120d has requested I stay up until midnight when it ends today. I'm not sure which time zone GMT is, and I don't know how to replace the background picture to the winner's. If you can tell me how so I can do this when it ends @ midnight. Is it the UTC?
Oh just joyous. I failed miserably. I upload it to theme designer, and it won't fill up the page. And then, if I hit tile, it tiles up. What is your suggestion for this error?
Well, what we want to do is to find a image that will fit wiki's content area. Therefore, we need to know dimensions of it.
Dimensions of the wiki's content is 1033px*1200px, so the actual image needs to have that dimensions in order to cover everything.
Of course, it can also have some different dimensions, but it will not look good in our case.
We have found that image and we have already made it have those dimensions; I have done that part.
Next, we need to define the width of places on the left and right of the wiki's content. It can practicly be anything, but I will not suggest more than 150px.
Also, what is very important is to that left and right side has the same width, so the image can be corectly centered.
Now we can add some border to seperate wiki's content and sides. I have added it to snow background.
If our image is more 300kb we can compress it with Radical Image Optimitazion Tool, or RIOT [1]
Theme designer
What we should handle first are the middle and main background colors.
The main background is actually background color of a layer that is first from back. The layer that is behind all other layers.
Middle background is a background color of a layer that is second from back.
That layer is there to fill empty space that will be left when the image gets splitted in half on large screens. [2]
The background color of that layer should be some avarage color of you background, which will be green.
However, I will rather put blue, since the upper part of image will be revealed by the adds on the main page and average of upper part of your background is blue.
The colors we choose can, but in the most cases why will not be main color like red, blue, etc.
In that case we will need to Google "blue hex codes" or "red hex codes" to get perfect tone.
Wikia's theme designer allows you to enter a hex code of your own color.
Hex codes are amount of Red, Green and Blue colors in some color turned into hexadecimal numbers.
The decimal version of those amounts can be 0-255 for each of the three colors.
Anyway, now when we have choosen our colors, we need to upload the image and choose how we will display it.
Considering that the image is uploded we can choose to lock the image and make wiki's content scroll over it.
That would be "fixed" option. However, we maybe have some image that can be repeated horizontally and vertically while still looking good.
The example of that image is our very first background on the wiki [3].
For that image a "tile" option will be good; it can be sayed perfect.
Well, if you try choosing "tile" option, you will se that middle background color will get disabled, since the image doesn't need to adapt to larger resolutions anymore; it is endlessly repeated.
After choosing how to display our image, we have come to third layer from the back, which is actually a wiki's content.
We want to make that layer transparent so we can see our background through it.
Therefore, we change transparency level until we are satsified with the result.
More, in the theme designer, it takes few seconds to show the result after changing the level of transparency, so be patient.
After setting trensparency level, we can customize wiki's logo, but I will not suggest to customize it for spring.
Well, I think that it should only be customized on some special days like Haloween, Christmas, Valentine's Day, etc.
When logo is covered we have reached the end and new theme is prepeared. We can save changes and see the results.
Seeing the results
When it comes to seeing the results, we may need to clear our browser chache to actually see them.
Web browser usually chache some data in order to load websites faster in the future.
So if some part of the website is changed, the web browser may display the old, chached version of that part.
In our case it will be the old background. We don't want to see that kind of result, so we will then clear our browser chache.
If even after clearing the browser chache everything isn't how it was in the theme designer, we can only wait for wikia's servers to start distributing a new background.
I hope that you will be able to put your background up now.
My mac has failed. I've had to use my PC with a screen that cannot see the background. Therefore, it's impossible for me to upload the picture. I won't have my mac back for about a day. Is it possible for you to upload the image? When I started the process to do so, my mac just died. ;( Thank you if you can!
