Tag Archives: design

Minor Changes

By Todd Perlmutter | Published: November 12, 2009

Didn’t have time to do much here today, so I kept it small and focused.

  • Changed tweet image name from twitter_16.png to tweet.png
  • Realized I was missing the RSS feed link for the blog, so I created a new icon pair (for the social icons), and added it in.  This is a bit involved for a lot of reasons based on how web pages function and render in conjunction with CSS.  I’ll write up a how to on this soonish.
  • Shrunk the logo image slightly to make some room.  The logo image comes courtesy of Twitlogo.
  • Moved boiler plate (aka header) items to use absolute positioning – makes some things cleaner.
  • Removed some extra markup and CSS that really wasn’t needed as a result of the absolute positioning.
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Recent Tweets CSS Makeover

By Todd Perlmutter | Published: November 11, 2009

Played a bit with styles for the Recent Tweets widget from Twitter Tools.  I just wanted to give it some pizazz.  To do this I made the Tweets it shows look/behave somewhat like they do on on the Twitter home page.  First you’ll notice that I replaced the bullets with a smaller version of the social media icon I used (see the top right of the blog).  Then I placed a very grey one pixel line above list item in the widget.  And finally I set each Tweet so that when the mouse hovers over it it gets a darker grey background.

The CSS code looks like this:

/* Twitter Tools */
.aktt_tweets ul li { font-size: 85%; list-style-image: url(tweet.png); border-width: 0; border-top: 1px solid #EEEEEE; }
.aktt_tweets ul li:hover { background-color: #F7F7F7; }
.aktt_tweets .aktt_more_updates { list-style-image: none; list-style-type: none; font-size: 75%; font-weight: bold; font-variant: small-caps; }
.aktt_tweets .aktt_more_updates:hover { background-color: transparent; }

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Blog Tweets… Yeah Yeah

By Todd Perlmutter | Published: November 10, 2009

Well, I bailed on Su.pr fairly quickly.  It simply would not work, and I don’t have a high degree of tolerance for things that are not well documented.  Don’t get me wrong I have no beef with StumbleUpon – they are a great site.  I just think the Su.pr service requires better documentation.  That’s all.

That had be head to the plugin directory at the WordPress site.  Didn’t take long to find something that seems like it will do the job for me: Twitter Tools.

While the plugin can do cross polination (meaning Tweets go to the Blog, and Blog posts go to Twitter), for my needs I really only want a one way trail.  The way I have things now my Tweets already go to Facebook (again see social links on the top right of the blog).  This means that when the plugin posts to Twitter, I’ll also get that reflected on Facebook.  For me that works.

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Plugging in the new Blog

By Todd Perlmutter | Published: November 10, 2009

So here it is, my new fangled blog. It’s WordPress – mostly for simplicty / ease of use.  Oh sure I’ve played with more complex CMS/blogging software before like Drupal – but I hadn’t really played much with WordPress before, and wanted to give it a shot.  So far me like.

As I set up my blog, I’m deciding which WordPress plugins to use or not use.  Taking it slow, don’t want to overwhelm.  Right now the main goal is to connect this blog with the rest of my online persona (see top right of the blog).

My first choice was Sociable in order to allow people who visit to reference anything they find here of interest with their social media accounts (Twitter, Facebook, etc.).  The interface for the settings for this plugin is great, you just pick which icons you want to show, and where in your blog you want to show them (pages, posts, etc.), and they show up.  You can change their order with ease.  You can theme it with CSS which is fantastic – it visually has a lot of fat in the CSS by default, very easy to trim down.  The creators of this plugin did a fantastic job with customization.  Worst icon choice: Print – not sure why it doesn’t use the browser’s print function.

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