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

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.

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