Find out if you are Mac or PC – take a fun test at SwitchToMac.com and find out which side you’re really on!

I just took the test and came out 100% Mac.

Actually it was my second attempt, the first go was very nearly, but not quite 100%. But let’s face it, “87% Mac” doesn’t look quite so impressive. So anyway, if you want to skew the results, think carefully whether you want to think ‘different’ or ‘differently’…. you’ll see what i mean. Oh, and obviously Mac users eat salad!

While you’re there, you can read my guest blog “10 things I love about my MacBook Pro” – a run-down of the ten things I like best about my laptop.

My MacBook Pro narrowly avoided disaster a little while back (see my earlier post The Luckiest Laptop in Leitrim.

I recently upgraded the entire Adobe Master Collection on my Macbook Pro to the CS4 versions and earlier today Photoshop started crashing. The horror. It happened whenever I tried to change the font on a piece of text. I was highlighting the text and using the arrow keys to flick through all the fonts in the list, one by one. Several ‘unexpected quits’ later, I’d narrowed it down to one particular font that was causing problems. …read more

I’ve recently been experimenting with Cufón text replacement, and decided to put it to use on a site I’ve been messing about with. I’d also been converting the whole thing to a Wordpress-powered site (more on that later), so it seemed to make sense to look for a plug-in to do the job.

So, the plugin is called WP-Cufon and you can get it at wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cufon/

It’s quick to install, has good documentation, and it’s easy enough to specify some rules to control the text replacement on your site.

So for example I’ve used :

Cufon.replace('h1', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h2', { hover:true });
Cufon.replace('h5');
Cufon.replace('#navbar a');

which replaces the font for h1, h2, h5 headings and any link text within the ‘navbar’ div with a special font of my own making. All of the subsequent styling is covered by CSS. It really is very simple to set up.

You need to convert your font first into a format that Cufon can handle – there’s a Cufon generator that does the whole thing very neatly. It also, importantly, allows you to limit usage to certain domains to protect the font from use elsewhere.

…read more

OK, here’s the background. Damien Mulley has set a challenge to get your site listed in first place on Google.ie for the search term ‘geansai gorm’ (which means ‘blue jumper’).

Anyway, I decided to give it a shot today …read more

As promised – here’s a quick rundown of how I tweaked the default WordPress theme to match my own website. Pretty much everything was achieved by editing either the style.css or header.php files.

The changes to the basic proportions of the page were made by increasing the #page and #footer divs from 760 to 900pixels and adjusting the right sidebar content to be 250px wide (to match my own ‘content_sub’ div) and expanding the rest of the content to fill the gap. …read more

The week before last I went on a ‘Blogging For Business’ course held at the Leitrim County Enterprise Board in Carrick-on-Shannon. It was a one-day course, but a lot of useful info was crammed in – WordPress, RSS feeds etc – I’d recommend it to anyone who maybe is just starting out setting up their own business website, or is looking for new ways to drive traffic to an existing site – probably not so useful if you’ve been running your own blog successfully for while – but ideal for beginners.

I’ve have made a few tweaks to the default WordPress theme – and well, it’s nearly there – as (hopefully) you can see from this page. I haven’t checked the layout integrity in many different browsers, and I expect there will be some strange things happening on sub-pages to this blog (for example – if any comments come in). And I’m also not sure what will happen if I start adding or editing widgets – but hey, it was my first effort and I think it has matched up with my main site design pretty well. There’s still plenty still to do – fiddle with the look of some of the links (particularly RSS related bits) and I haven’t really set up the sidebar yet. …read more

OK, in order to work out how WordPress sites are put together, I’m going to have to put on my Graphic Design Geek hat. (Yes I have one of those. It’s a black beret, by the way.)

I’m intending to blog about the changes I’m making as I go along. …read more

Here’s a thing. The default installation of WordPress I’ve just done is set up in such a way that the URL of each individual post is what they call ‘ugly’ – it contains numbers and question marks, rather than containing the actual text from the title of your post. And apart from being ‘ugly’, these links are not particularly Search Engine friendly. …read more

OK, you may remember seeing a little image in my last (first) post. Well, getting that to appear wasn’t quite as straightforward as I’d hoped. When I first tried to upload an image from my computer, I got an error message:

failed to write to disk
…read more

I thought it might be useful to document the process of setting up this blog on my site as I went along.

Step 1: I found this page on WordPress.org which details the procedure for installing WordPress on your own site (this assumes that you have your own domain, and FTP access to upload all of the WordPress files to your own site). Now, being a graphic designer, and itching to get on with the task of customising the page to make it look all arty and such, it’s fair to say that I only read the instructions briefly, so this might all end in disaster, but here goes… …read more