New: Feedback System!
As you may have noticed, Blog from Italy has a feedback system (blame Sean Carlos!) which is being tested. Read more
Want to Modify Your WordPress Theme?
Miss Expatria said she liked Blog from Italy’s new look, so I thought I’d write and tell you about two tools which I use to help me tinker with the ’styling’ of this site.
If all you want to do is change some of the cascading style sheet stuff, in terms of colours and text sizes etc, then you will find having the FireFox browser really useful.
Why? Mainly because you can add these two very useful free plugin or extension programs. (You may need to check that the extensions I am about to mention will work with the brand new FireFox 3.X, before installing the latest version of FireFox.):
- ColorZilla - wonderful! You can select the colour you want using a little crosshair, and this great program will give you the code you need to slot into a css file - something like this: #E5E5E5 or E5E5E5, which is the grey colour from the WordPress admin ’save and publish’ buttons. You need to use the ‘#’ before the ‘hexadecimal’ number in a cascading style sheet file, or you can just write ‘gray’ (note the US spelling). I find ColorZilla’ invaluable.
- Web Developer - is another extremely useful, if somewhat more complex FireFox extension. For this tinkerer, I find the Web Developer > CSS > View Style Information menu item essential. Why? Quite simply because it allows me to find which part of a .css file I need to adjust to suit my own needs. When you select View Style Information from the menu, you end up with a little crosshair, which you can then use to find information about the .css item you need to change. It will tell you, via a red bordered box and info in the browser top bar, the name of the <div> or the item you need to change. This means you can find it within the .css file, and tweak it. Wonderful!
If you don’t know what a <div> is, then do not tinker! Even if you do know what a <div> is, don’t go making changes without having ensured that you have a copy of the original .css file in a safe place.
Once you have these tools, you can change text styles and colours easily, and personalise you blog’s look.
If you want to go deeper, then you need to play with things offline, otherwise, you may KO your site!
Have fun! But take care.
An Illustrious Link - Lluís Bassets of El Pais
I was a little surprised, to say the least, to discover that one of the sites sending me the odd reader or two was one of Spain’s major national dailies, El Pais.
Oh, well, I thought, someone has placed a link to one of my posts about something or other, and this was why El Pais was showing up as a referrer.
However, my curiosity got the better of me, and I had a go at tracking down the origin of the link, which, I was even more surprised, and pleased, to note came that visitors were coming from the ‘De Alfiler a Elefante’ blog of one Lluís Bassets, who is, if I have understood correctly, and allowing for the fact that my Spanish is dire, the chief opinion column editor of El Pais.
Actually, Mr Bassets and little old me appear to share similar views as to the degradation which is affecting modern politics throughout Europe (and the world in general) at the moment, and it appears that a few of my posts on the subject of the Archetypal Italian, Silvio Berlusconi, may have caught his eye. Lluís Bassets’ blog links to Beppe Grillo’s blog too, which is interesting.
I’ve no idea how for long Mr Bassets will continue to link to my blog, but I shall try to write about issues which may be of interest to his readers, so Blog from Italy can continue to be worthy of the link.
If I get up the courage, language barriers permitting, I’ll have a go at contacting Mr Bassets, but for the moment: Many thanks for the link sir!
I’ve linked back to his blog out of courtesy.
The fact that major newspapers should be linking to blogs such as this one, is interesting in itself, and would appear to indicate that some blogs are viewed as being potentially more valid fonts of independent information, news, and comment, than traditional sources. And, in Italy, newspapers and the news media in general here, are far from being independent.
Although, having said the above, many of the posts on this blog have arisen from both my reading of articles in the press, and from my chatting to people in general. Then again, nobody pays me to do this, so I don’t have newspaper owner influenced editors or advertisers breathing down my neck.
If someone were to employ me to do this, then I imagine things would change, which would be a shame. At least, I think so. However, I don’t think any job offers are likely to come flooding in, but you never know.
Manic Monday
Yes, I know Monday is now but a memory, and that it is now Wednesday. But Monday was a fun day!
Why a fun day? Well, aside from the usual stuff, I also made a vulgar suggestion to an artist I had never spoken to before - in Italian, then, after having retrieved the little one from his school, I met up with two American friends, Chris Bright and Sean Carlos for a couple of pints down at the good old 442 - in the company of the 5 year old bundle of energy. To cap it all, in the middle of Monday I received a request for a translation which had to be completed by Tuesday morning.
To cap things off, and just before I was due to collect the little one, it appeared that persons unknown had been trying to hack my Italy is in site, which turn turned added a dose of ‘frenetic’ to what had already been quite a hectic day. In order to block the potential hack and prepare myself for the worst, I whizzed around changing passwords, and making backups, just to be on the safe side.
Then came the news that the Italian mother in law had been admitted to hospital with breathing problems, which caused worries all round. The poor lady is something of a ticking time bomb, and years of chain smoking have left her health somewhat unstable. A great shame, she is a very sweet person.
Despite all the action, I managed to get the translation job finished on time, and the client was quite pleased to discover the nicely formatted, thanks to WordFast, final version lying in her email inbox on Tuesday morning.
As for the vulgar suggestion I made to the artist, who, as I have already mentioned, I had not spoken to before in my life, I am pleased to say that said artist was not the least bit put out by what some artists may have considered a potentially sacrilegious idea. Although I won’t mention exactly what I am up to, you can read more about the idea on my new Italy is in Italian contemporary art site, in this my ‘Art Meets Business‘ article over on Italy is in.
At least the drink down the pub was pleasent, and I was pleased to hear that Chris seems to be getting things sorted out on the looking for a job in Italy front. Sean was in fine form too, and we exchanged geek info about WordPress and he ended up asking me if I really was ‘just’ an English teacher, after I fired off some info about server file permissions (775 for most folders and 644 for most files, incidentally), after I mentioned the attack which appeared to have taken place. Yes, running your own web sites can be traumatic at times.
I finally got to bed at around 2am, think is was. Great, and Tuesday was to prove no less hectic.
Actually the activity of both days left me dog tired, and I ended up collapsing and falling asleep on the sofa with the dog last night.
At least today will be a little less fraught, I hope.
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