All those who have emailed me with questions about designing a MediaWiki skin, take note. Now there is a book for you. Packt Publishing has released a book called MediaWiki Skins Design. With the consent of the publisher, I’m releasing a sample chapter (Chapter 8, Social Networking and MediaWiki) of the book here on Squirrel Tao. Clicking the link will bring up a pdf version of the chapter. Topics include how to embed Twitter and YouTube content and how to enable social bookmarking on your wiki.

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I’ve become overly obsessive about making MediaWiki skins or something, because this morning on impulse, I started making a new color scheme for the Rounded Blue MediaWiki skin I made yesterday. Once I had started, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stop until I was finished, or else it would bug me. I had really intended to do other things today, but I can’t concentrate on anything else, anyway, now that I have become so obsessive about making skins the last couple of days. The good news is that I was able to change the color scheme of the Rounded Blue skin with very minimal effort. That should show readers how easy it is to customize a skin. Just change the colors in the image files, change the background color, change the background image or get rid of it, change the link colors and change the button and bullet colors if necessary. If necessary, adjust the positioning of the content area and the left column up or down, along with the p-cactions div tag. Voila, a new look. continue reading »

Today, using my own MediaWiki skin as the basis, I altered it to make it look like the Rounded Blue Edition WordPress theme. It is available for download. Click here to go to the download page and view a small thumbnail screenshot of the Rounded Blue Edition MediaWiki skin.

To use it, just unzip it and upload it into your MediaWiki installation’s skins directory. The path to the stylesheet is relative: skins/roundedblue/main.css. Change the path if for some reason the stylesheet is not being applied. You’ll find the path in the roundedblue.php file, in the HTML head section, right underneath the title tag.

The Photoshop images that are used for the header background image, the rounded corner content boxes, etc. are available at itcouldbethisone.com for download. continue reading »

I’ve finally gotten around to creating a custom skin for the Living Philosophy Wiki. Now it has the same look and feel as the Squirrel Tao blog. Like the Squirrel Tao theme, it is based upon a customization of the Rounded V2 WordPress theme by Ghyslain Armand. In the process of customizing my wiki skin, I’ve also integrated the blog with the wiki, so that both share a navigation bar in common.

The First Stumbling Block – A Broken Stylesheet Link

I had started to create a custom skin several times in the past, using the instructions that can be found on the Jnana Base wiki, only to encounter a problem after Step 8. That is, I would make a copy of the default monobook skin and rename it. I would change “monobook” to my own skin name, everywhere the word “monobook” appeared within my own skin php file. I would upload my new skin and set my personal preference to use this skin. Voila, I would excitedly preview my work only to see completely unstyled HTML, all laid out in one single column, in Times New Roman, with huge H1 headings and the whole bit. It turned out that the link to the stylesheet was broken. continue reading »

Before seeing the rounded-v2 theme by Ghyslain Armand, I would never have considered the color brown as a main color to use in a website. Now I love it. It allows darkness in a color scheme without reverting to the old neon-on-black look of early websites. It has a sophistication about it that black sites are often lacking. Very dark sites that are almost, but not quite, black can also have this kind of sophistication. Black can still look sophisticated, too, depending upon how it is used in the overall design, of course. Generally, though, dark sites tend to me to look amateurish or outdated if not well-done. Since choosing brown for my new design, I notice other brown sites more these days. Another brown website I found today is a blog on the 9Rules network, LeliaThomas.com. Lelia is an artist, and she showcases her portfolio in her blog. continue reading »

I’ve been a busy squirrel over this three day Labor Day week-end, redesigning my Squirrel Tao theme, as well as testing and integrating numerous WordPress plugins and retagging and recategorizing all of my posts. Last night, I went live with the Squirrel Tao makeover. My reasons for the redesign, so soon after launching Squirrel Tao, were several. First, I had become dissatisfied with the minimalism of my previous theme. It came to seem not only boring, but also constricting in its very elegance. continue reading »

I guess I’m less jaded and sophisticated than most of the folks on Digg.com, because most of them seemed distinctly unimpressed by Widgetoko.com, which is a blog all about – blog widgets! Not me! I feel as excited about it as I used to feel about copying and pasting all the free javascripts available on the good, old javascript sites! I know all about restraint and moderation, having already gone through a phase of foolish design excess. I may just enjoy looking at the widgets and knowing that they exist. Out of the bunch, there just may be one or two that make it easy for me to do something that is cool and useful to me. After all, what’s the worst that could happen? My blog hasn’t validated as XMTML transitional ever since I added LibraryThing and Pandora blog widgets. Oh no! Anyway, some of these diggers remind me of the people who used to be the HTML purists and didn’t want anybody to have images or, even worse, Flash on their websites. Sorry, guys, I respect your technical expertise, but you’re just a wee bit dour and sour about it If I sin as badly as I did when I spent all my time downloading fun fonts that made my text impossible to read and that nobody else had installed on their PC, then I shall repent dearly. But I think I’ve become wiser since those reckless errors of my youth.

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This was part of my harvest from my foray into Digg.com yesterday. I hadn’t been on Digg in several weeks, and I was glad I took a look. I found a cool CSS resource. CSS-galleries.com has a single RSS feed of all the major CSS showcase gallery sites. The ProfitPapers website has a collection of web 2.0 design tutorials. The “web 2.0″ part of the title may be a little misleading. These are design tutorials, and all of them cover design topics already very well covered in the design community. Some people appear to be using “web 2.0″ to denote what they see as the currently trendy style. I’ve yet to look through these tutorials extensively, but I’m always on the look-out for a better way to make rounded corner content boxes – my personal pet peeve. When I saw that several of the tutorials were about rounded corners, it caught my eye.

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This isn’t a new post in the Design by Fire blog, but it’s the first time I’ve read it. I loved it. It gave me an oh so emotionally satisfying laugh, in addition to educating me about web design. (I may use CSS and elastic layout these days, but I don’t give every link a title tag. I still have much to learn from the design gurus and the web standardistas!) The Design by Fire post I love so much is called “Design Eye for the Usability Guy“, and if you are interested in web design and haven’t read it yet, please treat yourself to it.

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