MrGray.id.au » Theme

A New Theme: OfficeFolders 1.4

Mr Gray — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 14:02:19 +0000

I’ve been wanting to change my theme for a little while now, and finally settled on one – OfficeFolders 1.4 by Themocracy.

I made a slight change to the footer:

which also necessitated a slight change to the style.css file (#footer-inner – height changed from 50px to 65px)

Original Theme Files

Be sure to let me know what you think of the new theme.

New Theme for MrGray.id.au

Mr Gray — Thu, 22 May 2008 13:04:18 +0000

I got tired of my old theme (Nikynik Blue), I thought it was starting to look a bit dated.

So I went looking for a new theme, still retaining the blue colour and came across Deep Blue WordPress Theme.

The theme was created by Nathan Rice. Thanks Nathan.

Adding Some Buttons

Mr Gray — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 12:13:22 +0000

So over the past couple of days I have been working on adding some buttons to my sidebar. Of course, a Google search helped me with this.

Taylor McKnight has a huge collection of badges available for download.

If that still doesn’t get you what you need, then make your own using one of these sites:

So there you go, get busy putting up some badges.

Some CSS Class Options

Mr Gray — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 12:43:23 +0000

I recently discovered that it appeared there could be some CSS Class options available within the theme I was using.

A bit of searching found this bit of information, which helped me work out how to get it working.

Very easily, all I have to do to display the text as styled above is use the following bit of code:

around the text I want styled in that format (minus the spaces between the greater than and less than symbols, of course!).

So the class-names that I can use are:

download
code
alarm
alert
favourite_post

Nikynik Blue Theme

Mr Gray — Fri, 13 Jul 2007 13:15:10 +0000

So I thought it was about time I wrote about the theme I’m using on this site. It’s called Nikynik Blue and a big thanks to Nikynik for making it – I really like it.

I can’t even remember where I first came across it – it might have been over at edublogs that I first saw it, but not real sure.

Anyway I did a google to try to find some sources for it, and these were the only ones that I could find:

The WordPress Theme Viewer has it here.
and after much searching, Nikynik has it on the Templates Page.

Here are the screen shots from those sites:

WordPress Theme Viewer Site:

Nikynik’s Site:

As can be seen from Nikynik’s site – it seems as though there are a few different class options available – something I didn’t realise until I found this page. It looks like they might read as:

alert
download
favourite post
code, and
alarm.

I’m not yet sure how to use these though. Will need to look into it.

Also, it should be noted that I have made a few little changes to the theme, mainly to accomodate some of the plugins I’m using (and I’ve described those changes in posts where I’ve written about the plugin!).

I haven’t come across any other sites using the nikynik blue theme (and surely there must be some, seeing as how great a theme it is), so if you are using the theme feel free to drop a comment, I’d love to check out your site.

Again, thanks for the great theme, nikynik.

Edit: I just found another link for nikynik over at WordPress.com, though not much there. Here it is.

EDIT (Again!!): Worked out how to use those Class Options. Wrote about it here. This site and this one helped me to work it out.

Updating Web Browser Page Titles

Mr Gray — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 13:48:46 +0000

I was reading these Brilliant WordPress SEO Tips for Bloggers and Webmasters and found the tip to improve the format of the page title in the actual browser window.

Originally my page titles looked like these, the default setup:

The code on John Wiseman’s site said to insert the following into the title element of the header.php file:

but I found that provided the following output:

Instead, I used this bit of code:

to get the perfect results:

Some Comment Styling

Mr Gray — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 11:01:01 +0000

This post is simply to do some Comment Styling of the theme and be able to test it.
Things I’d like to get right are:

Gravatars displayed at full size (80px x 80px), preferably on left hand side
Gravatars displayed in line, ie not indented further into the page as more and more comments are added (see picture below)
Default Gravatar picture changed (see current picture below)
Different coloured background for author (my) comments
Perhaps a number displayed in each comment
Perhaps some stats listed on front page (number of posts, number of comments, etc)

The following sites might be of use for me to get this happening:
Gravatar and the Broken Image Icon
Gravatar Popup Plugin
CSS Styling for Alternating Colours & Author Comment Background
WordPress Codex – Using Gravatars
WordPress Codex – Plugins
Comment Styling
Styling your WordPress Forms
WordPress Author Comment Highlighting
WordPress Support – number on comments
Plugin for my comments
Counting Comments & Trackbacks

Comments being indented:

Unknown Gravatar Picture:

EDIT (11/8/07): Tonight I came across the separate comments & Pings plugin (Version 1.0) which fixed up the problem of counts not being correct. Then followed these instructions to get it all right.

I was also able to use the following sites to help me sort it all out:

Contact Me Form added

Mr Gray — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 11:18:59 +0000

Tonight sees me add a contact form to the site. I am using the Secure & Accessible Contact Form for WordPress (Version B20070414). I installed the plugin in the usual space and followed the instructions to get the form up and running. I think I now need to do some CSS editing, as I don’t like the way my theme puts borders around the various parts of the form (like in the picture below – yes it is a picture below, not the actual contact form, so don’t try to type into it ):

So anyway, now you can contact me by clicking on the tab located in the header of this site or by using this link.

EDIT (5/7/07): I have now deactivated and deleted this plugin – see my post regarding the installation of my new contact page.

Nice Categories Plugin

Mr Gray — Sun, 10 Jun 2007 12:28:55 +0000

This is a simple little plugin which will:

display the categories under which an entry is filed in the following way:

Single category: Category1
Two categories: Category1 and Category 2
Three categories: Category1, Category2 and Category3
Four categories: Category 1, Category 2, Category 3 and Category 4

I installed the plugin in the Plugins directory and activated it. Then I just needed to do some minor modifications to my theme files to get it to display the categories nicely.

Picked the plugin up from txfx.net at this page.

Akismet Plugin activation

Mr Gray — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 11:46:18 +0000

Tonight also sees me activate the Akismet Plugin, Version 2.0. This involved me signing up for an account at WordPress.com, then using the API Key to activate the plugin.

I’m actually quite surprised. The only reason I’ve activated this plugin now is because tonight I had two spam comments already. And the site has only been going for 15 days – I’m amazed at how quickly they found the site.

Hopefully this plugin will get rid of these annoying comments.