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.

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

New Look!

July 5, 2008 · Filed Under This blog · 17 Comments 

I know the old Blog from Italy look was becoming a little confused, so I decided to give it a facelift.

The new theme is based on yet another Brian Gardner theme, called Revolution only I have modified it a wee bit. I say ‘yet another’ because the previous Blog from Italy theme was also by Mr Gardner.

One of the adjustments I’ve carried out is the addition of a space at the top of the side column menus. I can use this space to place just about anything. As you may have noticed, there is a YouTube video presentation, which will live there for a time. Every so often I’ll change the video or add something else.

Other jiggery pokery is down to Michael Oeser, whose BranfordMagazine code I’ve adapted, well cut and pasted, into the Gardner Revolution theme so I can display bits and bobs from past posts. This is something I’d been wanting to do, but not being too hot with css, it took me a little while to work out how to achieve the double column effect I was looking for.

Along with other small modifications, such as a new Blog from Italy graphic, I’ve slotted in a section at the bottom of home page where I can display photos and the like. Again, this is something I had been thinking about doing for a while.

Finally, I’ve retained the ability to display full posts on the front page, because a number of people voted for this in one of my polls. Now, there is the best of both worlds.

Hope you like the new look. If you do have any problems (loading time, funny layout etc), let me know, and I’ll see what I can do.

Should anyone want a copy of this modified Gardner/Oeser(/Roe!) theme, then let me know, and I’ll place a download link somewhere.

As always, thanks for reading.

Alex Roe

PS I’m still tinkering, so things will move and change over time.

Tags: , , , , ,

supernal-hilarious