And here’s the “Jack-O-Lantern” that resulted:

Special thanks to Blender Cookie and Jonathon Williamson for sharing their invaluable knowledge.

Cleaning House

I recently decided that I wanted to add a little organization to my sidebar. Previously, links of different groups ran together with the post categories, archives, meta and links under different categories, as modules all jumbled together. There was no distinguishing one from the other. It had bugged me for some time.
Also, I didn’t necessarily like viewers of my blog seeing the “login” section simply because there was no need for them to. At the same time, I wanted to make it convenient for me to get to when I wanted to log in.

My solution? The use of tabs to logically group categories, archives and the meta/login modules together. This would then allow me to group all links together in their own section, and keep the “meta” section out of the view of users but still allowing me to get to it rather easily.

“A Great Tab System”

So off I went to find a good jquery tab system. There are various systems out there, from the straight forward “click-change” to more robust plugin-geared tabs with animated transitions. In my search, I came across a rather nice modular-based one. It treats the labels for the tabs across the top as an “unordered list”. Brilliant!

This allows for adding tabs as you go along with very little overhead. Quite nice. Besides the implications of using something like this to “dynamically” generate tabs using a database-driven site, i.e. something like WordPress—mmm, my favorite ; ) —it grants you a generous level of control over the tab states (“hover,” “active,” and so on), so that you can let your users know what tab is currently active, for example.

The tab system is found on Queness. The tutorial that the owner of the blog has set forth is well-written and fairly easy to follow, but keep in mind that it’s written specifically for duplication of the tab setup that he has in his own sidebar. For customizing, some may consider this a little more involved/advanced, so if your jquery and CSS skills are basic, expect customization to take some time and learning. Otherwise, it was fairly simple to figure out.

Trailer

UPDATE: View the final ax-transformation vid here.

Step 1: Change your brush shape

Go to the Brush Tip Shape in the “Brushes” palette (F5). Here, you will find a diagram, similar to the one below, for your brush tip:

Click on one of the points around the circle and drag in to “squeeze” the brush tip into something more akin to a “hair” strand. You can also rotate the angle by grabbing the diagram at the “arrow” and rotating it at whatever angle you like. Refer to the example below:

This takes care of the brush tip shape. Now let’s set it up for “hairs”—plural.

Step 2: Scatter

Now, click on and highlight “Scattering” (Fig. 1 – 1).

Fig. 1 - 1

The default setting should work fine, but if not, set your “Scatter” to something like “38%”. Everything else, you can leave alone. Go to the next step.

Step 3: Shape Dynamics

Click on and highlight “Shape Dynamics”. For “Size Jitter,” I highly recommend setting “control” to Pen Pressure. This will cause your brush to shrink and expand depending on the level of pressure applied. This way, you can get “strands” of varying length, for a more realistic look.
Also, change the “Angle Jitter” control to “Direction.” You can also use “Initial Direction.” These settings will control the “grain” or “direction” of the strands of fur. Everything else, you can leave alone. Refer to Fig. 1 – 2:

Fig. 1 - 2

Step 4: Other Dynamics

Finally, click and highlight “Other Dynamics” and change the “Opacity Jitter” control to “Pen Pressure” and the “Flow Jitter” to “Pen Pressure,” as well. This will add softness and hardness, accordingly, to your brush strokes, according to the level of pressure that you apply. And that’s it. (See the final settings below.)

Final Settings

This post can also be found on siteCLIQUE.com

What do you do when you want the homepage link to be a link to the posts page, and not a static page? For anyone that has used WordPress before, you know that this is nearly impossible to pull off. No matter what combination of settings you use in the admin “Reading” section, this cannot be done. And trying to do it with the right php tags is just as difficult. Well, WordPress 2.7+ has brought something special to the table. Instead of some creative hacking, you can simply put the right php code in your sidebar (or header) document. Where you would normally place the code:
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li'); ?>

You can now put:
<?php wp_page_menu('show_home=1'); ?>

. . . in its place. This will then create a link called “Home” automatically in your navigation bar, and then list any other pages that you have created, thereafter. The auto-created “Home” link will now take you to the index page, where your posts are listed. Very clever 2.7. Way to go!

This post can also be found on siteCLIQUE.com

As I did my research, I was surprised to find that the various techniques deployed to activate this feature were very evasive; nothing that you would call native or simple. This perplexed me—I would have expected to find something more built-in.

Well, as I dug deeper, I found that there is something simpler— something much more native and natural. Despite this fact, finding documentation on the technique was surprisingly difficult and almost non-existent. I assume this is because it is new to version 2.7. Read below to see how it’s done . . .

Here’s what you do: simply add the class “.current_page_item a” to your stylesheet (style.css) along with whatever rules you need to style this class, and voila! It’s done.

Example:

.current_page_view a {

background: ('images/active_img.jpg');

Note: In order to change the actual color of the text, you will need to add the rule “!important” to your color property, in order to get it to change. Everything else should behave as normal.

Example:

.current_page_item a {

color: gray !important;

}


You can also view this post on siteCLIQUE.com.

One of my favorite aspects of the film is an interesting one: Daft Punk will be doing the music! Crazy, huh? Being a Daft Punk fan myself, I can’t wait to see what they have to bring to the table. In many ways, this seems like a perfect fit. We’ll see what happens.

As far as the title, many dislike the current “TR2N” so chances are it will be changed before its release. I thought that I would just throw in my two cents. Here’s what I came up with:

• Tron2: The Wrath of Tron!
• Tron Reloaded
• Tron2: Revenge of the User

Here’s a “pirated” sneak preview of the film, which was originally shown at last year’s Comic Con:

This post can also be found on siteCLIQUE.com