Fixing CSS and Tweaking The Talian Theme

Okay, it’s Saturday, it’s too cold to go outside for more than a brief, well-layered walk, and so therefore I’ve been making some modifications to the CSS file for the blog. There were a couple of issues that were bothering me with this otherwise excellent theme:

Virtual Assistance For Business : Free Premium WordPress blog theme “Talian” released. An elegant theme that is very much close to my heart.

The theme designer hasn’t responded to comments requesting fixes or information for several months. It’s likely that he’s not that interested in supporting his free themes, just in designing them. Which is perfectly acceptable to me, because after all.. they’re free.

Actually, there were a lot of little things that I’d already fixed. But the major ones were that for some reason, the theme author chose to style the em tag so that not only was the text not in italic, it was smaller, lighter in color, and added an extra line break above and below the tagged text. Why? I don’t know. It originally looked like this:

em {
padding: 0px;
font-size: 11px;
font-style: normal;
font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
color: #666666;
clear: both;
display: block;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
margin-left: 0px;
}
and now it looks like this
em {
padding: 0px;
font-style: italic;
color: #000000;
margin-top: 10px;
margin-right: 0px;
margin-bottom: 0px;
margin-left: 0px;
}


Of course, it’s overkill, it would look just fine if I deleted it from the spreadsheet but I do like that it uses a darker color and so on. It doesn’t require the font-style: italic; declaration. I have no idea why the designer would add the clear: both; display: block; declarations – that’s what was causing the unwanted line breaks, I think.

I also needed to somehow widen the center column so that it would take the 400 to 500px wide photo images that I’ve come to prefer. My Flickr page has one setting for copying my images that assumes a 500px width, so I kind of needed to do this sooner rather than later.

The other stuff that I had previously done:

• Edited non-standard English (still some to go)
• Changed the centered header to a CSS-styled Flickr badge
• Added one or two widgets (still need to fix a couple of things)

The center content is now wide enough to accomodate the bigger images. The wrap was originally 930px, the container was originally 920px, the header and content were originally 900px. The left content and right content had to be widened so that they totalled 950px, the same as the content and header width, and the left-post had to be widened from 480px to be about 10px wider than my largest image width. I also increased the size of the post-entry text… may think about making the font darker or more readable, too.

#wrap_talia {
width: 980px;
margin-top: 0px;
margin-right: auto;
margin-bottom: 0px;
margin-left: auto;
}

#container_talia {
margin: 0px;
float: left;
width: 970px;
}

#header_talia {
float: left;
width: 950px;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 10px;
height: 120px;
}

#content_talia {
float: left;
width: 950px;
padding-right: 10px;
padding-left: 0px;
position: relative;
}
.right-content-talia {
float: right;
width: 725px;
}

.left-content-talia {
float: left;
width: 225px;
}

#left-post {
width: 510px;
font-size: 100%;
padding-right: 0px;
padding-left: 0px;
float: left;
position: relative;
padding-top: 20px;
}
UPDATE: Welcome to all the recent visitors via StumbleUpon! Since this post was written, I did manage to remove the stubborn secton that was titled in non-standard English; it turned out to be a widget and was listed by name on the widgets page. I didn’t figure this out until after upgrading to 2.5.1. This theme is pretty much compatible with 2.5.1 and I haven’t messed with it much, aside from trying to get the formatting for custom fields to stop overflowing the center section. Still have to find where an errant width setting from higher up in the style sheet is being invoked in the meta tags.

Be careful out there, StumbleUponers, I picked up a very nasty virus while Stumbling one night and nearly lost everything I had. Be sure your virus definitions are rock-solid.

[tags]Wordpress themes, Talian, CSS[/tags]