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Theme Graphics Bake Them Remake Them

By Dave Smith Thursday October 23, 2008

Graphics are the little touches that make your theme special

Graphics is another place you can really change the look and feel of a blog theme. In case you didn’t know you can replace or tweak those graphics used to trim out a theme. Closely associated with the style.php are the images for the theme. Here to is where you can work some magic to make the theme your own. I often change the images associated with things like buttons, blockquotes, RSS, Dividers, (sidebars, body, header, footer, etc.). The images are stored in a directory inside the theme folder; usually img or images.

This is probably the first real directory I open once I download and unzip a theme. I can learn a lot about a blog by looking at the image folder contents.

I will often make a screen shot of this folder opened so I can see the images and their file names. This does two things for me:

When I’m reading through the CSS Stylesheet I can see what images are being used where which helps me get a better mental image of what is going on in the theme.
I make a list of the ones I want to keep, the ones I want to delete and create my own, the ones I want to modify just a bit.

Then while going through the style.php learning the layout in CSS I make note of those image files and where they are called in the formatting of the blog. You can make some small changes and additions to these graphic files creating some dramatic changes in the look of your blog. It is a quick and fairly easy way to customize the theme to your personal taste.

Adding a Header Image

If I’m going to be adding a header image to the theme and one doesn’t exist I’ll put it here or install the rotating image header plugin.

If you are adding a header image to a theme that has one, it is pretty easy to replace if you keep the same dimensions as the one originally with the theme.

As you get more comfortable with CSS Style sheets you will find it easy to add a header image to any theme and even change the size of the theme width to accomodate your image.

Here there is a fine line to be walked. I’ll cover Header Images in a separate post.

Do Follow and Lucia’s Link Love

By Dave Smith Wednesday July 2, 2008

A while back I wrote A Fable Do Follow and Comments when I installed the Do Follow Plug-in. I’ve noticed more and more comments which have nothing to do with the post. They found the blog lab on a do follow blog list and all they want is a link.

July is Clean Up Unused Plugins Month

By Dave Smith Tuesday July 1, 2008

I’m declaring this to be “Clean-up Un-used Plug-ins Month”

I know I didn’t need the hyphens. I’m trying to be a little creative as a Dial-up Geek.

I’m always installing new plug-ins here at the lab to test and see if they will add functionality or enhance the presentation of the blog.

However, sometimes I don’t have a real use for them, or I replace that functionality with a different plug-in. But I don’t deactivate the old or unused plug-in.
Why this is important to you

Plug-ins can add code to your posts

Three things can happen:

You slow down the load time of your blog because it is going out and getting something that plug-in needs and it isn’t even active.
You are moving the content of your blog down further on the page for the search engine bots.
You (in some cases) are providing one way links out to those plug-in author sites and all you did was activate the plug-in.

These are Great Plug-ins Podpress and Next Gen Gallery

I activated each of these plug-ins to do some experimenting which I never got around to doing. While looking at my page source today (because I changed do follow plug-ing) I noticed a lot of lines of code going out to these two plug-ins. I knew I hadn’t used either one. I deactivated them and as expected the code went away and my page was smaller with 6 less lines of code and javascript calls.

Cleaning it up in July

Open any post and view source. If you see a lot of calls to plugin files you aren’t using on your blog then I would suggest you deactive them. Some plugins don’t put code or calls on your blog. But you might want to deactivate any plugins you aren’t using even if they don’t add additional code and load time.

With everything else we have to do it is hard to set aside some time to do a little house cleaning. Now is the time to Unplug those Plug-ins you aren’t using.