IN MY OPINION » Blogging

Wordpress theme redesigned

Andrew — Mon, 28 May 2007 18:41:32 +0000

As I stated a few days ago, I mistakenly broke my previously used FastTrack theme. I liked it very much because of the main photo at the top. There depicted a young men with a rucksack walking along underground station. As his face was hidden and his picture was blurred, his character resembled me. I like wearing rucksacks and usually use subway if I need to get somewhere. This fact made the theme quite personal, and I didn’t need to customize it more for a long time. After I broke the theme and I had some hours to get down to WordPress Themes internal kitchen, I created my own theme.

To not take long, I’ll write my work log:

WP Theme editing on the local machine

Editing a WP theme remotely is a real pain. In this case, you have to upload/download your theme sources every time you change something. More easy way is a installing your WP copy on the local machine. There are lots of howto-s over the Internet. I’m little bit familiar with Apache+PHP+MySQL bundle, and installed it within 30 minutes. After this, I downloaded my current WP files from my hosting directory and upgraded it the latest WP version (2.2).

Tools

I took the FastTrack theme as a base for my new theme. The markup of all themes are very similar, because all of them uses the same layout: header, content, sidebar and footer. All parts are stored in few .php files with correspondent and clear names. The appearance of a theme is mostly determined by СSS file with styles of all parts. Hence almost all time you have to work with a CSS file editor. For this purpose I chose the great FireBug Add-On which show all comprehensive information about a web page including a CSS styles and HTML components on the page. PHP files I edited with Komodo and CSS styles with TopStyle. For choosing right color schema I found out cool on-line tool for color schema generation – kuler.

Creation

I took one of my photos which looked fine as a header image and cropped it to the proper size. Then I tidied up all unnecessary elements like top navigation, odd styles, etc. The width of the post area became wider on 100px. Then I chose a color schema using kuler. It took some time to play with links appearance and font sizes. And in a few hours the new theme I called harpsichord was done.

If you want to customize your theme, I can suggest you starting from Guides to creating your own themes.

P.S.
I eventually tasted the new-brand Eclipse chewing gum For those who are unfamiliar with my special interest to it, I’d say that Eclipse is the most popular open-sourced IDE for Java language (not only however).

Broken blog

Andrew — Thu, 24 May 2007 20:40:04 +0000

I’ve broken the blog theme fasttrack I’d been using for a year. It happened while I was playing with now-reading plugin which allows to arrange all books you are reading at the moment , adding reviews and rating it. I’ve been delaying the moment of getting familiar with WordPress themes templating, and I’m afraid the necessity of doing it has just come.

Enabling OpenID in the WordPress driven blog

Andrew — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 16:08:38 +0000

OpenId – is a one of the many global unique person identifier. The idea is not novel, but there are bunch of open-sourced, not vendor-dependent, collaborated implementations. Basically, the idea is in using your any well-known account, e.g. LiveJournal as a login or your ID in other systems. It is very useful, because you don’t need to create an account on another OpenID supported system, to make a simple action like leave a comment to a photo of your friend. As I run my own WordPress driven blog, I always wanted a some way to comment my friends posts on LiveJournal. But creating an account only for that reason, seemed to me meaningless. And at that moment appeared a genius and bright implementation of that unique id MyOpenId. Moreover, the LJ started to support this authentication method. For me only one inconvenience remained. I didn’t want sign my comments as jdev.myopenid.com (it is my MyOpenId account), because nobody knows who is behind this account. I needed a solution which allows me to associate my blog with my openId. Today I bumped into a great recipe in the How to Use Your Own URL, Not WordPress.com’s, As Your OpenID article.
Basically you need to do this few simple steps:

Get your MyOpenId.com account (or on any other OpenId provider)
Log in into your WordPress driven blog as admin
Go to Presentation -> Theme Editor -> Main Index Template
Add to head section of the index.php file such simple strings:

Now, I can and do a LJ post comments of my friends

First outside visitor

Andrew — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 21:04:50 +0000

My blog has been commented by outside visitor. Actually he is my friend, but he has discovered my “secret” blog by himself. Now I feel that I’ve got a one seldom visiting reader. This feelings are very encouraging, and I’ll try to write little bit more not to disappoint him By now, I can state that my audience is growing smoothly!

WPG2 plugin installed

Andrew — Thu, 09 Nov 2006 21:51:52 +0000

I’ve successfully upgraded the gallery and blog to latest versions. It allowed me to install WPG2 plugin. This plugin allows inserting images from a G2 gallery to a WordPress posts.