How to change your Weblog's theme.

Rolf saw my new theme for this Blog and immediately asked me to write a new Blog entry on how I did it, so here we go. It's really RTFM stuff, but it may be useful to summarize a couple of FMs (Fine Manuals) related to changing one's Blog theme :).

Here's what I did:

Went on a great vacation with my girl-friend to Andalucia (not required, but highly recommended).
Took some nice pictures in Ronda. For this particular shot, I took 7 pictures with my Canon digital IXUS 330, one next to the other (not required, any other picture will do).
Organized all photos with iPhoto, stitched those 7 pictures together into a single one using Canon's PhotoStitch software (not sold separately from Canon cameras), trimmed and scaled the panorama with GraphicConverter to a maximum width of 1024 points, suitable for most web browsers on most computers (Again, not required, just use your own favourite picture).
Uploaded my picture as a file to my blog and kept the URL for later reference. (See Customizing your Website)
Read the Customizing your Website chapter in the The Roller Weblogger User Guide (required).
Started by selecting a theme from the set of pre-set themes in the Website:Themes Dialog of this Blog's Settings Menu (requires login to your blog). In my case, I chose the currency theme as a base theme.
Edited the _css page in the Website:Pages section of my Blog. This is the stylesheet that is used for rendering the tags in the website document that we modified above. The syntax is quite simple and self-explanatory, but you may still consider Reading the CSS specs. In this particular example, I peeked at Alan Coopersmith's Weblog's source code and it's CSS stylesheet to find out where the picture goes. In this case, the CSS defines a background image for div tags with the id header. In my case, I replaced the image URL with my own image's URL.
Edited the Weblog page in the Website:Pages section of my Blog (again, requires login). In particular, I introduced a div tag with id header to trigger the above CSS definition around the existing title part. It's very useful to refer to the official W3C XHTML and HTML 4.01 specifications in order to understand what you're doing. I also tweaked heights and the description position as well as some colors to make the header better match the picture.
That's it. Feel free to play around, in case you screw things up, you can always select one of the predefined themes to fix stuff for you.

Well, I hope this helps, and I'm looking forward to see more customized themes...

"How to change your Weblog's theme." has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2004-06-29 09:01:33.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

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How to use USB memory sticks with Solaris.

About once every two weeks, people ask me how to use USB memory sticks with Solaris. That's a perfect example of what to Blog so in the future I can just point people at it :).

There are a couple of documentations available online that tell you how to handle USB storage devices in Solaris:

First of all, the official docs come with step-by-step guides on how to add, remove, mount and unmount USB storage devices in Solaris.
docs.sun.com is a great resource for Sun documentation, just type in what you're looking for and you'll probably find what you need very quickly.
Rolf Kersten's excellent Solaris 80:20 Guide has a section on page 9 (paper)/15 (PDF) on how to do it the quick'n'dirty way.

This introduces us to a second great source for Solaris know-how: BigAdmin.

You may want to check if your USB device is on the list of officially supported USB devices.

Notice that today, you are required to be root in order to be able to restart the volume manager vold. We are working on making this easier to use. Meanwhile, you may want to consider writing some scripts and using sudo to make mounting and unmounting USB devices available to your users in a more user-friendly way. sudo is available on the Solaris Companion Software CD or from www.sunfreeware.com (Solaris 9, SPARC, Solaris 9, x86).

About a year or so ago, I did a collect order for NatureTech USB Memory Sticks with built-in MP3 player and Sun logo on them for my colleagues and they turned out to be very popular. That's where I first went through the above docs myself :).

"How to use USB memory sticks with Solaris." has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2004-06-29 07:22:07.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:

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