Leland.info

Experimenting With WordPress Child Themes

Leland — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 23:14:34 +0000

I have a lot of experience in coding good old fashioned WordPress themes, but I’ve never really delved into the prospect of working with “child” themes.

After reading countless blog posts by Justin Tadlock and Ian Stewart about how great WordPress child themes are, I decided to give it a shot.

I found a really awesome tutorial today that teaches you how to make a “child theme” for WordPress. Thanks to that tutorial, I have now created a WordPress child theme of Thematic, which is now visible on this blog.

Now I know this is no Junction, but keep in mind my design skills aren’t that great. Basically all this child theme does is override a few lines of CSS to change up the header a bit, as well as alter the color scheme.

Even though I recorded a video review of the Thematic theme, I didn’t really realize its potential as a theme framework at the time. Hopefully soon I can start experimenting more deeply with all of the custom hooks available in the Thematic theme.

Oh, and in case anyone is wondering what I decided to call my child theme…it’s called Monochromatic. While I haven’t officially released it, feel free to view the source and use/modify it for yourself.

PowerTheme Redesigned

Leland — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 23:28:41 +0000

I just launched the new PowerTheme design. It’s a much lighter design than the old one. Hope you all like it. I have some more surprises in store for PowerTheme as well, so stay tuned!

Gallerific

Leland — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 11:58:04 +0000

I recently launched Gallerific, a web design gallery - powered by WordPress. It’s been featured on sites such as CSS Mania and WP Candy and getting quite a bit of traffic for being so new (about a week). Check it out if you’re looking for some web design inspiration, I’m trying to keep it regularly updated with all the submissions flowing in.

Cuil Sucks

Leland — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 00:48:52 +0000

Cuil (pronounced “cool”) is supposed to be the hot new search engine on the block, created by ex-Google engineers. Let me tell you right now, it sucks - so far at least. Just search anything, anything at all, look at the results, and you’ll see what I mean. A search for “Leland.info” returns a bunch of old stale links, which by the way have nothing to do with this site. I honestly hope they can improve though. I like the idea of ranking pages based on content relevancy only, and not “superficial” factors like incoming links.

Google PageRank Update

Leland — Sun, 27 Jul 2008 15:39:28 +0000

Matt Cutts recently announced that toolbar PageRanks were to be updated. I honestly don’t get what the big deal is with PageRank. Webmasters go absolutely crazy over it.

There is a big difference between toolbar PageRank and “internal” PageRank. Toolbar PageRank is public data, updated once every few months or so. Internal PageRank, used by Google themselves, is constantly updated. This is a floating point number (such as 5.234234). Mere mortals like me can’t see that.

A number from 0 (the worst) to 10 (godly) is assigned to a page according to the quantity and quality of links pointing to that page.

It’s just one of many factors that go into ranking pages in Google. Shouldn’t webmasters be more concerned about the daily fluctuations of Google’s search results than a (mostly) meaningless number that’s pushed out every 3-4 months?

Blog Is Now Running WordPress 2.6

Leland — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 11:48:06 +0000

It seems like just yesterday I upgraded to 2.5.1 (even though it was over a month ago). There’s not really much difference. A few things I noticed right after upgrading:

Word count on the write menu
“Bubble” for outdated plugins

It was a relatively painless upgrade for this blog, especially since I don’t have that many plugins that I’d have to keep up with too.

Gmail Has A Black Dot

Leland — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:14:27 +0000

Stop the presses, this just in: Gmail, a popular free webmail service, has a black dot located in the top left corner of the page. What could this dot be? It seems the general consensus is that it is an iframe, with a border. More to come as this breaking news story develops.

Web 2.0 Overload

Leland — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:07:32 +0000

Just take a look at this web 2.0 map of the world, which features exactly 1001 logos from various web 2.0 websites. Obviously there are a few repeats, but still - there’s a good number of sites in that map. I have to admit it’s pretty cool, and a lot of effort was obviously put into it.

3 New Templates

Leland — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 16:56:36 +0000

I’ve been trying to experiment with designing things a bit, and I have released 3 templates on the new templates page. All are XHTML valid. These are all very simple, but hopefully some will find them useful. If they get popular enough I may consider doing WordPress theme versions of them.

Firefox 3 Breaks World Record

Leland — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 13:07:23 +0000

It was announced that Firefox Download Day 2008 set a world record with 29,008,009 downloads. I recently upgraded to Firefox 3 myself, so I guess I’m one of those 29 million or so downloads. Congrats Firefox!