shibbyonline

How Many Fonts…

Jon Hicks has been ‘fiddling‘ with his site; his words not mine.
If you take a visit over there you might notice some good looking heading tags. Or you might not. Why is that?

Jon has decided to target specific fonts in the CSS. Normally when declaring fonts in a tag you would go some thing along the lines of a couple of system fonts and then a font family:
body { font-family: “Arial Black”, “Helvectica Bold”, sans-serif }
But Jon has broken the mold (again) and selected some fonts that are not present on your standard OS installation. Have a look (sorry Jon I’ve just copied your code)
body { font-family: “P22 Underground Pro”, “P22 Johnston Underground”, “P22 Underground”, “Gill Sans”, “Gill Sans MT”, GillSans, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; }
As you can see the first three fonts are definitely not an OS standard.

This in my mind is a brilliant substitute to font replacement hacks and tricks. But how far do you go to catch everyone and every font type. Luckily for me I got to view the site from a machine with P22 Underground installed. But after a quick trip to Font Explorer I de-activated the font and presto; Gill Sans!
Whilst you could get carried away with this and apply different fonts to all manor of tags and elements, what effect will it have on your page loading and the load on the CSS file?

Untitled

Some times you just can not think of a title and so you go with the old month and year algorithm.
To which I’m now theming Nov07.

I’ve always wanted to knock out some custom themes that are hand built from the ground up. But everything I try I end up with WordPress moving the goal posts (in respect of function changes in 2.3) or a incomplete style sheet and this bugs me! They never feel complete and I know it, to which I’m never happy and I move on to something else.

But a few months ago I started following the Blueprint CSS project. I know these CSS frameworks are getting some stick; or at least provoke great discussions, but I felt I needed to try it out for my self.
So I set about building a theme from the grass roots of Blueprint, but as with most people I fell foul of the grid layout in Blueprint and ended up floating back to my floats and widths to get things positioned. But if you look closely you will see a lot of Blueprint in here under the bonnet.

The design itself is something I have been working on for over four months now; yep I know I’m slow, but each time I get some where I have to change directions and it gets put towards the back. The first sighting was during October when I managed to rush a pink version out.
I wanted to move towards a darker site but something that I could build off for quite a while. So whilst it is up and running now, expect a few tweeks and changes here and there. Look out for a Blueprint inspired downloadable theme in the future.

Panic: CODA Alert

Yesterday the tubes were alive with the news of Coda, the new application from Panic.

Coda is an attempt at an ‘all in one’ application containing all the tools for the development of a web page.
Currently I use a combination of TextMate, CSSEdit and Transmit that seem to fill most needs, but what if I could have all that power and only need load up one application?
Well I downloaded the 15 trial of Coda and spent a few minutes using it.
Find out my thoughts.
[more…]

White

There is something to be said for trying new ideas and keeping everything fresh.
But there is also something to be said for actually sitting down and finishing something off; something like a WordPress theme.

Exit the Black theme, enter the White version. OK so naming stuff was never really my strong point.
I got a bit tired of a dark site, for most it really works for me I wanted something lighter. I guess the dark nights are calling for a lighter treat for the eyes.

Yes as before when God spares me a few minutes on my own I’ll know it into a release; so how many is that now, I’m 0 for 4!

Dark, almost black

It is a little bit later than planed but here is the new theme/style for shibbyonline.
Code named Black it is the first theme I have created using a dark background, those of you who have followed my themes and designed will know that it is mainly light colours that float my boat.

There are still little bugs to work out and I’m in the process of writing new archive and about pages but hopefully once completed it might make it’s way to a release.