Presenting: Livejournal Theme for WordPress

You know the story. You’ve been using LiveJournal since 1999. It’s your home. You’re familiar with it. You’re on the list of notable LiveJournal users. But times they be a changin’. You’re friends are all leaving LiveJournal for WordPress because it’s a better C-M-S (whatever that is). You’ve switched to WordPress, but everything looks strange and confusing.

Don’t worry, as usual engtech has your back.

Blog Action Day: Save Paper when Readers Print Your Blog

Today is Blog Action Day with a focus on the environment and I’m going to teach a quick CSS trick for how to save paper by reducing what gets printed when someone prints an article from your blog.

Presenting: Black and Blue and Read All Over

CSS design is a bitch.

CSS Tip: Building 3D Buttons with CSS for the Sandbox Theme

An often requested tip in blog theme CSS design is how to do 3d buttons for the menu bar at the top of the page. It’s done using the common “sliding door” technique where one image is the front plus middle, and another image forms the end.

WordPress CSS Tip: Design for Sandbox Theme in a sandbox

I’ll be the first to admit that I only know the tip of the iceberg when it comes to CSS design, but one ‘workhack’ that easily applies to any kind of programming activity is rapid development. The concept is simple: reduce the time between action and result to the shortest amount of time possible so you can get more done. My number one tip for doing a fast CSS design is to do it all on your own machine instead of doing it live on the Internet (or wordpress.com). It will save you lots of time and headaches.

I’ve taken the Sandbox sample blog and example CSS template provided by Scott Wallick and made a very easy to use downloadable archive.

Win Cash Prizes for your CSS Design for Sandbox

The whole idea behind HTML and CSS is that you use HTML to format your web page (or blog post) with things like headers, bold, lists and tables. Then you use CSS to style those elements so that they look the way you want them to. The whole idea behind it all is that you can build the structure with HTML once, and then change the look of it whenever you want to using CSS.

Design Tips: Website Speed Optimization for Dummies

If a website takes longer than 1-2 seconds to load then most people give up on it, so doing what you can to make your site faster (and your readers happier) is in your best interest.

This is a quick list of tips, tools and common areas for improvement.

Three new themes and Bryan is leaving WordPress

Bryan Velesco (Avalonstar) is parting ways with WordPress. While Bryan was with WordPress he had this to say about my Theme Review series:
Thanks for the review. These have really helped a lot in not only solidifying my knowledge of the template system, but getting rid of these damn bugs too. What you said about ChaoticSoul [...]

5 Habits for Writing for the Web

These are the steps I follow for painless web publishing. I’ve been writing on the Internet since 1994, and these habits have become second nature to me. I recently introduced a friend to writing on the web, and it was interesting watching him hit problems I never would have because of the habits I’ve formed.