Category Archives: WordPress

SMCSLC: All About WordPress

WordPress LogoJust wanted to pitch the Social Media Club of Salt Lake City’s September get together. Thom Allen, Joseph Scott and I will be presenting on WordPress, BuddyPress, and a host of other blogging tools and applications. From their site:

Many of us are past the question: To blog, or not to blog.

We know there’s value in blogging.Some of us have used WordPress, Moveable Type, TypePad or Blogger. Perhaps all of us already have a favorite blogging platform.

For our September Social Media Club of Salt Lake City meeting, we’re focusing on WordPress. We think it’s one of the more popular blogging tools. We have structured the program so there’s something for everyone regardless of your WordPress familiarity.

About WordPress

First of all, thank you to Joseph Scott — an Automatic employee and WordPress programmer who’s official title is bug exorcist — who has agreed to put together September’s program. You know you’ll learn valuable information when one of the software programmers is our lead presenter.

Networking will begin at 6 p.m. and our program at 6:30 p.m. Joseph will provide an introduction to WordPress, its history and where it is today.

WordPress Breakout Sessions – Beginner, Intermediate, Advanced

Around 6:45 p.m. we’ll break-out into smaller sessions to focus on WordPress in more depth. The three breakout sessions will be geared toward WordPress beginners, intermediate and advanced users.

Thank you to two very talented bloggers in their own right, Thom Allen and Jake Spurlock, who will lead the beginner and intermediate breakout sessions, respectively. Joseph will lead the discussion in the advanced user group.

Jake’s session will also include an overview of BuddyPress, a comprehensive social networking tool which can be installed as a WordPress plugin.

Breakout concepts will include discussion items like:

  • Why you should use WordPress
  • How to most effectively install and customize WordPress
  • The best URL structure for searchSEO optimization of your WordPress blog
  • Plugins for WordPress
  • 10 steps to installing and setting up a customized WordPress blog

Breakout sessions will go until approximately 7:30 p.m. or whenever we decide to quit.

Details

Date: September 17, 2009

Time: 6 to 8 p.m.

Place: University of Utah | Fine Arts Auditorium with breakout sessions at the neighboring BEHS Building, Rooms 106-108 | map it parking instructions included in map link

Special thanks to Andy Thompson in the University of Utah’s Marketing and Communications department for arranging for our meeting space.

RSVP: on Eventbrite

Twitter hashtag: #smcslc

To learn more about our presenters, please visit their respective sites:

Joseph Scott

Jake Spurlock

Thom Allen

via Sept. 17 meeting: All About WordPress | SMC of SLC .

Skulls…

Skull WordPress Theme

So, in the last few weeks, I have been doing a lot of WordPress theme development. When I see something cool on the web, I want to implement it a new a cool way. Skulls is basically the end result of some tinkering on the web. Here are some of the methods that I used in this theme.

1. Font Replacement

I read a great article on CameronMoll.com called Exploring Cufón, a sIFR alternative for font embedding. Cufón is this rad javascript library that will exchange text with a font resides on your server. A friend of mine, Tyrel Kelsey showed me an example on a site that he designed using the script, and from there, I was set. Immediately, I  knew that I wanted to create a grungy WordPress theme that I could use this on.

2. Fixed Footer

Nothing terribly revolutionary, but after staring at Facebook everyday, I wanted to put a persistent footer, that would have a couple of quick links in it. To create a fixed footer, simple add the following code to your div.

Make sure to add some bottom-margin to whatever div is going to be above it. You want to make sure you do that, so when you scroll to the bottom, you can see all of your content.

[css]
#footer {
margin:auto;
position:fixed;
margin:auto;
left:0;
bottom:0;
height:40px;
width:100%;
background:#242424;
z-index:1999;
}
[/css]
There are a couple of issues that in IE6 (Go figure…) But they can be resolved by adding this:
[css]* html #footer {
top:expression(eval(document.compatMode && document.compatMode==’CSS1Compat’) ? documentElement.scrollTop +(documentElement.clientHeight-this.clientHeight) : document.body.scrollTop +(document.body.clientHeight-this.clientHeight));
position:absolute;
}
[/css]

3. SUPER-ULTRA-RAD GRAPHICS

I mentioned already the font replacement. I found some cool vector packs that had some skull designs in them. The post headers have a banner that overlays the other divs due to some negative margins. One thing to be aware of, if you follow a similar design, is to make sure that links have the coverage that they might need. I had them squeezed a lot tighter, but it was hard to click on the post links.

So, all in all, I think that it turned out to be a pretty cool theme. Not for everyone, but I think that someone will get a kick out of it.

Demo

Download

A Daring Inspiration

I am excited today, to FINALLY release a WordPress theme that I have been working on. In all of it’s glory, A Daring Inspiration.

Daring Inspiration

Daring Inspiration is a theme that I have had kicking around in my head for a long time. For those unfamiliar, there is a great site on the internet run by mac pundit, John Gruber called Daring Fireball. John write simple text posts, and shares them in a link style that lends itself to being more of a link style blog then a traditional one.

With that being said, this theme is GPL licensed, XHTML valid, and rocking in its simplicity.

Demo
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