ltlblg

A useful article on novel uses for Photoshop’s “blending options”. Very handy for icon design…

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Well, I’ve continued to tinker with the ltlblg theme, and as you can see, it now sports a rather fetching dark blue colour scheme. Don’t worry though, the white version is still avaiable by clicking the snazzy little circular button in the top right. I’ve also created a custom feed icon, which fits better with the two color schemes.

The other main feature addition is the possibility of integration with Twitter. Using Alex King’s Twitter Tools, you can have your blog include all your twitter posts. What’s more, with the ltlblg theme, you can have those posts styled seperately, so they stand out, with a cute little bird icon. Details on how to set this up are included in the readme.

A good post on how to create beautiful watercolour style images with Photoshop.

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[Update: New features have been added, which are discussed here. The download link on this page is still up-to-date.]

I started this blog a few weeks ago, and its intention was to be a super-lightweight tumblelog, with the odd longer post if I felt like it. There’s a heavy emphasis on the written word and super duper simplicity; I wanted to strip down the blog format to as simple a design as possible. ltlblg is what I came up with. I’m certain many people will think the design is boring, but I love simplicity, and I like to let the written word take centre stage.

I’m not too possessive when it comes to design (or anything for that matter really) so I’ve decided to release the theme under the GPL just in case anyone else fancied it. The PHP and CSS are bare-bones, just the way I like them, but they’re well commented, so it should be easy for even beginners to tweak the look and functions. The ltlblg theme offers the following features:

Asides built in
This blog is somewhere between a tumblelog and a blog, so I felt it necessary to include the possibility for both asides and titled posts (like this one). For a little more on what asides are about, see Matt’s post on them. Asides are built into the ltlblg theme, and to use them you need to change only one value in the template files. This is easy to do, even for beginners.

Quote styling

I often quote myself. It adds spice to my conversation.
-George Bernard Shaw

I like to sometimes include quotes in my posts, and to help the wise words of history stand out you can use super simple tags to mark out what you want emphasised. See readme in the zip file on how to do this (it’s easy).

Simple code
The code (particularly the CSS) is laid out in a very simple fashion, and commented extensively, so it’s a snip to change colours, fonts or layout.

That’s it!
Ok, so that’s not a very long feature list, but that’s kind of the point. ltlblg is super-lightweight, loads fast, and looks good.

I hope that if anyone chooses to use it, they enjoy it, and if you do, post a comment below. Likewise, if you have any questions, you can post them below too.

Disclaimer: I should point out that I’m on a Mac, and although the theme looks good on Safari and Firefox, I haven’t had time to test it on Internet Explorer yet. I will do so shortly and tweak it if necessary.

New designs for British coinage. These are absolutely beautiful, beautiful enough for me to bother posting something that’s already on kottke.