Green IS cheesy.

Well… where to start?

The other day I read a complaint on Keoblog that all the wordpress blogs look the same: Kubrick theme. Well, I used to use it too. With that dark image in the header which didn’t fit there at all.

So I thought it was time to do a redesign… I did some search and found a template containing the functions that I need to call in proper loops. Needless to say, I’d hate it if I had to explore all the wordpress functions just to make a different design. I started writing the css from scratch and editing the template files. The design was created in the Chaotic Way (tm). I had no idea what I was about to create, I just knew that I wanted the header image to stay where it was and that I would like to have some light green (CF0, more exactly) in it.

I couldn’t get the colours right (as usual). It was looking real awful, until I tried to make the whole background (which was previously white, black, and all kinds of grey) green. Suddenly, I got a surprisingly good looking contrast. The rest was a piece of cake… Well, in fact it all took me about 10 hours and that’s without the bubble strip (which I added today) and smilies. ^^

Oh yeah, smilies… you know the gorgeous looking smilies I used to have here? They are gone (and I also broke the backward compatibility, so some of them will not be displayed and you will see text instead). They were way too big and broke the text flow, so I basically stopped using them in the text. And they were transparent gif’s. Ooops, as we all know, gif has no partial transparency, so the borders of the smiley are just fading to white. If you put such a smiley on a black background, it is ugly. So I took the small invision smilies (16x16 pixels) and had some fun with GIMP (normally I don’t link to such obvious things, but I think I should at least share a little bit of google love).

How to make full transparent images in GIMP? First, you have to convert the picture (if it is indexed) to RGB (use menu Image > Mode > RGB). Now you just choose Layer > Transparency > Color to alpha. Then you have to repaint (or copy from a backup that you had made) the places which really should be white (like eyes). There is one drawback to this method: the light parts are semi-transparent. You can either copy these parts from the original smiley or just let them be semi-transparent (it usually doesn’t hurt to have the smiley a bit darker on a dark background and it will look exactly the same as original on white background).

Oh well, that’s it… no more writing for me… now it’s your turn to write your remarks (noticed the “be the first to comment”? ;-))