Post Date and Title

For a long time I knew I wanted the date to be displayed calendar style, as in month, day and year all one on top of the other. So I found this tutorial to help me achieve that look. Only thing is I had some trouble understanding it and getting it to work, so I tried an other one of her tutorials with a very similar effect (just doesn't look like a calendar) and this one worked better with less tweaking and was easier to understand. Here are the changes I did to that particular code.



- changed the color of the circle and added a radial gradiant (though it doesn't show much because there isn't enough of a color difference between my 2 colors)
- moved the date header less to the left until it looked good. I find it strange that it disappears if it goes beyond the main container though, but at the same time I do like the effect it gives to have it slightly cut off.
- removed the letter-spacing between the letters of the month and year, it just made it look very odd
- made the year slightly smaller than the month, since it's 4 letters compared to 3 for the month
- moved the whole date up a bit with negative margins so it would look right (before it looked like there was too much space above the month, and too little below the year)
- changed the color of the text to white for all
- changed the font to the same as the post font



I really like the effect of the box shadow being wider than the white border and showing beyond it. Would not have thought to do that. Might use that elsewhere in my design now.

I also changed a few things about the post title:

- post body clear both so post text would appear below the date and not next to it; also this will prevent the title text to overlap the body text if ever the post title is really long, some blogs need to add this bit of code as I've noticed they have this problem which is more noticable on a phone
- moved the post h2 (aka title) so it would be almost lined up vertically with the center of the date circle using padding, and so it would clear the circle, too.

I'm not sure how, or where the code is, but if there are 2 posts on the same date, then the older post, or the one lower on the page, does not have the date next to the title. Nonetheless, it looks just fine.



Part of me want to delineate the title a bit more than this. So I tried putting a shadow-line below it, but I'm not quite sure if I like it... Also it might look weird if I add something below it (like labels, author, comment links). I'm keeping this option in my head, but for now I'm removing it.


PS this screencap was taken before I changed the font face of the date.

Now before I get too ahead of myself, I'm going to look into having a thumbnail and post summary of each blog post on the main page/ index pages (I know, you already got a glimpse of it in here, but it was not working correctly). This will change things considerably for how I want the rest to look.