http://istanbulcatz.blogspot.com/
A Flickr contact of mine named István Tóth takes the most wonderful Istanbul cat and dog photos. With his consent, I have now started a blog for them. Partly to provide tutorial material for the easy peasy page, but mainly because it is so much fun to do it! (great content = easy design, remember? ;-)
For this one I used the picture window template, the one in the middle with the red header. What I was looking for was something like the rounded rectangle background that goes underneath everything, including the header. Nice unification of design elements, that. The radiuses of the rectangle's corners were smaller than what I have here, so I looked for the word "radius" inside the HTML code and changed the values. Also, I replaced all of the background png files with my own stuff by doing a ctrl+F in the HTML editor for "png". Then as usual, I went to the Advanced Template Designer and changed the fonts, colors, etc from there.
Another thing which I used here is the code which Furkan found on Southern Speakers a few days ago, which allows you to have separate boxes for things you post on the same day.
There is one thing with this blog, which is that it is bi-lingual. Which means that in the posts I would like to somehow distinguish between Turkish and English. So, the English stuff gets some added code inside the HTML tab of the post editor. Nothing major - only one small line:
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.8em;">english text</span>
The widgets got a custom treatment: They got a special shape, became wider, got a background color, etc. All of which I did from the CSS tab on the Advanced section of the Template Designer. And here is the code which I used for that, which you will need to apply to all the new widgets that you create:
Another thing which I used here is the code which Furkan found on Southern Speakers a few days ago, which allows you to have separate boxes for things you post on the same day.
There is one thing with this blog, which is that it is bi-lingual. Which means that in the posts I would like to somehow distinguish between Turkish and English. So, the English stuff gets some added code inside the HTML tab of the post editor. Nothing major - only one small line:
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 17px; line-height: 1.8em;">english text</span>
The widgets got a custom treatment: They got a special shape, became wider, got a background color, etc. All of which I did from the CSS tab on the Advanced section of the Template Designer. And here is the code which I used for that, which you will need to apply to all the new widgets that you create:
#Gadget ID{
margin-top:20px;
margin-right:-15px;
margin-left:-5px;
padding: 15px;
background:#222222;
font-family:Arial;
font-style: normal;
font-size:13px;
text-align:left;
color: #888888;
border-radius: 20px;
}
I also added a border to the post images, again with the same CSS tab. And the code for that is this one, obviously you can change padding and color values as needed:
.post-body img {
padding: 6px;
background-color: #975858;
border: 1px solid $(image.border.color;
There is a custom cursor on this as well. Those who would rather not have this will need to go into the code and remove the line which says
<style type='text/css'>body, a, a:hover {cursor: url(http://cur.cursors-4u.net/cursors/cur-7/cur671.cur), progress;}</style>
and which comes just before
<b:skin><![CDATA[/*
And finally the header - where I tried something new: I placed the cat image (which is actually a part of the header) on the upper right hand corner in such a way that the header takes a curve around the post column. This was positioned as a separate image gadget, whose location I played around with using the CSS tab on the advanced designer. You can use your own image to replace what I have on the site. Create an image with a transparent background, save as a 24 bit png file and upload into the picture gadget.
The code for the placement of this is below, and please note how the margin values are huge big negative ones. This allows me to position the transparent png image above the header text, as well as the post, as a layer. Great! And I will certainly be experimenting with this feature a whole lot more:
<style type='text/css'>body, a, a:hover {cursor: url(http://cur.cursors-4u.net/cursors/cur-7/cur671.cur), progress;}</style>
and which comes just before
<b:skin><![CDATA[/*
And finally the header - where I tried something new: I placed the cat image (which is actually a part of the header) on the upper right hand corner in such a way that the header takes a curve around the post column. This was positioned as a separate image gadget, whose location I played around with using the CSS tab on the advanced designer. You can use your own image to replace what I have on the site. Create an image with a transparent background, save as a 24 bit png file and upload into the picture gadget.
The code for the placement of this is below, and please note how the margin values are huge big negative ones. This allows me to position the transparent png image above the header text, as well as the post, as a layer. Great! And I will certainly be experimenting with this feature a whole lot more:
#Image1{
margin-top:-100px;
margin-left:-44px;
}
And as for the header text, this was made with a layer style, however turned out to be way too strong in terms of color in the end. So, after I was sure of where everything was supposed to go, I merged the layers and colorized/desaturated the whole thing with the HSL palette and then saved this as a 24 bit PNG file with transparency.
Download template and photoshop file for the header here >>>
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