Tag Archives: WordPress

Why I chose the Coraline theme & the Eaglefeather font

Posted on August 21, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

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: Continue reading →

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The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com (via United Stage)

Posted on August 19, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

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

The Typekit Fonts Tutorial for WordPress.com UPDATED:  July 4, 2010 I spent the afternoon trying to figure out how to code Typekit Fonts into all 14 of my WordPress.com blogs to add some spectacle to the drama of this United Stage blog.  The process isn't simple or intuitive and since there really isn't any  step-by-step documentation that I could find to help me, I decided to help myself — and you — by constructing this Typekit walk through for the new default Twenty Ten theme.  You star … Read More

via United Stage

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How to add tweets / retweet buttons to your WordPress.com blog

Posted on August 5, 2010 by Daniel Greene| 4 Comments

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: Continue reading →

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Why I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com

Posted on July 3, 2010 by Daniel Greene| 6 Comments

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.”

Continue reading →

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Thinking of moving from WordPress.org to WordPress.com

Posted on June 28, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

It’s been such a headache for me to manage my WordPress.org-powered blog that I’m thinking of moving it over to WordPress.com. I didn’t realize until recently that I could even have it all on danielgreene.com. I read this article called WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org tonight, and I realized that, on WordPress.org, none of the Pros are helping me and all of the Cons are hurting me, whereas on WordPress.com, none of the Cons would hurt me and all of the Pros would help me. I’m not a PHP programmer nor do I really want to hire one to manage my site for me. I freak every time I have to update from one WordPress software version to another. Automatic updates always hang. Manual updates are a pain. With WordPress.com it’s all taken care of, and I could focus solely on what I really love to do, which is write and share media. The terms of service for WordPress.com forbid ads, but I don’t earn more than maybe $100 a year in Google AdSense ad revenue on danielgreene.com anyway. With the money I’d lose, I’d gain time— and peace of mind! And the few “legacy” pages I have, such as my Style Sheets Demo Page, while pioneering in its day, hardly seems relevant anymore. I could probably even put some of that CSS into a WordPress page anyway.

What do you think? Any reason why I shouldn’t turn danielgreene.wordpress.com into danielgreene.com and move my blog over here?

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My first blog post using WordPress for Android

Posted on February 4, 2010 by Daniel Greene| Leave a comment

WordPress for Android was released on February 2, and I downloaded it from the Android Market today for my Nexus One. Now I’m posting a blog entry with it. It looked like it hung just now when I tried to select Categories, but other than that, it’s pretty nifty. Oh– I just realized I just had to click the refresh button to the right of Categories and I got a list to choose from. Not bad!

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Deaf Guy Touts Top Ten WordPress Plugins

Posted on August 23, 2006 by Daniel Greene| 1 Comment

This guy subscribed to my videos on YouTube (thank-you-very-much!) so I checked him out. He has several ASL videos, and one in particular caught my eye because my new blog is “powered by WordPress.” In this video, he describes his 10 favorite WordPress plugins. I’m glad I watched, because several of the plugins he described could improve the functionality of my blog.

While watching his video, I felt so happy to understand ASL! Ah, the benefits of knowing a second language! :-D

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