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Archive for the ‘Web design & development’ Category

MiniCard Theme for WordPress – a cool free business card/social network theme

November 10, 2009 | Published in: Web design & development | Tags: , , , , , , 285

minicard

Want more MiniCard goodness? Purchase the premium pack to gain access to the in-built AJAX RSS feed module, several new sub-themes, priority support, and the warm fuzzy feeling you get by supporting the author! Premium is £25 GBP.

I am releasing my MiniCard theme for wordpress which supports hCard/vCard microformats, tonnes of social networks, showing some portfolio items (optional), and more – all controllable from its own Theme Config page. This theme is free and licensed under GPL – there is also a premium pack available with many theme variations, and the footer feed functionality.

Read more for more information and the download links. I hope you find this theme useful and spread the word :)

Continue reading MiniCard Theme for WordPress – a cool free business card/social network theme»

Creating ‘Web 2.0′ Layouts using strips

November 13, 2008 | Published in: Web design & development | Tags: , , , , 10

Creating Layouts using strips

I’ve seen the ‘web 2.0′ layout (full width background, centred content) done in some pretty wacky and different ways, the worst being a background image and then fixed height sections laid on top (if the content wraps or the text is resized…bam..broken layout).

Because of this I am going to demonstrate the method I use – content strips. Hopefully this will be useful to CSS beginners who want to code this type of layout.

Continue reading Creating ‘Web 2.0′ Layouts using strips»

Introducing: Theme Slice

Theme Slice is an exciting take on the current crop of Slicing services out there; a PSD to WordPress Theme conversion service; brought to you by Anthony Brewitt and yours truly, Mike Jolley. You send in your mock up design and Theme Slice will send you back a full WordPress Theme based on your design. Read on to learn more.

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Creating an accessible yet sexy search box with CSS

Create a Search BoxSearch boxes: integral parts of many websites but often neglected in terms of markup and style. When considering both accessibility and semantics, marking up a a search box can be a little awkward depending on the look you are trying to achieve.

In this post I will suggest some methods of marking up your search boxes, and show a neat way of styling it using css and a few images.

Continue reading Creating an accessible yet sexy search box with CSS»

Easy jQuery Pull Quotes

Pull QuotesPull quotes, lift-out quotes, or call-outs are a handy method of drawing reader’s attention to a section of text. Recently, on a couple of client projects, I’ve seen the need to enhance large blocks of text so the user could skim read them without missing the really important parts. Pull quotes seemed perfect for this, so I created a small jQuery script to take care of them.

In this article I demonstrate an easy method of creating pull quotes from a block of text using jQuery (a JavaScript library), CSS, and the html span element. I hope you find this method useful.

Continue reading Easy jQuery Pull Quotes»

Anti-aliased Rounded corners with JQuery

Rounded CornersRecently I’ve been searching for a method of creating nice looking rounded corners with Javascript & JQuery.

First I found the “JQuery Corner” plugin for rounded corners, but was disappointed that it did not include smooth, anti-aliased corners.

I then did some more google-trawling and found this post, which contained a modified version of Curvy Corners for use with JQuery. Now this script was much much better.

However…the filesize was a massive 40kb, way too big for production use, and to make things worse the code was not compatible with packer so I could not reduce the filesize.

Well, I got busy, and fixed the errors. It is now fully packer friendly meaning easy rounded corners in JQuery at only 9kb 8kb 15kb 20kb 16kb 10kb. Excellent. Read more for the download link.

Continue reading Anti-aliased Rounded corners with JQuery»

About this site

Blue Anvil is the online web design journal & portfolio of , a web designer from Norfolk, England. Read More »
MiniCard Theme for WordPress
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  • Out of the blue - More

    • Download Monitor 3.3.5 Tagged for release

      The latest update to Download Monitor for WordPress has been released; this version comes with a many fixes and some new features, such as improved sorting. For full details view the readme; you can grab the plugin here.

    • Closing the Forums

      Just posting to let current users know that I’m closing the forum on Blue-Anvil. This is mainly due to spam-registrations getting out of hand and being a general nuisance. I will be posting good topics as FAQ items within posts if applicable.

      Please note that you can still post and get help for my plugins/themes by posting on the wordpress.org website.

    • Show off your MiniCard!

      Are you a user of the WordPress MiniCard theme? Its been downloaded over 14,000 times so far!

      If you have used it as-is, made your own child-theme or done something creative with it, please show off your MiniCard’s in the comments, I’d love to see how the theme is being used!

    • Spam Stopper updated for WordPress 3.0

      My Spam Stopper plugin has been updated for WordPress 3.0 (version 3.1.3) – you can grab it here. Sorry this update took longer than my other plugins but this one gets less lovin’ – if you want to change that feel free to donate, spread the word, or rate it on the WordPress.org plugin page.