Taking Your Camera on the Road

I have quite a few examples in my CSS Experiments on showcasing your photographs, as a single image or in a gallery format, and I found a very simple, easy-to-understand explanation of how to use CSS to create a photo gallery from Web Reference.

With this article I hope to show you how to produce a [...]

I bravely entered the WordPress core programming again and made a few customization changes - nay - improvements. These are for me, but you might learn something from the process of changing your quicktags javascript file yourself. Quicktags in WordPress are buttons that sit above your editing box in the Write Post panel of the Administration. They allow you to quickly add bold and italics, links, images, blockquotes, the "more" and "nextpage" tags, and other things. There are even plugins you can use to add more buttons to your quicktags buttons, but I wanted to get into it and fix what was already there. Here are some tips for changing your WordPress quicktag buttons.

In order to learn more about WordPress, I started hanging out in the WordPress Codex and on the WordPress Support Forum. Over time, as I became more familiar with the inner workings of WordPress and read much of the documentation in the WordPress Codex, I started answering a few questions in the Forum. Part of giving back to the WordPress Community.

After a while, I found that many of the same questions were being asked over and over again. This is typical, and most of these are addressed in the Codex, but I thought I'd give people another opportunity to find some answers to common questions about using WordPress.

With the amazing help of the supportive folks on the WordPress Support Forum, my challenge was answered and I wanted to share this neat effect with you. My very popular series on CSS Experiments in Design consist of almost a dozen pages with hundreds of different design experiments. Most of these feature inline styles, but a lot of them had their own styles in a separate style sheet. The styles sheet was huge. With more than 600 articles on my site, why should I include over 20K of styles in my site's default style sheet when I only need them for a handful of articles? I needed a way to let the style sheet for the CSS Experiment pages only appear on those pages and not the rest of the site. This is good for overall site optimization and faster access times.

Fonts are a critical part of web page design. They display the content of the page, but their style reflects the entire look of the site. They play a very important role. Understanding how fonts work is part of web page design and we look at how they work, which are the most popular fonts, and how to embed fonts into your web page design.

After poking at my WordPress Theme fora few days, it was time to start hitting the HTML and cleaning things up. I wanted to start developing the Theme to match more of the site's intensions, and I needed to make sure that all that information imported into the database was there, in semi-working order, and that the links to all the graphics were working. Well, they weren't. This led to an interesting lesson in linking to graphics from within WordPress.

With the move to WordPress v1.5, things are a little more challenging for creating a CSS file. The header, footer, index page, and other elements are now divided up into modular template files which are "included" in the main index page. A div or class will start in one template file and finish in another, so things get a little crazy and confusing when it comes to designing your WordPress site and WordPress Theme. I realized that the effort to install Apache, PHP, MySQL and WordPress to my computer to help me create my new WordPress site look and Theme was not the way to go. Everything in WordPress is done "online" and I needed to tweak my Theme without being online all the time. I found a way to create a test page and have it work on my hard drive so I could go through and make the modifications I needed to the style sheet, and save precious server bandwidth. Want to learn how it's done, follow me.

I've been working hard over the past two years to write a series of articles about what I've learned while developing and designing, redesigning, and redeveloping our web site . What started out as a few articles done to help me answer my own questions about how things work, and now has expanded to [...]