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How To Do A Print-Style Callout June 21, 2006

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Callouts are done with a combination with CSS and various elements.

Pick up pretty much any print magazine (remember what those are?) and you’ll probably see two graphic elements in use that are created with text. One is a blockquote, which quotes someone else. The other is a callout, which quotes the article you are reading.

Both elements are used for the same two reasons:

(1) Fill up space to avoid large blank areas on a page.
(2) Break up visual monotony in a long article by adding a touch of graphic element.

Callouts are done with CSS. The first reason isn’t as relevant …

Another Tag Graph Example June 15, 2006

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This is a really short post. I came across another variation on a tag graph at Ohmpage., but it’s called a Content Taxonomy there. Just scroll down to the bottom right of any page on the site. Tag graphs, as you’ll recall, are a variation on tag clouds.

If you view the source code, you’ll see that it’s built up using CSS styles and variable percent widths instead of hard pixel widths. Pretty ingenious. There are a number of ways you could pull it off using CSS and Javascript, but pure CSS makes it simple. Here is an example …

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 …

Tag Graphs - An Alternative To Tag Clouds May 26, 2006

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45 Royale, a web design firm,  has a feature in their “notebook” that makes me ask why didn’t I think of that? Instead of a tag cloud, they use something called a tag graph. A little bit of thought, and I realized they’re not hard to create in PHP and a bit of CSS. [This post is a general discussion. I’ll come up with exact code for WordPress in another post.]

The tag graph is near the bottom right of their notebook page. If you do a “view source” on the pag, you can see that two …

Creating Slideshows On Your Website May 24, 2006

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There are numerous ways you can share photos with friends, including the free Flickr service and a variety of toys, any number of open source packages that allow you to post photo galleries on your website or weblog, and so on. One option is a neat little service from Slide.com (found via Emily Khoo).

You upload several photos to create a slide show, save it, and voila, you can share the show. Customizations include special effect transitions, including fading, pushing, sliding, spinning, and a couple of others. You can choose the slideshow size (small, medium, large) and the …

5 Types of Tag Clouds May 2, 2006

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Markus wrote a post over at Performancing about tag clouds and started an interesting discussion. Yours truly added a few comments. At first glance, it may seem that a tag cloud is a tag cloud is a tag cloud, but there are several distinct differences, as far as the source information used to build the clouds is concerned.  I’m summarizing here my conclusion about tag clouds, based on the discussion that Markus started.

Types of tag clouds:

  • Category-based, using the category names that you have defined on your blog platforms.
  • Content-based, using the full text of all your posts to build …

    • An Article Assignment System For Blog Networks April 28, 2006

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    One of things I really enjoyed about being a print publisher was actually meeting the writers that were contributing to my magazine. The cameraderie was in itself worth the effort of travelling from city to city - for me, within a 2 hr drive. Another thing I enjoyed was being able to sketch out a list of topics that I wanted to see covered over a a specific duration of time. And because I had met my writers, it was easier to assign story ideas to particular writers or contributing editors. I could tell whether they’d really be interested in …

    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 …

    Determining The Author Of The Current Post

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    This post is the precursor to the post I’ve promised that shows how you can tweak your WordPress blog platform to share Google AdSense or Chitika (or what have you). Instead of writing a single, long, complicated post, I thought I’d split the instructions up into two posts. This post shows you how to determine the author of a specific blog entry. If you are going to test the code, you’ll need to create a couple of test users on your WordPress blog, then post at least one entry each.

    While researching the WordPress documentation, I was surprised to find that …

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