Blog Archives
Why I chose the Coraline theme & the Eaglefeather font
WordPress Blog Theme
The WordPress Coraline theme came out the other day, and I like it because:
- It has a “Leave a comment” link that can’t be missed. The one in the Twenty Ten theme is hard to find. I want to engage readers in conversation, and a loud “Leave a comment” or “# comments” link grants them easy entry.
- It allows for a body, feature bar, and two sidebars beneath the feature bar. This means I can feature my latest tweets. And knowing that whatever I tweet will be featured prominently on my blog might give me pause before I tweet while drunk. Not that I would ever do that!
- Like the Twenty Ten theme and the Kubrick theme before it, it allows me to have a banner image, which I think it is fun.
- I can use the right sidebar to feature my latest Flickr photos on par with my categories, tag cloud, etc. in the left sidebar.
Typekit Web Fonts
I’m also using Typekit to stylize my blog with a Frank Lloyd Wright–inspiredfont. I chose this font because: Read the rest of this entry
The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)
For those who are in their TypeKit Editor and just want to know the CSS selectors used in the Twenty Ten theme, I am sharing this list compiled by David W. Boles. Thank you very much, David!
content, body, p, h3#comments-title, h3#reply-title, #access .menu, #access div.menu ul, #cancel-comment-reply-link, .form-allowed-tags, #site-info, #site-title, #wp-calendar, .comment-meta, .comment-body tr th, .comment-body thead th, .entry-content label, .entry-content tr th, .entry-content thead th, .entry-meta, .entry-title, .entry-utility, #respond label, .navigation, .page-title, .pingback p, .reply, .widget-title, .wp-caption-text, input[type="submit"], #access .menu-header, div.menu, #colophon, #branding, #main, #wrapper, blockquote, blockquote cite, blockquote em, blockquote i, body, input, textarea, .page-title span, .pingback a.url, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6
via United Stage
How to add tweets / retweet buttons to your WordPress.com blog
Have you seen all the blogs with the tweets / retweet buttons? They make it very easy to spread the word about the blog posts you like, don’t they? Great SEO for bloggers, too. I wanted these buttons for my blog so I did some searching to find out how to add them. Here’s what I found.
Mirella McCracken had the easiest how to add a retweet button tutorial I’ve found; in fact, she had the only correct answer I have found anywhere! (Where did she get it, I wonder?)
I can add to Mirella’s post by saying that the answer is a shortcode. WordPress developed these since they don’t allow embedded scripts in WordPress.com blogs for security reasons. I learned about shortcodes when I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com. In a WordPress.com blog post, you can use a simple shortcode to embed a YouTube video or a Flickr video. What I didn’t know about was the TweetMeme shortcode.
The TweetMeme shortcode for WordPress.com looks like this: Read the rest of this entry
Why I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com
I finally got tired of the hassle and hours it took me to update my WordPress.org-powered self-hosted versions of two different blogs–danielgreene.com and smithersgreene.net. Trying to upgrade my blogs to WordPress 3.0 was the last straw.
I’m a guy who started writing his own HTML and CSS in 1996; in fact, I was one of the first handful of brave ones on the Internet to style valid HTML with CSS knowing that most browsers couldn’t handle it. After all, what did I have to lose? Little old me with his personal website.
This was a decade before Flickr and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter allowed you to post content with ease and let them take care of the code, and years before every major website was written in structural HTML and styled with CSS. This was back when you had to either have a self-hosted website or something like AOL Hometown Web pages. This was when “Web Designers” would charge you an arm-and-a-leg for a page and a couple of links. I was okay with the idea that, if I wanted a site that used proper HTML (without proprietary structural markup) and CSS, I had to get an ISP to host my own website. And I had to write all my own HTML & CSS.
Things have changed in the past few years. Even with WordPress.org, I had more freedom to blog without worrying about the coding. When I didn’t have to worry about updating WordPress and editing .htaccess pages and PHP files, it worked great. But I hated it when I would break my site when trying unsuccessfully to upload new versions of the blogging platform software. I thought, “Why can’t it be more like posting content to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? I can’t break those sites. There must be an easier way.”
Test of Inline CSS in WordPress.com Blog
Apparently, you can’t use embedded style sheets in WordPress.com, but you can use inline styles. In this post, I’m going to attempt to replicate one of my old CSS-styled HTML pages. I’ll start with my CSS Font Properties Test that I first published in HTML with embedded and inline CSS in February 1998. Here goes:
Daniel Greene’s CSS Font Properties Test
A Demonstration of CSS Font Properties
[Remainder of table truncated]
