Tag Archives: Wordpress

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 | Posted in Media Grease, Projects, Tools/Services, Web design | Also 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 | Posted in Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Also tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

How to test your new WordPress themes

May 4, 2008 – 3:34 pm

Before you change or update the theme of your WordPress site, it’s a good practice to test that theme first. That way your site’s visitors aren’t greeted with a broken site.
Unfortunately, WordPress offers no built in testing solution, so you generally have two options:

Try out your theme on a test version of WordPress running either [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Tools/Services, Web design | Also tagged , , | Comments (0)

‘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 | Posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Also 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 | Posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects, Tools/Services, Web design | Also 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 | Posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects, Tools/Services, Web design | Comments (0)

Hello world!

April 27, 2008 – 11:18 am

I’m web and print designer Chris Johnson and welcome to my brand new professional design blog. This site will be dedicated to the things I know and learn about designing for web and print.
Media Grease is built on the WordPress content management system and is hosted by WebFaction. Both are products that I would have [...]

By Chris Johnson | Posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects | Also tagged , , , , | Comments (1)