Chou Seh-fu Blog

Blog title (header) – Grecian Empire Regular (transparent PNG file, distressed a little with Photoshop)

Tagline – Georgia, Bitstream Charter, Serif

Navbar – Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, Nimbus Sans L, sans-serif

Entry Titles – Berylium Bold by Larabie Fonts (@font-face kit generated at FontSquirrel.com).  This isn’t exactly the font I wanted here, but it’s pretty close.

Post Entries – Times New Roman, Times, serif.  Kind of a boring choice, but unlike a lot of fonts, Times New Roman contains all the glyphs for ancient Greek. And its thick stroke size makes it readable, to boot. (I’ve added a little extra space between words in the CSS.)

Greek Characters (large) – Theano Didot Regular.  A beautiful font for ancient Greek, but not as readable as Times New Roman at smaller font sizes. (See my page on Greek fonts for more details.)

Blog title (footer) – Caesar Dressing (embedded from Google Fonts)

After installing WordPress and activating a theme you’re happy with, it’s a good idea to set up a child theme. This allows you to customize the styles for the theme you’ve chosen – and more importantly, to keep these styles after the next theme update.

I did not know any of this before I set up the ancient Greek blog, and enthusiastically went to work updating the style sheet for the Twenty Ten theme. Then when it came time to update that theme, I lost all my changes! (There was a backup of a style sheet that had some – but not all – of the style changes that had been made.)

For a few months after that, I always kept a recent copy of my modified style sheet, so that it could be uploaded whenever a theme update was needed. And eventually I got around to setting up a child theme, and placed the modified style sheet into it.

But this really isn’t the best way to do this. In my case, the parent style sheet is about 1,400 lines long, and my child style sheet is 2,000 lines long. And much of the latter code is identical to the parent style sheet, which no doubt slows down load times.

At this stage it would take a bit of work to trim out all that redundant code. So take it from me – set up a child theme right from the start so you can keep your style changes during theme updates, and to keep your installation running as fast as possible.

UPDATE: Looks like my setup isn’t as bad as I thought. Since the child theme style sheet contains all the code from the parent, I didn’t add this line at the beginning of the child’s style sheet:

@import url("../twentyten/style.css");

Therefore, the parent style sheet doesn’t get imported at all – only the 2,000 line child theme style sheet is imported.

After WordPress was installed, I wanted to use the same theme and styles here as on my ancient Greek blog. Here’s how it was done…

Just to recap, after WordPress was installed, the initial default theme was Twenty Twelve:

Since the Twenty Eleven and Twenty Twelve themes were not needed, they were removed from the server for security purposes. At that point, the Twenty Ten theme was uploaded and applied on the WordPress dashboard:

Following this, my Twenty Ten child theme from the ancient Greek blog was uploaded and applied:

This child theme differs from the parent theme in the following ways:

1. Various font changes.
2. A Photoshop-generated weathered stone background is added to the body.
3. A Photoshop-generated gray paper background image and yellow borders is added to the wrapper. The former is a bit brighter than the gray paper background used on the rest of the site.
4. The visible blog title is actually not text, but a background PNG image (since the makers of the Grecian Empire Regular font might not appreciate their font being embedded for the web).
5. CSS 3 drop shadow behind the header image.
6. A blue Greek meander background image is displayed after each post, serving as a divider between blog posts.
7. An Athenian owl is added to the footer for decorative purposes.

Next, the default header image was swapped out in favor of the photo, “Poseidon Temple at Cape Sounion near Athens, Greece” by anastasios71 at Fotolia.com. The blog’s tagline and its styles were also changed, with the tagline being moved to the right.

Finally, a background image was added to the widget area, and a copyright notice was added to the footer with the Blog Copyright plugin by Blog Traffic Exchange.

A curious problem happened to me recently when using GoDaddy’s automated WordPress installer for this blog.

I tried to install WordPress into the default /wordpress/ folder, but the automated system wouldn’t let me. The automated system “remembered” that I had previously installed WordPress into this folder a year earlier (for my ancient Greek blog)…even though that /wordpress/ folder did not exist anymore! (Last year I moved the ancient Greek blog to the /blog/ folder.)

This would not have been a big issue, but the system then informed me that the install into the /wordpress/ folder had failed, and that I should de-install it.

Which I did.  Only to discover that the system remembered the database which was originally linked to the /wordpress/ folder…and began deleting the database tied to the ancient Greek (/blog/) installation of WordPress.

Six months of posts gone in a puff of electrons!

Fortunately I had a backup, and was able to re-create the database and restore it. (Special thanks to the GoDaddy support team – there was a bit of problem with the re-creation step.)

Moral: Be wary of the automated WordPress installation system if you’re installing more than one blog onto your site. And always make db backups.

There is an automatic installation process for WordPress on GoDaddy, but often it is necessary to manually install WordPress (last year, I tried using it to install WordPress on 4 different sites hosted by GoDaddy, and their automatic system failed 75% of the time).

My suggestion is that you skip the automatic WordPress installation entirely, and perform a clean manual install, starting at Step #2.

Checklist:

1. If you’ve tried the automatic installation and it fails, you need to uninstall it. While there is an automatic uninstall, I have never –NEVER– seen it work successfully. So you’ll have to do a manual uninstall:
   1. Use Dreamweaver or Filezilla to delete the WordPress folder on your online site.
   2. Make sure that a MySQL database for WordPress wasn’t created:
      1. Click on Web Hosting on the GoDaddy page.
      2. Click on the website you tried to install WordPress, and click Launch.
      3. Click on Databases > MySQL.
      4. If the database was created, delete it by clicking the X (Delete) icon.
2. You now need to create a WordPress database.
   1. Make sure you are logged into GoDaddy.
   2. Click on the black My Account button and choose Web Hosting.
   3. Click on the website you tried to install WordPress, and click Launch.
   4. Click on Databases > MySQL.
   5. Click Create Database button.
   6. Description: WordPress
   7. MySQL Database/User Name: {3 letters followed by 13 numbers}
      Database/User Name: ______________________________
   8. Password & Confirm Password: {your database password}
      Database Password: ______________________________
   9. MySQL Version: 5.0
   10. Allow Direct Database Access: No
   11. Write down your MySQL Database / Username and Password.
   12. Click OK.
   13. During database creation, the Status for your database will read: Pending Setup.
   14. When the process is complete, the status will say: Setup. (This step can take 30 minutes to complete.)
   15. Click on the Actions button and choose Details. Write down your Host Name.
       Host Name: ______________________________
   16. Do not close this browser window or tab!  Proceed to Step 3.
3. In another browser tab, get the official detailed instructions for installing WordPress. (If the procedure is no longer available on this link, Google “install WordPress“).
4. Download the latest version of WordPress from the page. This is available from the large red Download button on the top right-hand side of the page.
5. When the download is complete, drag the downloaded WordPress folder into the offline directory containing your website. (You may rename the wordpress directory to blog, if you wish.)
6. Double-click on wordpress (or blog) directory. Copy wp-config-sample.php file and rename the copy to wp-config.php.
7. Edit the wp-config.php file with Database Name, Database User Name, Database Password, and Database Host.  (Remember with GoDaddy, the Database Name and the Database User Name are the same.) You may cut and paste this information into the file from the (still-open) browser tab from step 2(O).
8. If using NotePad++ for editing, click Format and make sure the file is encoded in ANSI. Do not encode in UTF-8.  Save the file.
9. Use Dreamweaver or Filezilla to upload the wordpress or blog directory to your online site. This takes about 20 minutes.
10. Run the install script from a browser window (eg: http://yourSiteName.com/blog/wp-admin/install.php).  Do not put “www.” before “yourSiteName“!
11. Set up your blog User Name and Password (these should be different from your Database User Name and Database Password). You will also need to supply your e-mail address.
    Blog User Name: ______________________________
    Blog Password: ______________________________

At present, the default theme is Twenty Twelve, which results in the first page of your blog looking something like this: