Rough Groove

Binary Silver

I have just installed my new photoblog BINARY SILVER. A Wordpress 1.5 gamma installation using a modified Manji theme. While it is not yet complete, I still have to finalize the static pages and other links, it is already viewable and commentable.

Why BINARY SILVER? In the earlier days of photography, a photosensitive compound of silver (silver salts) was used in getting the image starting with Nicéphore Niepce, then developed further by his partner Louis Daguerre. William Henry Fox Talbot then introduced the calotype process that used silver iodide. In the digital era, binaries - ones and zeros, are the components of information. In a way, BINARY SILVER just translates to digital film.

Manji

Have been browsing blogs last night and Manji came up. Wow. Another theme for Wordpress by Khaled Abou Alfa but this time for version 1.5 beta, which, by the way, many are now using. I’ll test this out and probably migrate from Kubrick.

Some minor changes

From the Kubrick FAQ, I made the following updates:

- showing the calendar
- made the whole header image a hyperlink (its now working even in Microsoft Internet Explorer)

As for the problems encountered in IE, got me thinking to include a line in the sidebar that reads:

“Best viewed with Firefox”

Kubrick

I’ve just made the change to Kubrick. From the rather bland design and simple title, random thoughts

my blog is now known as ROUGH GROOVE.

For a few weeks now, I’ve been planning of adopting the Kubrick template by Michael Heilemann for WordPress 1.2 Mingus which allows an easier way for customizing the blog header like placing an image by way of Photoshop editing and much much more. And so, a few nights ago, I started to work on this by installing a trial blog at my old domain salagubang. While using the template and then changing the image was very easy, the blog title would not just come off. Reading Podz’s Wordpress Guides gave me an idea of what to edit in the wp-layout.css file:

From
h1, h1 a, h1 a:hover, h1 a:visited, .description {
text-decoration: none;
color: white;
}

to
h1, h1 a, h1 a:hover, h1 a:visited, .description {
display: block;
text-indent:-500em;
text-decoration: none;
color: white;
}

This was enough to move the blog title out of the image and still retain the hyperlink. However as the clickable area of the header title was small, I changed this one (same file):

From
h1 {
font-size: 4em;
text-align: center;
}

to
h1 {
font-size: 10em;
text-align: center;
}

Now, the clickable area is wider. But I would prefer to have the whole header image clickable.

By the way, the photo above was taken early morning when the mists haven’t yet totally lifted during my Holy Week sojourn in Siocon, Zamboanga del Norte this year to collect beetles and do some photography work.

I’ll be making changes and will be reading the Kubrick support group in the next few days to further enhance the site.

Wordpress Sidebar

Hmmm, a cool way to blog in a small yet unobtrusive manner.