Blog24 » Blog24 Progress

Plugin Problems on Blog24

Chris — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 10:40:08 +0000

Some of you may have noticed a few quirks in Blog24 layout and design. These are caused by plugins that are being used to improve the site but their output has not been styled yet.

Sorry for any vexation caused by irksome layout. Be assured that these little oddments will be fixed as soon as possible.

I suppose that there is a lesson or two to be learnt here:

Don’t test plugins on a live blog.
Do not test CSS on a live website.
Do not activate plugins just before sleep.
Don’t share blog-probs with your readers?

Plugins That Need Styling

At the time of writing I have spotted three problems with the styling (or lack of) of the output of plugins. These plugins are Other Posts From Cat, ShareThis and Similar Posts.

Another Troublesome Plugin

I thought I would test Twitter Tools by Alex King. I thought it would be a nice feature to have a daily summary of my Twitter activity and Twitter Tools can do this without hassle. The problem is that every post on Blog24 is added to Twitter using TwitterFeed so these summaries are also added to Twitter.

This is a problem that I hope to fix by ditching TwitterFeed and letting TwitterTools update my Twitter account while filtering out the Twitter summaries.

While I strive to make Blog24 better my to-do list seems to be expanding exponentially. I wonder if Thomas Malthus had to-do lists like this.

Adapting a WordPress Theme For Your Blog

Chris — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 01:22:28 +0000

There have been a number of steps taken to convert Nurudin Jauhari’s Indian Muslims (IM) Wordpress theme to the design that you see before you today.

Images

As this theme uses images in the header area I thought it wise to replace them with my own work. I chose simple images that were not too busy and distracting and cropped them to the correct size before uploading them to the server.

The next image I changed was the favicon.ico – as shown here: >

Although there were a number of minor images to change or edit (those used for subtle effects) the last main graphic that required changing was the background. I wanted to keep it simple but somewhat random. I took the aforementioned favicon and pasted it onto the plain background in fairly random places, obviously it was coloured accordingly and random single pixel dots were added just add a very slight suggestion of texture.

Colour

I had already decided which colours I wanted to use and had already noted their hexadecimal RGB values so it was a case of finding and replacing these value in the theme’s stylesheet (stlye.css). To make this process easier I used two of my frequently used pieces of software: PageSpinner and Apple’s DigitalColor Meter.

Apple’s DigitalColor Meter is a very useful little application that is included with Mac OS X which enables to get the RGB values of any pixel on your screen. In this case it was used to discover the hex colour code for numerous elements of the IM theme so they would be easy to find within the long css file.

PageSpinner is a great html editor and it is an app that I have been using for a number of years. There are many features but it was the find and replace I put into use replace the original colour codes with the new making recolouring the theme an absolute breeze.

After two or three changes I quickly uploaded the style sheet and refreshed the page to make sure that my changes had the desired effect. It would be rather annoying to completely replace something as simple as colour codes only to find that you have ruined the whole look of the design.

Typography

At the time of writing I am not sure about if I have settled on the font choice for Blog24 or not. However, I have tweaked the font sizes and line spacing here and there. I did remove most of the text-transform:uppercase in the style sheet – they had been used to capitalize all the heading tags, only the tabbed navigation was kept in uppercase letters. All the header tags included borders too which I thought made the overall layout look a little cluttered at times so they were removed too.

Layout

The main reason I chose to use an existing theme was to save time. I tried many themes and settled with IM because I really like the layout. As a result I have not touched the overall layout of the theme. As previously discussed I will develop my own layout and theme for Blog24 but time was short and I knew that WordPress 2.5 was going to be around the corner so I wanted a quick solution.

Without changing any html or css I have altered the sidebar using a great feature of WordPress, Widgets. These allow the blog’s administrator to rearrange blocks of navigation and introduce other features for their blog. I have chosen to tag all posts on this blog so added the tag cloud at the top of the sidebar. At the time of writing the sidebar is not finalised and changes will be seen over the next few weeks.

I have experimented with two Widgets: Text and RSS. The Text Widget has been used to play with advertising simply by pasting the code and adding the ‘Sponsor’ for the title. The second was the RSS Wiget which currently shows the latest links from my del.icio.us account. Basically, Widget make it extremely easy to add and delete elements to part of the layout of your WordPress blog but with this theme only one area is Widget ready, the sidebar to the right.

Summary

Hopefully this article may help others find their quick fix for setting up a more personalised blog design when using WordPress themes or templates of a different blogging system.

The style sheet was not altered very much, mainly the color, background and border attributes were altered along with a few tweaks to margin and padding – all of which did not take very long to do. Despite this it is possible to make a dramatic change as illustrated by the following screenshots:

Next time WordPress plugins used to power Blog24 will be discussed.

Design for Blog24

Chris — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 13:57:45 +0000

At the moment blog24 is using a theme designed by Nurudin Jauhari and will slowly adapt it for my needs over the next couple of weeks, so don’t be surprised to see frequent changes during this time. Although the current theme is acceptable I am busy designing a custom theme from scratch, when time permits.

I took the decision to start publishing before developing a custom theme as there could be big changes when Wordpress 2.5 is finally released and this could delay the launch further. Also, as with any new website or blog, it takes time for them to be publicised and listed on numerous directories and search engines. At the time of writing I have not even started that process as more content is required, another reason for publishing using a third-party theme.

As time passes I will document the progress of blog24’s development and overall progress and will include techniques used to publicise the site along with summaries of their success or otherwise under the category ‘Blog24 Progress’. Hopefully this will become a useful series for blogger beginners.