CodeProfessor

Revamping Blog Information Design And Layout August 20, 2006

Chris Pearson has recently talked about how the information architecture of blogs is lacking because of the reverse chronological view of posts. This tends to limit the experience of visitors, especially if they have come to your site from its web feed subscription. He suggests that bloggers should consider other blog architectures, to present posts in some other manner than just reverse chronological.

One particular suggestion of Chris’ stuck with me, because it reflects what I, as a former print magazine publisher, would like to do with some of my blogs: highlight my best work, not necessarily my most recent …

Do We Need Multi-Column Layout Web Page Designs? July 8, 2006

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Given how long desktop publishing software has been around, and how powerful it is, have you ever wondered why (X)HTML and CSS have such a hard time producing multiple column web pages? Sure, you can create multiple columns with XHTML tables, but you cannot auto-flow text between columns. Sure, you could try replacing tables with CSS code, but try to properly align a layout with more than three columns with CSS, and you’ll be tearing your hair out. Well, UXD (links below), User eXperienced Design, has an exciting post about the new multi-column feature for CSS 3.0 - something I’ve …

Create Your Own Wordpress Themes + Plugins June 30, 2006

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If you’re a fan of the WordPress blogging platform, you’re probably well aware of the wide range of plugins and page themes that are available - many for free. While this weblog is generally aimed at bloggers/ online writers who want to tweak their existing blog platform setup, occasionally you may want to write your own themes and plugins from scratch. Or not. Here are some of the resources I’ve been using for all the (free) plugins I have planned for you for this year and next. These resources range in target from beginner to advanced WordPress user. (I’ll …

Too Much Information - Busy Blogs June 2, 2006

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Nick over at Performancing made the comment that he’d recently visited a site that had way too much information obscuring what he was really trying to find: a contact email for the author. He explained the features he found that really didn’t interest him.

It made think for a second and I realized that this blog you are reading is a prime example of busy-ness. I’ve used it as a showcase for so many blog features that it’s ended up as a dog’s breakfsat. In fact, while it is a showcase for various features, it’s a prime example of what …

CSS Image Display - Tweaking Your WordPress Theme Pt 2 April 13, 2006

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The title of this post is a bit of a misnomer, as we’re not really tweaking a WordPress theme, per se. The effect we want to achieve is to display an image with a blog post, and have the text flow around part of the perimeter of the image. This effect is actually very easy to achieve using what’s called inline CSS. We insert a style attribute into our <img src="" /> tag to indicate how we want to position an image. A second attribute is used to specify a margin.

Let’s start by having a first image float to the …

CSS Paragraph Display - Tweaking Your WordPress Theme Pt 1 April 12, 2006

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If you’re not happy with the WordPress theme that you currently have, there are a lot of great themes summarized over at BloggingPro. They don’t create the themes; they just point to some nice ones. There are also generic designs over at OSWD, which are also free. The drawback with the latter is that you will have to do some coding to import them into WordPress (or whatever).

I’ve downloaded a lot of nice themes, all of which I tweak slightly before using. Tweaking the design a bit makes it a touch more unique. The beauty of most WordPress …