My first Typography Video
Last week I gave my self the challenge to create a motion typography video (sometimes called kinetic typography). I decided to go with the song "No Handlebars by the Flobots" since I quite enjoy the song (I think it's the trumpet). My original goal was to do the whole song over the course of 4 days, but I soon discovered that was impossible, so I decided to just do the first half (maybe later in the summer I'll finish the rest). So without further antagonizing, here's the finished version of my video!
Optimizing the “Google Syntax Highlighter” WP plugin
Google Syntax Highlighter may be WordPress' most popular syntax highlighter plugin, but it's not the most efficient. With plenty of extra JavaScript and sloppy PHP writing, it's quite the bloat-ware if left unchecked. So here's 2 fixes showing how to put GSH on a diet and still get all the features of the plugin.
Weekday Tip: 9 Ultra-useful WordPress Plugins
No WordPress blog is complete (or even fully functional) with a healthy arsenal of plugins in it's repertoire. So here are 9 ultra-useful plugins to use on every blog setup you configure.
What are “Weekday Tips”
It's no secret that we've started a new series on FS called "Weekday Tips" and it's been incredibly successful even though it has only been 2 weeks since it started. So here's a video talking about what it is and how it works and also what all is happening behind the scenes here at FS.
Advanced WordPress Thumbnail Selection
Thumbnails in WordPress themes are a critical part of relaying the topic or aspect of the article/post you've written. With some simple tricks you can add your own to your theme, and there are even plugins out there to do it for you. The fact of the matter is that these systems you have in place have faults, so here's a video detailing how to create an advanced WordPress Thumbnail generator in your own theme.
Weekday Tip: WordPress Conditional Tags
Wordpress' conditional tags are by far one of the most useful and unglorified tools for theme and plugin development. Here's a list of all the tags.
The Conditional Tags can be used in your Template files to change what content is displayed and how that content is displayed on a particular page depending on what conditions that page matches. For example, you might want to display a snippet of text above the series of posts, but only on the main page of your blog. With the is_home() Conditional Tag, that task is made easy.
Weekday Tip: CSS Shorthand pt.3
Font
The font property is, with exception of some system fonts, a shorthand property for setting all of the properties for a font in one declaration. These declarations go in order of font-style, font-variant, font-weight, font-size/line-height, font-family. Below is a chart showing values can be used in each section.
Weekday Tip: CSS Shorthand pt.2
Background
The background property is a shorthand property for setting all background properties in one declaration. The order of declarations is background-color, background-image, background-repeat, background-attachment, and then background-position. Remember that default values for these properties are not set.
Weekday Tip: CSS Shorthand pt.1
Margin & Padding
The CSS properties "margin" and "padding" allow the use of shorthand declarations, meaning we can state all the "-top", "-left", "-bottom", and "-right" attributes in one call.
Letters from the editor 7: Months of trivialities
Dear Readers,
April and March didn’t turn into the months I had hoped for on FS or on any of our sites really, a combination of trivial work that I gave a higher purpose than need be really put a delay on the articles I have in the works for FS. For this I give my deepest apologies.