Comments on: Welcome to WordPress

By: Bruce

Bruce — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 07:36:16 +0000

Thanks Jasper. Migrating from iBlog proved to be a lot more work than I anticipated; something like 3 months of my "spare" time! This includes getting familiar with WordPress which of course goes well beyond the level of customization that was possible with iBlog. However, the "main" design is a K2 template rather than a build from scratch (I don't know nearly enough about PHP for that!). I think the K2 heritage is obvious, but hopefully the appearance is unique given my tweaks here and there, my choice of plug-ins, etc. To my eye the design is a little busy—especially next to your elegantly simple style—probably because I tried to incorporate the "best bits" from my iBlog template. I can clearly see that my thinking hasn't migrated as far as my content ;-)

By: TriangleJuice

TriangleJuice — Sat, 18 Mar 2006 02:20:54 +0000

Hi Bruce,

I've got 5 letters for your new blog: G.R.E.A.T :-)
And of course: welcome to the WordPress community!

Too bad the "opacity" option is invalid CSS, because it's a perfect fit in your design. I was also wondering if you did all of the main design by yourself?! Everything just looks awesome - now if you only could squeeze those last little bugs?

Cheers,
Jasper.

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 22:42:50 +0000

Ooo, one more thing I like: the styling of the visited links. Cute little check mark. Nice. :)

By: Bruce

Bruce — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 19:33:48 +0000

Thanks for the feedback Rob :-) I will be posting a "Credits" page when I get to it, but for now... The icons are Silk Icons, a freeware set that happens to be the included in the K2 template my site is based on. The transparency is unfortunately not valid CSS; it may have to go :-( It's done like this: ul.menu li a { background: #000; opacity: 0.8; } In K2 when you create a page you get a tab; when you create a sub-page it is listed in the sidebar. Just how I want it! AJAX? Yes, this site uses floor cleaner (lemon scent). K2 utilises the Prototype JavaScript library. The tag clouds are done with plug-ins: UTW, Extended Live Archives on the Archives page, and UTW (differnet style using CSS) on the About page I like the drop-shadows too; involved some trial-and-error and IE/Win doesn't play nice (surprise surprise!). The drop-shadow is just a background image for the body and the main container (page) has a background image layered on top to divide the primary content from the sidebar. The "alert" is just CSS applied to p class="alert":


.alert {
	background: #fff6bf url(bioneural/exclamation.png) center no-repeat;
	background-position: 15px 50%; /* x-pos y-pos */
	text-align: left;
	padding: 5px 20px 5px 45px;
	border-top: 2px solid #ffd324;
	border-bottom: 2px solid #ffd324;
	}

Cheers, Bruce

By: Rob

Rob — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 18:28:20 +0000

Wow, I love the new layout! Very impressive. Some observations / questions:

* Did you do your own image set? All those cute little icons for the feeds, bugs, tags, etc. Nicely unified.

* I love the page tab styling. How'd you do their transparency on top of your banner?

* I like how you have some pages as the main tabs above, but others are just in your sidebar. Is that a plugin or is it all just hardcoded? I've been looking to do something similar, but my theme has a slick way of automatically putting pages into the header tab bar. Downside is that there's no way to exclude some pages (unless I hack my templates).

* Are you using AJAX stylings? Looks very polished

* I like what you did with the styling of your Tag Cloud on your archives page. The varying depth of black is a neat idea.

* Those drop shadows on the left and right of your page width looks awesome.

* Ok, I've seen this around lately and I love it -- how'd you do that little yellow notify thing at the top of this post? Neato!