hellorobot.org

Graffiti, 
St. Petersburg, July 2006

WordPressincludes 3 posts.

Adding a Header Image to Grid Focus

The design/layout of hellorobot.org is a modified version of the Grid Focus WordPress theme – a fairly extensive modification, but the same basic structure. And although this blog is a smaller width and uses a different menu style, adding a header image to the default Grid Focus theme is not much different than it was here.

I think you’ll find that adding a header image is pretty simple, really. It requires editing two files: first, the header.php file; and second, the style.css file. Both are found in the ../wp-content/themes/grid_focus_public/ folder. You can edit these files in a simple text editor like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit in Mac OS.

Bug in wp_list_bookmarks?

When I first began building out hellorobot.org, modifying the Grid Focus theme, I wanted to be able to feature some of an ongoing list of links – say only the newest 5. Seemed easy.

WordPress has a built-in template function for displaying links, wp_list_bookmarks(), with a decent list of options that can be passed as a URL query string. One of those options is ‘orderby,’ which natch specifies the order in which the links should be displayed. I wanted it to be ordered by date so, as described in the WP documentation, I entered ‘orderby=updated&order=desc.’

It didn’t work.

Customizing the Grid Focus WordPress Theme

I am not a designer. For me, creating a good-looking site design is a long and tedious task of trial and error. So one of the things I’m learning to love about building a site in an open-source CMS platform like WordPress is the number of free designs available. And some of them are even good!

Check out this list from Smashing Magazine. It’s where I found Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus, which I loved for its clean and neutral look. I like the hyper-organization of it.

What follows is an ongoing documentation of the changes, customizations, updates that I am making to hellorobot.org’s Grid Focus install. Hopefully, some of these changes are for the better.

Hellorobot.org is the development hub, blog, & portfolio site of Brian Leary. Who is Brian Leary?