Blog Archives
Why Your Blog Should Probably Have a Print Stylesheet
CSS If your blog has well-written and informative articles, like any good blog should, you should probably have a well-formatted print stylesheet declared. Just like your regular “screen” CSS controls how your webpage looks in a browser, the “print” stylesheet controls how your webpage prints on a printer. First things first, you need to declare the stylesheet: <link rel="stylesheet" href="print.css" type="text/css" ...
Continue readingProtecting Your Images From Theft
CSS If you Google “stop image theft“, you will get some results of some really bad, non-effective ways of preventing image theft. Things like “disabling right-click” with JavaScript. Crippling usability is never good, especially when it will barely even slow down someone determined to steal your image. This is kind of like strip searching kindergardeners because one of them brought a knife to school once. There are two ...
Continue readingContact Forms For Your Blog
Design & Coding Option #1: Wufoo Wufoo is by far my favorite choice for creating forms for websites, blogs included. They have a free plan which allows you to create three different forms with 10 fields each and receive 100 submits per month. For a lot of bloggers, this is probably fine. If you outgrow that, the pricing plans are very reasonable. With Wufoo, you design your forms right on their website and then they give you a little code snippet to place ...
Continue readingOrganizing Your Blog’s Advertisers
Blogging If you have multiple advertisers on your blog, you really need to make an effort to keep them organized. Since different advertisers start at different times, it can get confusing quickly. There are a million ways to stay organized with this, but here is how I do it. I have an “Advertising” folder in the folder I keep in the folder for all my blog stuff. Inside that folder I have a “* Current Advertisements” folder. I add ...
Continue readingDon’t Be Afraid To Use Tables For Quick Tabular Data
Design & Coding Tables get more than their fair share of bashing by the web community. Before CSS really took hold, tables were required for web layout despite their obvious shortcomings for such a task. Now that the days of table-based layouts have faded, any lingering uses of tables is shot down and ridiculed by the web community. But there is no reason to be a table-hater! Tables have one, distinct, incredibly purposeful use. Can you guess it? Tables are for ...
Continue readingStyling Specific Posts On Your Blog
CSS One of the many, many smart things that WordPress does is apply the ID of posts to the div of that post. Most themes leave this intact, although I have seen some themes that remove it. This is how the container div for posts should look like: <div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>"> One of the reasons WordPress does this is for linkability. ID’s have that special ability to “skip down the page”, so if you ...
Continue readingTips for Styling Code in your Posts
CSS If you’ve ever included snippets of code on your blog, you know that presenting that text can be a unique challenge. HTML provides a tag for this purpose, the <code> tag. Unfortunately, just chucking your code in those tags isn’t the end-all solution. For one thing, you typically need to turn off your Rich Text editor and hand-write them in if you want to get those tags at all. For another, if you are including actual HTML code ...
Continue readingHow to make special “author” comments in wordpress
Design & Coding Here is a quick little tip for WordPress on how you style your author comments differently from other comments on your blog. Thanks to Charity at Design Adaptations for first explaining to me how to do this. In your comments.php file you will likely have a line like this, which is right at the beginning of the “comment loop” which makes the list item for each comment: <li <?php echo $oddcomment; ?>id="comment-<?php ...
Continue readingImprove Your Blog Typography with Typogrify
WordPress Plugins Typogrify actually began life as a set of Django templates crafted by Christian Metts to improve web typography. It was the ported over to WordPress by Hamish Macpherson. As Jeff Croft puts it: Typogrify: almost certainly the best thing to happen to web typography since Georgia. The beauty of Typogrify is it’s simplicity. You will benefit from it just by plugging it in an turning it on, but there are a bunch of more advanced features if ...
Continue readingDocument Your CSS Like You Are Working on a Team
CSS Commenting your CSS is simple, just put them in between “/*” and */”, like so: p { font-size: 1.3em; /* Font size for main content */ } That’s a single line comment, but you can do multi lines just as easily: /* Blog Design Template Author: Chris Coyier Authors Website: css-tricks.com Feel free to use, share, or alter this template in any way. Links are always appreciated. */ There are many different schools of thought on ...
Continue reading
Recent Posts
Blogging tips writers
Blog Partners
