‘Tis the Season Theme for WordPress
You can sense it in the air. That cool breeze. Those holiday tunes on the radio. The decorations the city and at homes in your neighborhood. The holiday season is here! And we at Performancing would like to share in the holiday spirit (whether Christmas, Hanukkah, or any other holiday celebrations we have this time of year) by releasing the ‘Tis the Season theme for WordPress.
‘Tis the Season uses the popular red-and-green color scheme that is very much in tune with the holiday seasons. The theme uses a fixed-width layout with a basic two-column structure featuring well-proportioned column widths. Again, here we use the rule of thirds popular among those well-versed in the arts, as with many other Performancing Themes for WordPress releases.
The theme is widgets-ready, so you won’t have to worry about changing sidebar content when switching to and from the theme (like after the holidays, for instance). ‘Tis the season is light on the eyes and also light on the bandwidth, with minimal use of graphics (mostly the header image). The minimalistic look adds to the simplicity, and this lets your readers focus on reading your content. Still, if you want to insert ads or banners, the main column and the sidebar are wide enough to accommodate popular banner sizes.
‘Tis the Season is developed and supported by Performancing in cooperation with Brian Gardner. Official support will be through the Performancing community forums.
Image in post
Here is an image of my laptop keyboard. The image is inserted as is, without any CSS “classes”. Some themes automatically format images when no IMG class is assigned, while most do not. The image is 240 pixels wide, which should fit most themes–even those with narrow main body columns.
Comments, Trackbacks and Pingbacks
Another important aspect of blogs is the interactivity you get from the comments and automatic trackbacks/pingbacks. Below you will see how comments and trackbacks will appear on the theme.
Links, Links, Links
Apart from quoting and blockquoting text, linking is also important in the blogosphere. This helps your readers navigate to external sources of information. Links also act as recommendations. Links also help establish relationships among bloggers.
The best way to link is to link to a descriptive and useful anchor text, so a human reader knows the context of the linked website, and a search bot knows the keywords to rank the linked website with. So instead of using “click here” as the link to freewordpressthemes.com, why not say the best free wordpress themes around.
Most themes will highlight your links with underlines, bold text or with different colors. Sometimes, themes can also change the look of a link when you hover your mouse cursor over the text. You can also use the “title” attribute (that means <a href="link here" title="helpful text here"> so a tooltip would appear when your reader hovers his/her mouse over the link text.
Quotes and Blockquotes
Quoting and citing are important aspects of blogging. This is to acknowledge that we bloggers are not all-knowing, and we also need other online publications and other bloggers to cite as sources. Apart from hyperlinking, we also cite text.
If a text is short enough, we can usually use the <quote> or <q> tags.
However, sometimes we need to quote longer pieces of text.
So for longer lines of code, we use the <blockquote> tag, which is, I think, self explanatory. Most themes will auto-format blockquotes so that they will look nice, and that they will stand out from the rest of the text. This means your readers won’t mistake blockquoted text for something you wrote yourself.
It’s good to keep blockquotes to a manageable level. If your entire post consists of material quoted word for word elsewhere, then you might be branded a plagiarist (if you don’t have adequate citation). You might also get penalized by the search engines for duplicate content.
Lists
This is an ordered list. Ordered lists are called such, because:
- They are ordered numerically or alphabetically
- These lists can be sequential in ascending or descending order.
- The tag for ordered lists is <OL>, which stands for–you guessed it–ordered lists.
- The world needs order in order to survive.
- Really, now?
Now this is an unordered list. Unordered lists are important, too, because:
- Some believe in the chaos theory, meaning by nature, nothing is really in order.
- There are lists wherein the order is not important. This menas everything is equal, and you just want to list down stuff to better organize your thoughts.
- Also, designers should be mindful of laying out lists, because items that are too long tend to run off into the next line.
- The tag for unordered lists is <UL>, which stands for–you guessed it–unordered lists.
Now you can also create nested lists, meaning lists within lists.
- For example, this is a line in a top-level ordered list.
- This is a second-level ordered list.
- I can add items under another level, this time as an unordered list.
- Here’s another.
- And another one.
- And here’s another item under said list.
- Lists look stupid if you only have one item (I learned that in elementary school).
- So I’ve added a few more items so it looks neater.
- And here’s another second-level list.
- This time it’s an unordered list.
Enjoy listing!
Using the MORE Tag
One great thing with WordPress is that it allows you to break your text, so that no everything is displayed on the front page. This is good when you want to increase page views to your static pages, or when you want to prevent your home page from being too long.
So I’ve split this page into half with the MORE tag. You’ll have to click a link to read the rest of the entry.
Code
This particular tag is important to programmers or people who discuss HTML and design stuff on their blogs. When you use the <code> tag, the text enclosed is made to appear like plain HTML, and not the usual way that the text is formatted when you read them. According to Wordpress Codex,
By default, WordPress will convert unrecognized uses of < and > into characters which actually look like
& lt;and& gt; (without spaces), which will “look” like a < and a > when posted. Or, if it finds the use of an HTML tag within the post, it will use the tag like it is HTML and you will have funky looking text and a messed up layout.
And here are the equivalents, when you use the code tag.
< = & lt; > = & gt; / = & #47; ] = & #93; [ = & #91; ” = & #34; ‘ = & #39;
(again, without the spaces)
So for instance, I’m explaining how to link to freewordpressthemes.com, you can say: