Archives › Layout and Styling
The designer/developer Jeff Sebring has written a plugin which enables the Post Formats feature into any WordPress theme. The Enable WordPress Post Formats Plugin is described on that page, which includes this download link. We’ve tested it with a number of themes and plugins – all smooth sailing. Evernote lets you save all the interesting [...]
Check out this impressive array: WordPress Post Format Eye-Candy: Tumblr Style Theme Inspiration Showcase by Kym Huynh at WordCast. The problem those site designs solve is inherent in WordPress, which will permit the posting of many types of information. Just text alone – WP is ready to accept haiku-or-shorter-length compositions, documents long enough to require [...]
A while back, I posted “Using Dummy Text as Testing Tool,” which was based on 7 Dummy Text Generators: Which Is Your Favorite?, a post by Alyssa Gregory, who blogs productivity, entrepreneurship and related matters at AlyssaGregory.com, Small Business Bonfire, and elsewhere, and is the founder of Avertua, which provides “virtual assistants.” They’re not virtual [...]
My very much past-warranty brain says that I already know how to wrap text around an image – a simple task – but especially as the other blogs grow – we’re trying to standardize post styling, among other things. Big white space – asymmetrically placed images with text hugging the top and bottom margins [...]
Jon Smajda is a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Minnesota, the author of two very useful WordPress plugins, one of which you’ll see in action momentarily. Pull This is a lovely pull-quote plugin. The primary use of the pull-quote is to emphasize – by repeating and enlarging – one phrase from a [...]
WPSkinner has the most complete list of WordPress statistics tools I’ve seen: Top 25 Best WordPress Statistics Plugins and Tools List – this is an area in which I’m playing catch-up – and I suspect that some combination of these tools will be the answer. Its sister site, SmashingUpdates carries paid themes, free themes, and [...]
Paddy Donnelly has a brilliant post at Smashing Magazine – a sort of Scott McCloud-like1 tour de force about how layouts look. So I think Donnelly’s The Death of The Boring Blog Post? is as close to a “must-read” as is possible. For my direct purposes – I started blogging to write about disaster preparedness [...]
David Lambert, as far as I can figure is one serious software and systems designer, recently wrote Callouts: I need a WordPress plugin on his blog Component Oriented. Then he went out and wrote the plugin. It’s called “Insert Callout,” and the preceding link is to its page on the WordPress Plugin Repository. Here’s Lambert [...]
Christian Watson, of Smiley Cat Web Design, which has a subsidiary, Elements of Design (“an alternative web desig showcase”). Check out this beautiful gallery of pull-quotes – some of which I think I’d characterize as “call-outs,” which, in my mental taxonomy, are properly a subset of pull-quotes. Here’s one that I liked a lot, Gallery [...]
The Font Burner Control Panel plugin seems to be the creation of one Adrian Hanft, a/k/a Adrian3, but more properly, Adrian E. Hanft, III (from “About” page). This terrific plugin lets you: Change heading fonts in WordPress (h1 through h4); choose from over one thousand (1,000) and growing non-commercial fonts; requires no code writing Plus [...]
Sometimes a map will help your post make sense; on other occasions, it’s just an opportunity to add a beautiful image to a post. A great source for unusual and beautiful maps is Mappery.I just used a map of Manhattan in this post, NYC – free crosstown bus plan may reflect understanding of transportation system [...]
Alyssa Gregory, the autueur1 of Small Business Idea Generator blog.has a post 7 Dummy Text Generators: Which Is Your Favorite? on Sitepoint. Five I’ve known and used; two were new. As I’ve been tinkering with the design of my primary blog – Popular Logistics – I’ve started to identify the problems (let’s hope I’ve done [...]
HTML Ipsum Presents – is a website, as described by Smashing Magazine, “A useful little website created by Chris Coyier. It provides you with the standard Latin text already in HTML tags. Clicking on any of the blocks automatically copies the text to your clipboard!” Here’s one sample copied and pasted, in one click, from [...]
Cicero on the virtue of Handstands Insofar as we know, Cicero 1 never expressed an opinion about handstands. We’re using color to signal dummy copy within this post. The original image was 1024 pixels wide. Now, having adjusted the “medium” size for an uploaded image at 250 pixels, we can insert an image, select “medium” size [...]
Adrian Diaconescu, the force behind Rubiqube, has published the first in an eight-part series about designing clean websites that still make a big impact, by using simple layout, beautiful typography and striking photography. The first is Common Sense Tips for Creating Web Design Layouts, and it’s so rich in information and resources that you might [...]
Easy install, easy configuration, works as promised- and if you’ve never used custom fields – this is an easy, non-scary way to find out. From the wonderful people at MightyMo comes the Simple Pull Quote WordPress Plugin (link to MightyMo’s Page – download link here). If you’re using WordPress 2.8.2, you can even install it [...]
Hackadelic shows you how to customize your CSS to create custom text boxes in DIY InfoBoxes – Simple And Consistent. (Since we’re still in setup mode here – the css hasn’t been changed in all of the WordPress themes we’re testing on the site – so if you don’t see them – just read Hackadelic’s [...]