There were two things I want­ed to see changed in the bootScore theme before ven­tur­ing into the big inter­ven­tions. I was told that improved top­ic clouds and post lists would increase read­abil­i­ty and usabil­i­ty. For­tu­nate­ly, it was easy to get a more fan­cy tag cloud and an improved list of recent posts show­ing the fea­tured images as thumb­nails: […]

To get less blurred fea­tured images, I sug­gest­ed enforc­ing Word­Press to auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate also square bootScore-spe­cif­ic thumb­nails of size 600x600. The bootScore tem­plates index.php and archive.php should request these images via the com­mand get_the_post_thumbnail(null, 'bsTeaser') instead of ask­ing for the medi­um size. This would make it less like­ly that a pic­ture would need to be upsized. […]

No web­site with­out pic­tures or logos! But inte­grat­ing a logo cor­rect­ly is often a tricky task. They have to be vis­i­ble, well-placed, and leave space for the menu. Addi­tion­al­ly, they must not bloat or dis­tort the head­er area. And the way of inte­grat­ing them into the tem­plates should also allow us to use the fav­i­cons for the brows­er tabs etc. This is where the bootScore devel­op­ers took a lot of the work out of our hands! Once our logos rough­ly fit the intend­ed dimen­sions, we essen­tial­ly need to fol­low the bootScore instruc­tions. And by that, we get a logo and the respec­tive fav­i­cons. […]

I love ZEN pre­sen­ta­tions. For that, you need pic­tures. Many pic­tures. Good pic­tures. For­tu­nate­ly, it is tech­ni­cal­ly easy to inte­grate pho­tos from the inter­net into your own site. What is chal­leng­ing, how­ev­er, is get­ting nice pic­tures legal­ly. […]

I don’t buy images. Nev­er. I take my own pic­tures. Or I use free images released under a Cre­ative Com­mons License. Or in the ‘pub­lic domain’. Some image data­bas­es offer their pho­tographs under their own licens­es, equiv­a­lent to the free licens­es, as long as I do not make their images pub­licly avail­able through anoth­er image data­base. I accept that as well. And as open-source licens­es do, too, some ‘pic­ture’ licens­es impose cer­tain duties on me. Thus, I need a pic­ture cred­it page: […]

Avoid­ing dis­tort­ed fea­tured images is pos­si­ble. We have shown that. How­ev­er, our method is not yet opti­mal: if we let Word­Press when upload­ing pic­tures, also crop the medi­um-sized thumb­nails as squares, we give up what is com­mon­ly expect­ed. Maybe oth­er plu­g­ins need the ‘medi­um’ thumb­nails in the orig­i­nal aspect ratio after all. So it would be bet­ter if we left the com­mon thumb­nail for­mats untouched. But we still need larg­er pic­ture squares: […]

bootScore — the Boot­strap-based Word­Press starter theme — can only be designed via CSS, PHP, and JS pro­gram­ming: If you want to fash­ion your web­site, you need to pro­gram. bootScore inte­grates Boot­strap tech­ni­cal­ly and leaves the vis­i­ble details to the pro­gram­ming web design­ers. And by default, it deliv­ers some­times blurred fea­tured images. Is it an unavoid­able task to fix that after­ward? […]

In the case of Fan­cy Images, we show our read­er first a tiny image. And on her request — wants to say: click — also a larg­er ver­sion. For imple­ment­ing this fea­ture, I ini­tial­ly put the URL to the uploaded image in the href-attribute of the fan­cy link and in the src attribute of the img tag. That slows down our site. We should fas­ten our fan­cy images: […]

I love sci­en­tif­ic writ­ing. Last night, I could­n’t hold back any­more. I need foot­notes on Word­Press that I can eas­i­ly apply to my posts with a good result! So, I replaced Easy Foot­notes with Foot­notes Made Easy. Too sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly unat­trac­tive was the result of Easy Foot­notes for me: […]