Typekit Made Simpla
January 29, 2010
The previous episode of Typekit Tales focused on the hero’s struggles with Typekit at WordPress.com, and involved his getting help. Help did arrive, followed by some thoughts about easing the struggle.
This post is intended to ease the struggle for those who follow the hero along the Simpla path: in other words, for bloggers who use the Simpla theme, especially at WordPress.com. In order to apply change the fonts you use, here is how to refer to some of the parts of your blog.
- Everything*: body
- Blog title: #header h1
- Blog tagline: #header p
- Post title: .entrytitle h2
- Title of sidebar sections, including widgets: #sidebar h2
* Note that everything means everything not overruled by more specific CSS selectors.
I used Anisette STD Petite for everything, then Intruder Alert for the headings. As before, I chose those particular typefaces because they are distinctive rather than because I think that they improve the blog. So they will survive at this blog only in the illustrative image.
The post title should probably read Typekit for the Simpla Theme, but I couldn’t resist the one you see above.
iPad Haikus
January 28, 2010
iPad video
makes me want a date with one
but not more than that
Mashable should give
the iPad to me: that thing
costs too much to buy
What to blog about?
iPad? State of union?
No: Boston haggis.
Trying Typekit
January 27, 2010
Intruder Alert! That’s the name of the font currently gracing the title (Changing Way) at the top of this blog.
I chose that particular font to check whether I could get Typekit working here at WordPress.com. It’s hardly a subtle change from Tahoma, the main heading font for this blog, and it looks nothing like Georgia, the workhouse here. For this testing, I wanted an intrusive font, and was amused when I found one appropriate in name as well as in appearance.
This isn’t the first time I’ve tried Typekit, or posted about it. In my earlier post, I recommended that Typekit be available at WordPress.com, and linked it to the CSS upgrade.
Typekit has since arrived at WordPress.com, but doesn’t require the CSS upgrade. Well, in a way it does. Consider the following barriers to changing the CSS on a WordPress.com blog: (1) it costs money; (2) it requires knowledge of CSS; (3) it requires knowledge of the way CSS is used in the blog’s particular theme.
I find the third and last of these barriers to be the highest. What heading level does a WordPress theme use for the blog title? for the tagline? for the post title? for headings in the sidebar? And what other selectors (besides h1, h2, etc.) are used, and how are they used? The answer varies between themes.
The theme I’m currently using, Simpla, uses h1 for the blog title. So to test Typekit, I used its kit editor to associate h1 with the distinctive Intruder Alert. That font was for some reason applied to the blog’s tagline (rather than to its title).
I emailed Typekit support over the weekend, and today received a response. I needed to use the selector #header h1. At a more general level, I need to be aware of CSS selector specificity.
My point, and I do have one, and I am getting to it, is similar to this one. Getting TypeKit to work on your blog can be frustrating especially if you are not familiar with CSS. That’s a quote from (and a link to) a guide to using Typekit at WordPress.com. The guide is good, but the quote could be more specific. You need to be familiar with the CSS of the theme.
My CSS isn’t terrible. I’ve tweaked a few themes, including Simpla for this blog. I found Typekit it harder to apply Typekit to that CSS than I did to tune the CSS itself.
I suspect that using Typekit is trickier than editing CSS. I’m generalizing, not only from my own experience, but from what others have written (in, for example, a post in the WordPress.com forums).
So, although Typekit has lower financial barriers to use than the CSS upgrade, it has higher overall barriers to use. I have concerns about this. One is that it’ll cause frustration for WordPress.com bloggers who see that they can try Typekit for free. The other is that Typekit support may be swamped. Anyway, time to email thanks to the Typekitter who supported me.
Google Voice: Two Steps Forward,…
January 26, 2010
One recent step takes Google Voice onto the iPhone. As Om reports, it’s browser-based (HTML5). Hence it sidesteps security at the iPhone app store.
A few days ago, Michael Arrington declared himself so besotted with Google Voice that he followed its beckoning extension into Chrome from Safari. Said extension adds click (a phone number on a web page) to call (via Google Voice) to the Chrome browser.
The above two steps have a few things in common: about Google Voice; positive; something of a score for Google over Apple; written by the founder of a blog that grew into a New Media Property (rather than delegated to one of several other writers at said property).
The third and last step I’ll describe in this post offers a contrast with the first two. It’s a step backwards for Google Voice. GV hasn’t worked on my Android G1 pretty much since I moved from Boston to Silver Spring.
I submitted a support ticket at the GV site a few days ago, but have yet to hear anything. Meanwhile, all the calls that I was hoping would be free (or very cheap, in the case of international calls) fail over to a “real” phone number, and T-Mobile bills for real money.
I also posted about this elsewhere. Perhaps that’s why my attempt to give away GV invites didn’t work…
SoundCloud and Partners
January 25, 2010
Two SoundCloud partners seem particularly interesting right now: The Hype Machine and Automattic. The former partnership has just been announced: I first read about it at TechCrunch, but the post there seems rather hastily written; there is a better account of what it means for various creatures in the ecosystem at the SoundCloud blog.
The partnership between SoundCloud and Automattic takes the form of a shortcode enabling the use of the SoundCloud music player on WordPress.com blogs. This blog, despite its .org URL, is currently hosted at WordPress.com. So let’s use that player to hear a track on one of the albums I’m looking forward to.
(The Mumford and Sons album, Sigh No More, isn’t out in the USA yet.)
Edit, a little later: SoundCloud seems to be running really slowly today; I don’t know if it has anything to do with the Hype Machine connection. Of course, having criticized the TC post as hasty, I found a couple of things that needed correcting in this very post.
OpenSource.com
January 25, 2010
Now there’s a domain for you. It’s actually owned by Red Hat. It’s a place to explore what happens when the open source way is applied to the world.
The site is powered by Drupal software, and is hosted by Acquia. I saw this news via Dries.
I then went over to grab the username Andrew.
WordPress Foundation Founded
January 22, 2010
Founder Matt announced the founding of the WordPress Foundation with – what else – a post on a WordPress blog. I saw the news via ReadWriteJolie, whose post is a mix of reporting and rejoicing.
Rather than covering the same ground, I’ll add that:
- The theme for the Foundation’s blog is Twenty Ten, “The 2010 default theme for WordPress.” It’s good to see Kubrik giving way to a far cleaner theme.
- Matt acknowledges that we expected to see the WordPress Foundation say “Hello World” a while ago. He does so with phrases such as slow cookin’ makes good eatin’ and ducks in a row. If I were a duck, I’d be nervous.
Social Distractions From Driving
January 20, 2010
I’ve been driving while distracted quite a lot over the last seven weeks or so. I’ve been distracted from driving itself by finding my way around the Silver Spring area, to which I moved in early December. I’ve often also been distracted by kids in the back of the car: are we nearly there? I’m hungry, etc.
So my actions suggest that I consider a certain amount of distraction while driving to be reasonable. Now that it’s possible to turn cars into wireless wagons, a whole range of social media distractions are becoming available. Mashable Greg provided an interesting account of such distractions.
My guess at an answer is that driving while cellphoning will top the list of dangerous social distractions for the forseeable future. But it is just a guess, and systematic research about the effects of driving of specific social behaviors is needed. Credit goes to Ford for conducting, and publishing the results of, such research.
Wanted: Fail Whapple
January 20, 2010
Toward the top of my feeds this morning, I saw:
- Anticipating the Apple Tablet: When journalism becomes fanfiction.
- Twitter Down and variations on that theme.
It occurred to me that I’d like to see an image made by mashing up the Apple Icon and the Fail Whale. In fact, I can see it, but my skill with Aviary and other graphics tools is too limited to show it to you.
I should note that I don’t think that the Apple Tablet will fail. It will be overpriced and over-demanded (which, you may argue, will prove that it wasn’t overpriced). I agree with self-professed Apple addict Paul Carr that there’s too much Tablet talk on the tech blogs right now. I also admire his (or his editor’s) post title: it displays such curmudgeonly craft that I thought it was Arrington.
