Variations on the Theme
June 28, 2008 – 8:17 pmI have been mucking around with the custom WordPress theme that gives this blog its look. I was using a theme called Pop-Blue, which has a nice clean design that I liked. It does, however, suffer from a few design decisions that are endemic on the web:
- The content text is a tiny-weeny font in a low contrast colour. This is very fashionable, but almost impossible to read.
- The body width is hard coded (to 803 pixels!) This forces all the content into a long, thin column when it doesn’t have to be, wasting a lot of space on todays widescreen monitors.
- The index page got the text from the RSS feed, which strips out all the formatting and images.
It was time to roll up my sleeves and get my hands messy in php and CSS. This was my first time mucking about in WordPress, and I was surprised by just how easy it was. I managed to fix the things I disliked about the original them without too much trouble.
If you are reading this is Safari you are in for an extra treat. Safari implements a couple of extra features that I decided to take advantage of:
- Downloadable font support – this is actually part of the CSS2 standard but it is not widely implemented. The font I am using is called Jayne Print Hand – I wanted a handwritten look and this was the best I could find on the web. Its not as easy to read as I would like, but it will do until I find something better. Ideally I would like to make a font based on my own flawless hand writing.
- I have written about -webkit-transform in the past, but now I am using it for something useful. Certain images on the blog are rotated slightly, which I think adds a certain jaunty style.
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