OK, there were only a bit more than 2000 lines of CSS in the basic style of Twelve Eleven theme of WordPress, and today I revised half of it, shrinking the code as much as possible. I do not know (yet) how to minify programmatically a file CSS, so I am checking line after line everything.
Diving in the code helped me in finding interesting piece of web design code, that I was unaware of like the measurement ex
that value the x-height of a font, the text-overflow:ellipsis
and a wonderful piece of animation that it is the input search of this theme.
I am still quite unhappy about the redundancy of the code (too many nested tags dependency), the reset of Eric Mayer (which I do not find positive at all) or finding pieces of empty CSS classes and that we load all the CSS in one big files while I know that is possible to load various CSS in one only HTTP request. So a little by little I am cleaning up, and trying to remove all the silly nesting (a “return” and a “tab indentation” occupy 2 bites). I already reduced the code to 1500 lines. And even some silly part of html too I commented through PHP.
Anyway, what I am most proud of, it is not the cleaning of the code, but the implementation of WebKit and have the possibility to insert my logo using proper typography. For the moment I am working with 3 fonts mainly: Adobe Pro Garamond, Helvetica Neue and obviously Ltc Bodoni 175. It is a pleasure to work finally on the web with typography, I am about to cry by the sheer joy of it.
It is a pity that I do not have enough time to fix more my blog web page and I am obliged to go to bed because it is 2 AM in the morning. Anyway I changed a bit the style and the blog start to have the shape that I want. Still many details to take care, but at least I am reaching there.
Of my objective list I can move forward of a 20% the first objective (a lot of work need to be done there)
- Get the most similar WordPress theme to my objective: Write HTML5 & Responsive Design (Twenty Eleven by WordPress), than strip the whole CSS, loading only the essential. Rewrite CSS and HTML on the style that I need to communicate. [30% done]
But I have to go backward on this, because the plug-in of Facebook that I found it is not working like I was thinking, so I have to take a look about plug-ins. I can share on Facebook, but I want to post automagically my post from here to there.
- Implement social sharing to improve visibility (Twitter, Google PlusOne and Facebook). [90% done]
OK time to a proper rest 😀