Labels widget

As I was trying to figure out the whole 3 column thing last time, I knew I had a problem with my labels widget. I had set it to display as a cloud yet it was not doing it. After trying playing around with the options, I had to remove and add it back, and that fixed the problem. No more crazy long list of labels with tons of white space! Still, I didn't like exactly how it was displayed, so I set out to find some customization option. I didn't want different size words, or just words, but more than that, I really had no idea what I wanted, so I'm not being too picky for this. I liked the idea...

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Footer

I know I'm not done with the main content part of the design (blog posts, comments, sidebar), but I really wanted to get started with the footer. Just making it presentable, and well, THERE. For now, I just want the footer to be the place where you can find more posts of mine, however you want to find it. Whether it be by category (via an other iteration of the main navigation), by label (which I suppose is just an other way of organizing the categories, just more messy I find), or by date (via the blog archives), anyone can find something else to read once they are at the bottom of the blog...

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Getting back in the game

I haven't worked on my blog design since, what April?! Yikes... I really want to start blogging again, but I'd like to have my blog design finished first. Then again, if I wait for the design to be done, I'll never start blogging again. So I decided to get it mostly finished. At the very least, functionnal. But now that I'm looking at the code, I'm feeling a little lost. Some things have dissapeared, like my social media button images, WTF?! I haven't touched anything since they last worked, or did I? I don't understand what I did anymore, where I was at, why I need some code for the design to...

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Post Summary and Thumbnail with Javascript

I've known for a long time that my next blog design would have truncated posts. Post truncation was not well welcomed when it started being a bit more common on popular blogs, but I always thought that the reasons for truncated posts was absolutely valid and beneficial, and I still do! When I started looking into this and I realized that the real way to truncate posts was to go back to every single post and insert the jump break. 1) That did not seem like a fun time to me, 2) it did not look the way I wanted it to look. I imagined there would be an other way to do this, to automate it, and make...

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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...

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Header: Tagline and other finishing graphics.

We're finishing the header today!! Just a few graphic elements to mention and we're done. First I want to talk about the long herringbone pattern that essentially looks like a long arrow. I made this graphic from scratch in photoshop. Yes, from scratch. I started with a small square image, hand traced, or mouse trace, an imperfect square around the perimeter. This would be literally the building block for the bigger graphic. My first intention was to have it be the background image, but after I finished I found it way too busy for that. Anyway, from the block outlines I made a variety of...

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Blog Background: Take 2

I've been noticing that my blog background takes some time to load. Not surprising since it is quite a large file, as the image itself is quite huge (2000px x 1000px). But it need not be that way. My background is a simple repeating image. I thought I needed it that big so it would scale to the size of the window, but upon further thought, I believed I could achieve the very same look but with a smaller image, and hence reduce load times. First, I cropped my background image to the smallest repeating pattern, which is this: Changed the repeat to repeat instead of repeat y (or just removing...

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