Want to Modify Your WordPress Theme?

July 5, 2008 · Filed Under Blogging · 2 Comments 

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.

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CSS

July 26, 2006 · Filed Under Technology and Gadgets · Comment 

Do you know what CSS stands for? Possibly, but if you don’t it stands for ‘cascading style sheets’.  What are these things? Well, they are a set of rules, almost like program code which you can use to style web sites - things like making characters bigger or changing the colour behind some area of text, right up to an including building entire web pages, thus avoiding the dreaded ‘tables’.  Don’t worry, anyone who knows a wee bit about the non-wooden variety of tables to which I am referring, but these tables are a bit like the tables you can build in Word and suchlike, only these are used for dividing web pages into a series of boxes into which you can pop images, text and other things.

Unfortunately my intermittent bouts of web design have not really allowed me to get a hang of CSS for much other than fairly basic stuff, even though I have two very good books on the subject.  I also have a rather neat style-sheet editing program which I invested in some time back.  It’s called, appropriately enough ‘Style Master‘.  I’ve only just started to see its real potential, and it does help simplify the task of creating style sheets and keeping track of all the little, and often interrelated, rules which you need to set up, or in my case, edit. I would recommend Style Master to anyone who wants to learn CSS and their support is excellent.

I have tried building entire pages with CSS, but have always had problems getting them to work in different browsers.  The problem seems to be that you need to use a number of so-called hacks to keep all of the browsers happyish most of the time.  Not being a full time web designer I just don’t have the time to get and keep myself familiar with all these hacks and modifications.  This is a shame because this technology, as it is known, is very powerful, and as any real web designer worth his salt will tell you, is the way web content is going to be shown to us all in the future.

I can see the day when web design will become modular but very flexible and browser compatibility problems will have become a relic from the dim and distant past.  Shame I don’t live in the hazy and obscure future really.

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