chaka chaka

started coding a new layout. rudimentary stuff going on. have to figure out a nice layout for the single.php, search.php, comments.php and page.php

am going to ignore the 404.php for the time being and for footer.php have just made minor adjustments to the current depo skinny theme - changed relative float positioning to absolute - saja.

this is what i have so far.

inspired by ilovetypography.com and its lovely typo references, but very loosely based on whatever i’ve seen. wanted to scrap using any graphics (i’m a light and easy type) but might use one for the header.

i’ll quote what an art director said to me after i expressed interest in helping slice some images for an edm (which would be purely photoshop work, don’t mock my experience):

are you sure you know how? i’m using notepad ok?

yes, dude. i grew up in notepad. did you? pfffbt.

i saw the cutest theme ever at barffie the whine connoisseur.

retro mac os wordpress theme by stuart brown. i thought it mighty geeky that my first reaction was to wonder how they aligned the header, footer and scrollbar images for individual posts and then only go “ooooooh old mac interface!”

for the more current wordpress versions (2.1.x and above), the align commands in the built-in rich text editor don’t work too well. so text will not wrap around your images (without some tweaking). arghhhh!

these changes are made under the assumption that your current theme is a little dated.

formatting is controlled in the main stylesheet under img.styles:

img.alignright {float:right;}
img.alignleft {float:left;}

such a simple yet annoying fix.

vspace and hspace don’t work either (nothing does, it seems) so open up that stylesheet and add this on to the previous block:

img.alignright {float:right; margin:0 0 1em 1em;}
img.alignleft {float:left; margin:0 1em 1em 0;}
img.aligncenter,.aligncenter {display: block; margin:1em auto; text-align:center;}

there is a class for centralised text, but since there isn’t an issue with text wrapping, there’s no need to touch it.

if it ain’t broke, don’t fucking fix it, yo.

how to style main page posts by category.

have no time to do a full length pseudo-geeky post now now, but will expand on it after i’ve tested it out. :)

from codex

update: whoops. those two links seem to be for category styling as opposed to having posts from different categories appear differently on the home page.

these two seem to be more of what i’m looking for. Styling Posts by Category and Category-Specific Images, using wordpress categories to style posts

much more complicated too. ;p

to exclude certain categories from the main page of your blog (assuming you’re like the other 99% non-freaks who use blog posts not a static page as your main page) like how i’m not cluttering my posts with my baju category aka category 23 and instead forcing voyeuristic casual surfers with ephebephilic tendencies to click on a navigational link in my interesting footer…

deep breath

in the earlier layout, i used wordpress’ built-in Query_posts, placing following syntax into the index.php file of my theme. (whitespace makes no difference.)

<?php
   if (is_home()) {
      query_posts("cat=-23");
   }
?>

but for some reason, this method didn’t work with derek powazek’s awesome minimalist DePo skinny theme (which, if you hadn’t noticed, i’m currently loving).

so, i googled this trick. just pop in

<?php query_posts($query_string . “&cat=-23″); ?>

before the line that says:

< ?php if (have_posts()) : ?>

ta-dah! done.additional: for hemingway reloaded template, insert &cat=-23 into existing query like so

<?php query_posts(’showposts=10&cat=-23‘); ?>

when you turn off comments for individual posts, the nasty “comments off” text is shown, giving everyone the impression that you’re a antisocial ogre. then they get mad.

also, when you google for help on how to remove this “comments off” you get smart alecky answers on how to entirely remove the option of commenting from your blog. leaving your millions of fans without a voice (or trolls without any dinner).

so, intermediate users can head down to your server and edit the file in wordpress root > wp-includes > comment-template.php

find and delete bolded text as follows:

$more = ‘% Comments’, $css_class = ”, $none = ‘Comments Off‘ )

if you don’t believe me, i got it from the codex

Line 720 of wp-icludes/comment-template.php has the words ‘Comments Off’ as the value of the variable $none (in the comments_popup_link function)

crisp new wordpress theme. what shall i call it? :)