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.

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Over on the right there you should be seeing a little widget-like thing showing the weather forecast for Lovely Leitrim. It’s using my own TV graphics-style Weather Icons which you can get here.

I don’t know exactly (yet) how to make it into a downloadable widget that other people could use on their own sites, but if I get time I may investigate how to package it up. At the moment it’s just hard coded into a regular text widget. And it’s also hard coded to pick up the weather forecast for Carrick-on-Shannon, so I expect the appeal might be… er… limited.

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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

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