I repeat: You cannot eat soup with a fork. Most soups, that is. If stew is considered a soup then beef or tripe/menudo stews could be considered a soup that one could consume with a fork as the broth is ingested via pouring the bowl into your mouth. For the most part, however, forks should not appear in soup, as in this photograph.
Humans
I did not set out to walk all the way from Astoria to the Freedom Tower on this day but that is what happened. Here are a few photos of a small number of people I saw along the way. Something happened in Tribeca that happened a surprising number of times within a period of a few days. Someone asked me to take their picture, and I demurred. I did not outright refuse to do it, I just acted like I didn’t hear the request. Every single time I wished later that I had done it. in Tribeca it was a yellow cab driver who asked “ARE YOU A PAPPARAZZI? YOU WANNA TAKE MY PICTURE?” I laughed and said no, not realizing until he drove away that I had an opportunity to get what might have been a fabulous, lively shot.
Something that drives me insane about these Elegant Themes is that thumbnail images are not always thumbnails. Sometimes they are, sometimes they are not. When they are not really thumbnails they are just full size imaged squeezed down using nothing more elegant than HTML, a technique for resizing images that was laughed at in the early days of the WWW but which has become an unfortunate bandwidth-hogging norm. Not only is it bad HTML but it often makes the image look warped. The first time I posted this story the thumbnail was warped and resized with nothing more than HTML. The second time I posted this story it was actually resized and cropped. Go figure.
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Terribles
The 13th floor is traditionally skipped in most modern high rises. This is on account of the enduring superstitious belief that the number 13 is unlucky, and that being on a 13th floor spells certain doom.
This Elegant Theme is titled 13Floor, suggesting its intended use is for spooky stuff like Halloween content or ghost stories.
The closest experience I had to a genuine ghost story came in the days after my grandmother died. I do not recall specifics at the moment but her death from heart attack occurred in the late 1980s, during college summer break. I was at home, in the house where most of my growing up took place, when the phone in my bedroom rang. I was with a friend. I do not remember what we were doing but whatever it was I did not want to interrupt the revelry, letting the phone ring a number of times before picking it up. I had assumed my mother would answer on the phone downstairs. Evidently she assumed I would take the call. The phone rang 7 or 8 times before I somewhat impatiently answered.
I heard heavy breathing, moaning, and a voice muttering my name. It was my grandmother, saying “Mark? Is that you? Can i talk to your mother?” I ran downstairs to tell my mother who had called, saying nothing of the apparent distress her mother was in. I realized later that the heavy breathing and other signals did not fully register with me as I heard them.
Minutes after mother took the call she ran upstairs, announcing that we were going to her mother’s apartment and to get ready to go immediately.
My friend went home, no questions asked, recognizing that something serious was happening. My mother and I got in the car. In her storm of uncertainty and confusion she drove the car completely on the wrong side of the road, nearly colliding with one vehicle before I grabbed the steering wheel and put us on the right side of the street. I told her to stop at the corner and that I would drive. For the remainder of this ordeal I did all the driving.
We got to her mother’s apartment building, a retirement/semi-retirement community the likes of which were abundant in Florida. As we boarded the elevator I looked for the 13th floor. There was none. I cannot say with absolute clarity that this memory shines so clearly that i can casually toss it off as a given. But I always looked for the 13th floor on any elevator in any tall building.
I don’t know who called an ambulance but EMT personnel arrived soon after we did. Grandmother looked dead already, ghastly pale white as a slab of weathered marble. Still, she was happy to see us. She did not smile. I never saw her smile. But on our arrival she showed a gratified, comforted look of thanks.
She was taken to the hospital, where she died the next night. My mother threw herself onto the body lying dead in the hospital bed. I was last to touch her, timidly touching her cold hand, in the first and so far last experience I had touching a dead body.
The days that followed ran together like one. I got little sleep as the phone rang night and day with calls from relatives long forgotten and altogether unknown to us until word got around that Gladys had died. No one liked Gladys, who had alienated virtually everybody on all sides of her family save for my mother. Calls came in to support us and my mother in particular, but not to mourn the loss of Gladys. My mother would later be lectured by her sister about how caring for Gladys was a mistake she would never have to make again.
As calls started slowing down and plans for the funeral had been made I looked forward to a first full night of sleep in what felt like weeks, but which was probably only 3 days. Then, at 3:42am, the phone rang. I might have ignored it under normal circumstances but if this was another relative from far away I did not want to miss the call or deny them the chance to connect, for whatever reason they might have had for calling at such a strange hour.
I picked up the phone and mumbled “Hello?”
I heard heavy breathing, and moaning.
“Is that you?” I heard a woman’s voice ask.
“Yes. This is me.”
She replied “I just wanted to see how you were doing.”
“I’m OK,” said I. “There’s been a lot going on.”
“I’m sure there has,” she said. Several seconds of silence ensued, then the heavy breathing continued, the gentle moaning.
My eyes slamming shut in desperate need of sleep I asked something like “What can I do for you?”
“Do you want me to come over right now?”
That question woke me up. I asked “Who is this?”
Her voice became perturbed. The moaning stopped as she pointedly responded “This is the woman you were with last night!”
I was confused but lucid enough to recognize that my uncertainty about who had called should not lead me to tell them off when it could be a concerned relative calling to offer support.
“Can you call back tomorrow?” I suggested. She agreed to this, her voice returning to what I had come to recognize was a sensuous sound. I will never know who this woman was or who she thought she was talking to but years later, while recounting this story to a lover, I realized that she must have been masturbating. I had deduced right away that this woman was a lover or paid paramour attempting to phone her partner but dialing the wrong number and talking to me instead. But the sound of masturbation just didn’t click with me when I was a young college sprig. I thought I was hearing the ghost of my grandmother, whose heavy breathing and moaning came through that very phone just days earlier.