footnoteblograndom musings and missives

As nice as the Kubrick theme is, I wanted to modify it just a bit, including the header (which Michael of Binary Bonsai has designed with many options to change), and typography. I spent a little time tweaking it a bit, but definitely stayed close to the original theme. When time allows, I’m sure I’ll totally customize it at some point to make it completely mine. Additionally, the Kubrick theme has been open sourced. I copied the theme in the wordpress/wp-content/themes directory, and renamed it “fnb”, to reflect my site.

Modifying the CSS is best done with a dedicated tool like my favorite, CSSEdit, by MacRabbit. Some of the options it has make for quick editing and organization. I took those big chunks of code and made groups of them to easily navigate about the code. It’s made me think harder about organizing my spaghetti CSS.

To the right of the style ID, you can see a pane for changing attributes. Additionally, you can change this to be code view, from which you can edit directly. There’s also code hinting to quickly add likely-used attributes. It’s fast editing this way. Once complete, you can upload the CSS, provided you’ve set up permissions correctly, onto the live server with tools like Adobe/Macromedia Dreamweaver or Panic Transmit.

I wanted to add an OS X-like search bar for OS X users, and though there are workarounds to make it appear identical in other browsers, I opted not to indulge in such hackery.

Next: Adding flickr

For my first post, it’s a recursive one. I’m not a programmer, but I’m willing to learn enough to accomplish simple goals, and I’m noting here how I actually installed and configured WordPress. Remember, you don’t actually have to install anything, you can opt to sign up for a free account at their site.

It was incredibly easy to set up; especially with all the options available. I’m fortunate to know enough to be dangerous. What’s nice about WordPress templates is that they are fully customizable for design, without destroying the content—the whole point of CSS-based design. Everything was done on my fully-enabled PowerBook, then uploaded to my server.

I followed the guides here at the All Forces WordPress installation tutorials.
Everything was working fine, up until I changed the Permalink schema from http://blogname/?p=000 URLs to something more human-friendly, such as: http://blogname/welcome. This was fixed by heading over to WordPress’ very extensive codex and digging up this entry, and this one:

<Directory “/path/to/wordpress”>
Options FollowSymLinks
AllowOverride Options FileInfo
</Directory>

Changing this httpd.conf file works great on the PowerBook. It involves /etc/httpd/httpd.conf to do this. If you don’t know what this is you need to go back and get familiar with Unix, Apache and the very powerful Terminal command line. Though familiarity with these tools is helpful, you could still edit some of these files without the Terminal, using the powerful BBEdit text editor, or its free cousin, TextWrangler.

This is an example of a plug-in available from another developer to make the WordPress Dashboard more OS X like. Along with other snippets and technological wisdom, he’s got his Tiger administration dashboard up on his blog. Quite nice, and very well done, Steve.

Next up: Editing WordPress’ default Kubrick theme.