Category Archives: Projects

A better meta menu widget

May 28, 2008 – 12:00 am

Recently I’ve been customizing the Media Grease sidebar. I’ve added a tag cloud widget, a recent comments widget and a manually updated “greatest hits” list. Ultimately, my plan is to move the recent comments, recent posts and greatest hits list to the top of the site using Javascript and CSS.
But I digress.
One of the things [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Using Sifr for nice fonts

May 24, 2008 – 1:14 am

There are just sometimes when you want to use a nice font on your website. Unfortunately, there is no easy way embed custom fonts using HTML/CSS. That generally means you’re stuck using ‘core’ fonts like Arial, Times, Verdana, Georgia, etc.
You could use images, or Flash movies, but both are labor intensive and break accessibility. With [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Media Grease: Moving from images to reality

May 13, 2008 – 10:03 pm

Since I finished the design comps last Thursday, I’ve been working on moving from my Adobe Illustrator files to the actual WordPress theme based on Sandbox.
With the help of Adobe Photoshop, some hand coded HTML and CSS, and the jQuery javascript framework, I’ve programmed approximately 20% of the theme. That includes the basic layout, the [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Web design | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Media Grease design ideas, Part 3

May 10, 2008 – 11:53 pm

I’ve had the chance to refine the design direction I wrote about last weekend:

The most important thing was deciding the design and typographic direction for the posts themselves. I wanted to match the overall tone of the rest of the look while being as legible as possible.
I don’t know if I’ll actually use the sidebar [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Web design | Comments (0)

Media Grease design ideas, Part 2

May 4, 2008 – 10:22 pm

I’ve been working hard today on coming up with the design direction for Media Grease. Here is a sample of where I’m at in Adobe Illustrator:

Over the next few days I’ll be explaining where I got some of the bits and pieces for this design, like the orange feed icon and seamless background wood texture.
If [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Web design | Tagged , , | Comments (2)

Added Google Analytics for stat tracking

May 1, 2008 – 8:11 am

Today I setup Media Grease to use the free Google Analytics service. Google’s system gives webmasters detailed statistics about how their website is used. You’ll know how people got to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, where they live (roughly), and so on.
Stat tracking of this sort has been around for [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Coming up with Media Grease design ideas

April 27, 2008 – 9:53 pm

Over the next couple of days I’ll be coming up with design ideas for Media Grease. Whenever I have the time, I start the design process with sketches on actual paper (this goes for both print and web):

Once I’m comfortable with something I’ve put on paper, I’ll start “sketching” the design on the computer in [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Print design, Web design | Tagged , | Comments (1)

‘Blank’ theme installed

April 27, 2008 – 9:18 pm

When working on the design of a CMS powered website—like this one—you generally have four options:

Modify the default installed theme/template/skin to your liking
Find a theme that’s close to the vision you have for your website, and modify that one to your liking
Create a theme from scratch
Find a “blank” theme with minimal styling to use as [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Web design | Tagged , | Comments (0)

FeedBurner feed setup

April 27, 2008 – 7:37 pm

I just setup a FeedBurner feed for Media Grease which you can access at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mediagrease
Using FeedBurner helps in a couple ways. When people and bots check your feed, they are hitting FeedBurner’s servers and not yours. FeedBurner has a number of feed customization options that aren’t built into WordPress, like the ability to have one [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1

April 27, 2008 – 6:15 pm

I’ve just upgraded Media Grease to WordPress 2.5.1 from 2.5. I’m a little surprised they haven’t made upgrading easier. If you need to upgrade your blog, the upgrade instructions are here.

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Tools/Services, Web design | Tagged | Comments (0)