OK, so you may have noticed that over the last week or so, my blog has been going through a number of physical changes. That’s because of that crazy CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) upgrade option we have been afforded by the higher ups at WordPress.
School has been out for me for the summer, and that has meant that I haven’t had any serious Math to do. AKA, I needed a “geek” fix. So I decided to start learning how to do (very basic) CSS editing. I don’t know how to code at all. So, this has been a real learning experience … exactly what I wanted. I still stink, but I’m starting to understand a few things.
Turns out it’s rather fun to mess around with CSS I’ve (I think) settled on a look I like for Good Tithings. I’m calling it “Mystery”, because it makes me think of the theme song to the show Mystery on PBS.
The flower header on the right I got from the “biology” template, same for the other little flourishes. I then messed with the design a bunch to suit what I wanted.
I was going for something “plain-texty“, since content is really what it’s about, not design, and I don’t want to distract too much from the main posts. But, I still wanted a “look” to it.
I also did a new design for my Athletic Club page that you can see here. It’s much more intense as the nature of the site is quite different than this one.
Thank you for putting up with the constant switches in theme. I’ll try to keep my grubby fingers off it … for a while. Until then, my “art” blog is up for grabs, as I’m still messing with it, and may indeed use it as a CSS sketch pad so that I can keep on learning about this CSS thing.
What I’ve learned (so far):
- Getting a top menu bar to appear, let alone look good, is harder than you’d want it to be.
- Each Default WordPress Theme has its’ own CSS “class” names, and if you don’t know what those are, you can’t do anything. Nearly everything out there, in terms of helpful info, is based on the Sandbox Theme. So, start with that. It’s the most versatile. But, you CAN mess with the other themes.
- FireBug is your friend.
- Start here for Sandbox Templates. Starting from someone else’s template is WAY easier. With that and firebug you can mess around a lot and get a feel for what each command is doing. But, be for warned. These themes don’t just plug in and play. The image files won’t load automatically, you need to upload them first. And others, since they are designed for sandbox on WordPress.org don’t work fully. But, they help.
- WordPress.com has significant disadvantages to WordPress.org in terms of your CSS flexibility. You can’t touch the underlying theme’s CSS coding. And you can’t get anywhere near the HTML (at Blogger.com you can). That said, WordPress.com is still far easier to break into for those of us that are not coding inclined. And the knowledge that your site is backed up for you, is not likely to have “problems”, and that you don’t have to worry about upgrades is a real advantage.
- A list of Color names is a life saver.
- This site helped.
- I don’t know anything.
- Clearly Computer Science isn’t my field.
Sapien Games 
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