Welcome to my blog

When redesigning my theme, I wanted to include a standard set of “share” links (or “social links” or “story tools”) for the posts and pages, featuring the usual print, email, rss and social-bookmarking links. Many people use the Sociable and ShareThis plugins for all of these, but I wanted to have a structure with separate links for each.

This article is a walk-through of creating two styles of “share” links, an inline set of links and a box (that also contains my tags).
(more…)

One of the great things about Wordpress is the plethora of plugins that the user community has developed to extend and enhance the basic blog functionality. Some plugins, such as WP-PluginsUsed, are simple and add a function or two you can embed in a page and are implemented as a single php file. Others, such as Now Reading Reloaded, provide significant functionality and involve many files.

Some plugins are purely for administration of the blog, such as Ozh’ Admin Drop Down Menu, whereas others provide functionality viewable to your readers. I have found the need to tweak some of these, sometimes for look’n'feel, sometimes for functionality. But managing modified plugins can be a challenge. This article looks at the common areas of customisation and how they can be managed.
(more…)

One of the key drivers for changing the theme was to break out of the “boxiness” that was common to many themes available. The old theme, and many that are available consist of a main box for all the content (so the blog is in the middle of the page and not stretched to fit the browser window) and then a few standard boxes within it: a header across the top, a footer across the bottom, and the content and a sidebar filling the space in the middle.

I was looking for something that had a bit of overlap and a background that appeared to flow out of the content. Achieving this was a bit of a challenge. This post describes how I achieved the layout I wanted and the CSS I had to use to get there…
(more…)

I’ve recently updated the theme used by this wordpress-based blog. In doing so I learned a lot about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), layout and the implications on a website that uses a mix of base “product” (i.e. Wordpress) and a multitude of plugins from a variety of authors that often follow their own standards on style and formatting. This article summarises the key things I’ve learned. They are not in any particular order.
(more…)

It’s taken a while but I’ve finally got the new theme up and running. This explains the lack of posts over the last month.

I hadn’t realised how complex a task it could be and I’ve learned a ton about php, css and debugging along the way. I’ve made a few notes and will write some posts on my experiences.

There may be a few things I’ve missed between my testing blog and here. I’ll be looking for them over the next few days. But for now, please enjoy the updated look and feel of the blog.