CSS Refresh Complete!
Five days ago I set up this blog with Dean J Robinson’s fantastic Redoable Wordpress Theme. I knew I was going to end up restyling it a little - Dean’s theme is incredibly popular, and I didn’t want my blog to look like loads of others!
So, the refresh is now done - and I’m quite happy with the results! I’d like to build my own original theme from the ground up eventually, but until I get time to do that I’m happy to base my site on one of the best!
What do you think then? Does anyone else give a damn about it apart from me?!
- Testing Complete
- Merry Christmas From Me!
- Reboot Complete
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Very cool redesign of redoable… as you can see, my site is also based on it as well, with some greenish modifications (but nothing so elaborate as your site!)
Thanks Jeff!
I think you’ve done a great job on Redoable. I’ve looked at hundreds in the last few days, to see what people had done with it - and I reckon that about 5% have actually modified it, so you should feel very pleased to be elite (or l33t depending on your background)!
Now we’re both faced with a dilema… Do we upgrade to 1.2 now Dean’s released it, stick with 1.1 and fix the bugs with patches from the new code, or just leave our sites as they are?
I think I’ll personally go for the last option, but it depends on if all your styling was done in the CSS, or if you hacked the PHP like I did!
Good luck with your site!
LOL! Just see that you’ve upgraded already - so that answers that then! Was it worth it?
Haha, I was actually in the midst of typing a response that mentioned that, but yes, it’s worth it. The code cleanups, some of the rearranging, and the ability to turn off the Firefox notice (it’s a bit off-putting to IE users, as correct as it is) were worth it. Not only that, but the dynamic CSS is very nifty (although I doubt you’ll find need of it, since you hacked the theme to bits!) Oh, and you can now choose what “badges” you want in the badge farm via the Redoable Options pane in wp-admin. And the navbar has the option of displaying on the right (original, broken in IE6) or below the header (new default, works in IE6) which is nifty.
I’ll probably explore the Twitt-Too support sometime soon, as Twitter is very nifty, but I’m not sure how much use I’ll have for it. Now, if only my Facebook status could also be sent to my blog AND Twitter… or my Twitter status to Facebook & my blog… Alas, I don’t have any time to really learn PHP (as relatively easy as it seems) and monkey with that. Anyway, lemme know how your upgrade/hackery of the upgrade turns out
Well… I cleaned up the CSS myself, removed the FF notice manually (funny and right, but a bit of overkill), not going to need the dynamic CSS, changed the badge code directly, and less than 2% of my visitors are running IE6!
So I’ve added the upgrade to my ‘Things To Do When I’m Done Doing Things Which Are More Important’ list… Which means (realistically) that I’ll probably end up leaving it until something on this site breaks, or somebody complains that something isn’t working!
Thanks for the feedback on it though!
Less than 2%! You lucky dog, having users who are mostly uber-cool geeky people. Being a professional musician, I have to cater to the lowest common denominator *sigh* Oh well. If you have any CSS tips for cleaning/streamlining the code, I’d love to hear them; I can pass on one myself. It’s a php compression bit you put at the top of your CSS file(s), then you add a few lines to your .htaccess file to treat any file named as style.css (or whatever) as a PHP file, and voíla! Instantly compressed CSS (completely non-human readable, but if somebody is really gonna pick apart your code, they can drop it into a CSS or text editor capable of humanizing it [e.g. CSSEdit, etc.]) Anyway, cheers!
Very nice - on my monitor the maroon is very dark, but I like the photo and the typography very much! And thank you for blogrolling me - I returned the favor!
@ Jeff: that’s an interesting tip! I’ve found some info on Google for it too, and I think I’ll get that implemented as soon as I get a chance - as it will help the 57kb CSS file from Redoable shrink a little!
@ Zep: thanks! It’s designed to be quite dark anyway - in the same vein as the Aries project at AvalonStar was heading before Bryan started his break! You’ve made me think though that I may work on an alternative style for people who don’t like it dark or for who it’s *too* dark on their display… Thanks for the link love!
Hi Paul,
Your mod of this theme looks just great. Beautiful header that perfectly matches the colour scheme you used. Excellent work.
In stead of days it took me weeks (and some frustration too) to tweak my blog just a little. No surprise since this is my very first experience with php, css and all that technical stuff (trail and error: at the end of the day it works….). For now, I’m almost done with this experiment but I have still one major (I think) challenge left: change form left- to center alignment. I have no idea whether this is complicated. If not, and in case you would be willing to point me in the right direction, I would be very grateful.
Thank you.
Take care,
Dirk.
This is strange. After reading your comment on the Redoable support forum, I’m trying Firefox (on a Mac) instead of Safari, and now it works!
If you want I can make a screenshot of the error I trigger with Safari.
Hey Dirk. Thanks for dropping in! I’m glad you like what I did with the theme - it took alot of work, but was definitely worth it!
Sure - send me over a grab of the error, and I’ll see if I can trace it. I suspect that it’ll probably end up being something to do with the AJAX comment handling…
Centering the Redoable layout isn’t that complex. Firstly, you need to reduce the width of everything that appears in the .secondary element. This will reduce the overall width of the layout, but it’ll still be left-justified.
Secondly, measure the overall width of your layout after those changes - and then alter the body CSS selector like this:
body {
font: 62.5% ‘Lucida Grande’, Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif; /* Resets 1em to 10px */
color: #0E0201;
background-color: #0e0201;
width: 980px;
margin: 0px auto 0px auto;
}
Just specify whatever your new width is, and the ‘auto’ left and right margins will take care of the centering.
Hope this helps!
Commenting with Safari browser
… works just fine now!
Thanks Dirk. That’s really appreciated!
I’ll let Dean know about it too when I get a chance, as that would put me right off a site if I was using Safari!
That’s no problem at all.
Thanks a lot for the above pointer on alignment. It works, just GREAT! I didn’t even need to change the width of .secondary. I would have never managed this on my own.
No problem Dirk - you’re more than welcome!
The reason why I did the resize of the secondary column was to allow the site to fit without scrollbars on 1024×768. Guess it depends on what resolution your visitors are running at…