I have been tweaking and modifying Moveable Type and WordPress themes for a long time, but until this latest TaB13 theme I have never done anything with custom fonts. After breaking the ice, though, I am really impressed with the way a custom font (or fonts) can significantly alter the look of a theme – here is one way to add custom fonts to your theme, using Google Web Fonts. Continue reading
I spent about four weekends developing the TaB13 theme and that was primarily attributable to the major head-start I got from using Automattic’s Toolbox templates. In contrast, I can easily knoc-out a child theme in a single weekend.
TaB13 was my first full-fledged theme project, so I am sure that the process will be more efficient, next time. The problem with developing a theme as opposed to a child theme, though, is the shear volume of CSS elements that have to be defined.
Just this week, when I published the post on date formats, I inserted an image with a caption and discovered that I had overlooked this element. Typically, an image caption is styled differently from the main text to make it more identifiable and an image with a caption usually gets styled with some kind of border.
Another problem I ran into was when I tried to bold a line of text. Nothing happened! I had failed to define the CSS “strong” element, so it appeared just like any other body text.
The good news is that nothing has broken, so far. I have a few little knits to clean-up and a few more weeks of testing, before TaB13 is ready for public consumption.
The number of people accessing the interwebs via a mobile device is growing exponentially, so it makes good sense to support this growing population with an attractive blog layout, at the various screen resolutions that they may be using to read your blog. Continue reading
WordPress replaced the Twenty Ten theme with a new Twenty Eleven theme recently, so I thought it would be a good opportunity to tryout this new them and see what it could do. Out-of-the-box, Twenty Eleven is easier for the non-technical blogger to customize. Options like placing the sidebar on the left or right, changing the color-scheme and rotating headers are now available in the theme settings and do not have to be coded, like they did in the Twenty Ten theme. Still, there are improvements that can be made – so let’s have a look! Continue reading
I have been getting a lot of questions lately about how to customize the look of various sidebar elements in the Twenty Ten theme. With that in mind, let’s take a walk through adding several widgets and modifying the CSS to alter their appearance. Continue reading