Unintentionally Blank

Transparency can add something beautiful to a design. Randa Clay thought so whilst designing her first WordPress theme and I have been considering something very similar for a design that has been going round in my head recently. Randa’s problem was that making the background of a <div> transparent so that the page background could be seen through it caused everything within the <div> to be transparent to the same degree, including text and images.

Transparent post level images aren’t desirable, so I set about finding out how best to apply the transparency to the <div>. Here are my results:

Continue reading “Cross Browser Background Transparency With CSS” »

Having decided to mix up my front page with a latest article section, I then had to work out how to manipulate the Wordpress Loop in order to display what I wanted. It took quite a lot of thinking, one wrong (oh so wrong) attempt and then I cracked it. Please note, this involves playing about with the index.php file in your theme, if you don’t want to spoil anything, please back it up! Now, here’s how to do it:

Continue reading “Adventures With The Wordpress Loop: Sticky Articles” »

Through the magic of MyBlogLog statistics, I found someone trying to use one of my javascript codes. It is always touching to find out that someone has found your work useful and it spurs you on to better things.

In this case, the user wanted something slightly different out of the code than what I had provided. Changing a page’s font size was the code in question here, but rather than changing it using the link method I had provided, they wanted to display a different font size based on a reader’s screen resolution. This is an inspired idea, I thought, as monitors get bigger and resolutions get smaller and text on screen disappears. This is why I use 1024×768 otherwise I wouldn’t be able to read anything!

Continue reading “How To Size Your Font Based On Your Reader’s Screen Resolution” »

The Mobile Data Association has recently shown the steady rise in the usage of mobile phones to access the internet. Opera have celebrated more than 5 million active users of Opera Mini and over 1 billion page views by the mobile phone based browser (Source).

What Does This Mean For You?

This isn’t a problem for you if your website is validly and semantically marked up to the standards of our friends the W3C. In fact, it is a bonus, the use of mobile phones to browse the internet means people have more opportunity to find your site and become regular readers. However, if your site is hiding dodgy code, it may not be displaying well at all on these miniature screens. And if your page isn’t marked up and laid out well then you could be turning off your potential mobile viewers.

Continue reading “The Mobile Web Users Cometh, Are You Ready?” »

Thanks to the magic of Google Analytics I have discovered that a good number of this blog’s visitors reach here with searches to do with Internet Explorer’s conditional comments. This is due to my post, a month back, extolling the use of conditional comments instead of CSS hacks. More recently I considered that if someone was searching for information on conditional comments then they were unlikely to find interest in an article merely telling them they should use them. Then along came the latest ProBlogger Group Writing Project - How To… and it all made sense. So here is how you can improve your code and drop those worthless CSS hacks; How to use conditional comments - the practical version.

Continue reading “IF Internet Explorer THEN Do Something Else (A How To…)” »