On Friday afternoon I decided to look for a new free WordPress theme to try out just for a change from my usual Thesis theme. Now and again I like to do this to show visitors that the way the page looks is not set in concrete. It’s how I like it. [...]
Yesterday the thought crossed my mind that anyone who visits this blog page fairly often will by now have got used to the Thesis theme design and the rotating image gallery, and will perhaps have come to believe that it’s how the page looks and that its appearance is set in concrete.
So I decided to [...]
Until today I didn’t even know what a permalink is, let alone how to modify them.
I’ll explain. Whenever I create a new post on my blog page, WordPress creates a new page for that post, and gives it a unique Id, so that it can find the page when needed (such as when you click on its heading, or search for it, etc.). The default way that WordPress names the page is /?p=345 where 345 is the numerical Id of the page. This is the permalink (permanent link) by which the page is named.
If you don’t quite understand the “new page for each post” concept, just click on the heading of this post, and you’ll be taken to the individual page for this post, with the comments (if any) and the option to make your own comments.
Until today, the URL in your browser would have shown the permalink of my blog pages as http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/?p=345 or whatever the numeric Id is. That’s unfriendly and meaningless. It doesn’t tell you or me, or more importantly, search engines, anything about the content of that page.
Today I adopted “friendly permalinks” which give the date and subject in the URL addresses that you can see in your browser.
As a result, the correct URL for this post is now http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/2009/08/24/friendly-permalinks-on-my-blog/ instead of http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/?p=396
If you look at the URL now, all you’ll see is http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/ and that’s because you’re looking at this post on my WordPress blog page at http://www.jthonline.com/WordPress/index.php
If you’d like a bit of fun, click on the heading of this post, to open its own page; then go up to the URL in your browser and delete all the text after the date of this date of this post. Then change the day (24 in this case) to another date.
Pick a date highlighted in blue on the calendar, when I made a post, to take you to the post for that day. Be careful not to remove the “/” when selecting dates.
When you’re happy with what you can do with all that, pick a date when I didn’t make a post. You’ll then get a 404 message because you’re looking for a page that doesn’t exist. But this time it’s a 404 message with a difference.
It’s a personal 404 message, dude.
When I got up this morning I was thrilled to find a carton from Amazon on my front porch, with the two WordPress books that I’d ordered on 31 July.
This page is powered by WordPress and it’s so easy to use that anyone can use it as I have done, without any books or formal training. This being the case, you may well wonder why I ordered these books. The answer is, that being a retired and single person without a family, I need things in my life that I want to get involved in. Currently this page is it. So I wanted to delve deeply into everything about WordPress, which powers this page.
Today I’ve added a new theme to this page, called Thesis, and it’s going to be my normal theme from now on. But now and again I might throw in another theme just to remind you how flexible WordPress is.
Apart from a new layout, you might notice some new features. One of them which you might like is that you can write and publish a comment to any of my posts, and then you have 30 minutes to edit your comments and details of your name and email. You can in that time, edit your comment to add a request for me to delete your comment and not post it.
Today I signed up with wordpress.com and created an account. I can now create and publish a blog page on that site. But my reason for joining was to get a code to enable me to activate some plugins on this page, such as the one above.
The panel on the right is currently for images I created in a 3D program.
I was thrilled to get a comment today, which you can read, and my reply, in the comments section, or by clicking on comments below yesterday’s post.
I notice that WordPress has automatically begun a new page for my older posts, with a link at the bottom of this page.
I’m up and running now with designing my own WordPress themes in Artisteer, and have posted a new theme today. I’ve got a totally different looking design ready to post on Saturday, for the weekend.
Digital radio started today in Australia. The 7PM Report commented on it in their program this evening. Charlie Pickering advised, with a straight face as I recall, that listeners with digital radios will be able to listen to broadcasts of Parliamentary proceedings and be able to choose between the Senate or Representatives houses. I don’t expect that will cause a stampede of people rushing out to buy a digital radio.
This evening I created my first WordPress design, called a “theme” in WordPress language. Until now I’ve been using free themes that someone else has created. You are now looking at a design I created.
I didn’t create the design in Dreamweaver, but in a program called Artisteer that’s very easy to use, and is great for whipping up a design very quickly. Or it can create a far more individual design if I give more attention to each aspect of the design. It doesn’t give total freedom in design (as Dreamweaver does), but it allowed me to the create the design of this page as it appears at the time of posting, in an hour of trying this and that, in every aspect of the design.
When I wrote a post last night with the heading of I’m gonna get a chainsaw, da da da da da I had a tune in mind that I couldn’t remember. But today it came to me, and I’ve attached the tune to yesterday’s post. Give it a play (by clicking on the link to the Joshua Rich song).
For a few days I’ll be changing the WordPress themes (CSS styles and images) so that you can see that I wasn’t talking about mild changes to the appearance of this page. You can do Google searches for WordPress themes to see the range of themes that are offered. Remember this. You could have your own Blog page at WordPress.com today, totally free. And you can add normal pages as well.
However, to make it easier to read I’ve changed the CSS code to make the print-size of the posts larger, up from 11px up to 14px, and I’ve changed the quote in An update on the bookshops on 2 Aug 2009 to Times Roman italics and a larger size. I’ve also removed the adverts at the bottom of the page. Have you seen the bottom of this page? It’s worth the trip.
In the past 24 hours I’ve experimented with a wide range of WordPress themes to see what this page looks like with them. I should explain that WordPress is a great example of keeping structure and content separate to design layout (with CSS). So I can have my existing content and then download and activate a new theme, and suddenly the page looks different, but with the same content. That’s the power of CSS – which I’ve been learning since April and have diarised in the CSS Report on my home page.
However, you cannot have this theme on a WordPress.com page, because these theme was developed by a third party (but it was still free). WordPress does have over 900 themes from which to ckoose, including the one that I use normally.
I’ve tried some wild designs that make this page look amazingly different and dramatically demonstrate the power of CSS to change the design. However, while the themes I tried are sensational looking, they make it difficult to read the text and check the comments (if any), or even find the comments, or the archives, or the Search and other features on the page.
I decided that those who click onto my blog page, probably want to read my blogs, and any comments to them, and decide if they want to make their own comments, as easily as possible. They don’t want an amazing design and this won’t bring them back to the page. They want an easy to read and use page, with amazing content.
In the end, it confirmed my long held belief that you should not do design or video effects and other things just because you can.
A friend recently emailed me that his wife, who was a professional typesetter by trade, thought that my use of italics for the first letter of paragraphs after some headings, was not good design. I was already doubling the size of the letter and changing its colour. It was a bit of overkill and I was doing something “because I could” – which is not a basis for good design.
Since then I have come across two wonderful websites for those who are at all interested in typography.
http://www.inspirationbit.com/
and
Both are WordPress sites.
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