Tag Archives: CSS

WordPress themes

John | 15 October, 2009 - 12:13 am

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 browse around for a new theme that would dramatically change the look of this page, for one day only, and this is the one I chose:

Tyson_Black_theme

Well, Reno made a comment on the new theme, using my last post to do it, as I hadn’t made a new post to go with the new theme.  The problem is that his very enthusiastic comment would make no sense after I reverted to the Thesis theme today.  So I’m adding this post with a record of the theme he was writing about, and as you can see it  looks totally different.  Not only the colours and header, but also the layout and the number of posts you can scroll down in full.  Thesis only allows the most two recent posts to be displayed in full.

One of the reasons that the appearance of the page can be changed with a mouse click is because of CSS.  My website has a long page devoted to my experience in learning CSS, where content and design are separated.  And the content is in one box, so to speak, and the layout and design instructions are in another box – and this includes fonts, colours, lines, and so on.

I’ve adopted another new theme today.  I really like the look of this one, and it has some neat features like tabs for categories.

I’m looking forward to Australian Idol next Sunday, because the guest mentor to the contestants, guest judge and performer is the legendary Liza with a Z.

For me, Liza Minnelli is an extraordinary singer and performer, and it amazes me that such a great legend is alive and visiting and performing in Australia – and she’s no stranger to our shores.  She married an Aussie.

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West Coast Swing

John | 12 August, 2009 - 11:50 pm

Late last night I tried to move the WordPress directory that powers this page from the subdomain of blog.jthonline.com to www.jthonline.com the same as the rest of my web site.  I’ve been wanting to make this change ever since I installed WordPress but I didn’t know how to do it.  WordPress is not just the web page you can see, but a whole system of over 15 Mb on my server with maybe 60-100 folders and sub folders and sub-sub folders etc and hundreds of files.  The index page you are reading is not an HTML page.  It’s a PHP page and that means it has PHP  programs as well as HTML and CSS.  This page is also linked to a MySQL database.  So there is lots going on.  By the way the PHP programs are server-side, which means they run on my server and are not downloaded to your computer (client-side).

As I mentioned, late last night, cheered on by a few glasses of red wine, I got up the courage to move the WordPress folder.  Disaster.  My blog page went offline and worse still, I could no longer access the admin page.

After a good night’s sleep I tackled the task again this morning.  Phew!  I was able to  reverse last night’s damage, and with some help from the WordPress Codex site, I made the move successfully, so here we are.  WordPress is now where I want it to on my hosting server.

Last Sunday night Lincoln Lewis (from Home and Away) and his professional dance partner Luda were assigned to do the West Coast Swing.

Things did not go well in the judging.  The judges said that Luda had not done the West Coast Swing.  She argued back and said she had done what WC Swing experts had told her what to do (choreograph and  teach Lincoln).  This was the start of an argument.  It got featured in Today Tonight, which had other local experts comment.  The argument is the feature of Ch 7 promos for the episode nest Sunday.

You can see the dance highlights from last Sunday at the following address:

http://au.tv.yahoo.com/dancing-with-the-stars/video/-/watch/14978062/episode-6-highlights/#fop

Lincoln and Luda are the 4th couple.  The blind guy is next.

You can see the judging and argument at this address:

http://au.tv.yahoo.com/dancing-with-the-stars/video/-/watch/14978068/luda-takes-on-helen/

I mention all this because I’ve sought the comments of a leading exponent of West Coast Swing in the West Coast of the USA – Sonny Watson.

Sonny Watson was instrumental in helping the “United States Swing Dance Council” (U.S.S.D.C.) pass a bill to make West Coast Swing the Official State Dance Of California. Sonny is a certified, trained judge. When he isn’t competing, he serves as a judge at many of the national events, including A.S.D.C. (New York), Atlanta Grand Nationals, Phoenix, Boston Tea Party, Virginia State Open, California SwingThing, Monterey Swing Fest, Jack and Jill O’Rama, Swing Diego, Dallas D.A.N.C.E., Dallas Classic, New Years Dance Championships (Dallas), Swing Worlds, US Open Swing Dance Championships and more. Sonny is also Chairman of the Board of the Dance History Department for the World Swing Dance Council.

If he replies, I’ll publish it for you to read.

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More changes

John | 11 August, 2009 - 8:26 pm

I‘ve made more changes including the title of this blog.  I had a friend at Elders IXL – Foster’s (Andrew W) who always called me the Silver Fox, so that’s where that came from.  Apart the new name for my title, and the new subtitle, the most obvious change is the design of the new header.  It’s not permanent, and it’s just part of my process (in the current jargon of an AFL footy team selecting a new coach) to learn how to do things in WordPress and the Thesis theme.

Furthermore, I expect that the new title and subtitle will only be temporary until I decide on something that I happy to settle.

Your opinion please?

I’ll welcome your comment on whether you prefer JT’s Blog, or the new title and subtitle, or have some ideas of your own.

I’d also welcome comment on what you’d be interested for me to write about.

Photo details

My photo in the header is a self portrait I took with a Canon G2 in the days when 4 megapixels was state of the art for consumer digital cameras.  The G2 was great for shooting self portraits because of the rear LCD screen which could be swung out and rotated so that I could see myself in the screen.

The photo has been processed in Photoshop to remove the background, and the header was created in Xara Extreme Pro 5.

CSS

Getting the header onto this page is a whole other story which involved a lot of Google searches to find suitable CSS code for Thesis, and then copying it into the appropriate file in the Thesis framework.  It took a great deal of trial and error and failures, and more Google searches for CSS code that works.

But in the end I got there, thanks to http://www.doublemule.com/

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A PS to yesterday’s post

John | 4 August, 2009 - 1:05 pm

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.

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Just because you can

John | 4 August, 2009 - 12:01 am

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.

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