Even Deeper Into The Transformation (Zero to Hero Days 13, 15, 25)

February 4, 2014 by jaklumen 7 Comments

I’m skipping around a little bit, because I wanted to focus more deeply on how this blog looks.

Assignment for Day 13 is to create, edit, or expand a blogroll.

This was a challenge I agonized over for over a week.

If you remember Hero pulls a zero on Blogroll challenge so far, I mentioned two parts that I intended to focus on.  The first part was to promote the blogs I work on.

I tried the Links widget, as Cimmy did for her blog The Dragon’s Lair:

Links widget and the Community widget, the latter which I’ll get to in a moment.

but it just wasn’t very easy to read. This theme has rather tiny fonts for text on the sidebar.

So I decided instead to build it by way of Image widgets, with each image linked to the respective blog:

Vox Diaspora doesn’t have any custom design, so I made an image.

I admit that I went rather lazy with the second part of my solution to the challenge, which was to show some of the blogs I follow.  I guess I think the Community widget is a rather clean solution– it doesn’t show all blogs followed, but shows a random collection.   I chose the “a few” option on how many users to show, which returns about 10 users for me.  I’ve seen this widget before, and although I’m not FULLY happy with it, it will do, for now.

The assignment for Day 15 is to open the Customizer and try out some new fonts and colors (and backgrounds and/or headers, if you’re still undecided).

Unfortunately,  this theme (Greyzed) does not come with customization options.  I did experiment with fonts on the last theme (Superhero).  But I did choose Greyzed because a lot of the color schemes were very similar, with a much cleaner look.

But I did have to experiment with fonts while working on the image widgets for the blogroll challenge.  This fulfills the title of Day 15’s challenge: to learn more about how visuals influence content.

I would be remiss if I did not give proper credit where credit is due, to one who is Aussome.

From a screenshot by my beloved Cimmorene

Aussa Lorens understands very well how visuals influence content.  (I have to be honest here, Aussa, it IS well designed.)  Cimmorene noticed this as well in Zero to Hero Day 25: Adapt a Custom Detail For Your Blog, which brings us to Day 25.

The day 25 assignment is to browse the blogs you follow and note a custom touch you love. Tell the blogger you love it, and interpret it for your own blog.

The detail I came up with was twice-over inspired.  If you follow the link to Cimmy’s post that I shared earlier, you’ll see that she was inspired by Aussa to create a widget that linked to some of her content, in this case, the entire category of her Zero to Hero posts:

Cimmorene’s widget for Zero to Hero posts at The Dragon’s Lair

and I thought that her widget was very cool.  So I noted the dimensions of her widget, and took a .gif image I had made previously for a widget:

The old “A Zero to Hero’s Journey” image

and created this:

The all-NEW Zero to Hero’s Journey sidebar widget

and I didn’t stop there.  Since I was learning what fit in the sidebar, I brought my Wordle (“Interconnection 1”) widget back:

Just had to adjust the width to 250 pixels, and it was good to go.

Related articles

• The Dragon’s Lair Goes Zero to Hero
• Zero to Hero Day 25: Adapt a Custom Detail For Your Blog
• Zero to Hero Day 13: Build a (Better) Blogroll
• Zero to Hero Day 13: Build a Better Blogroll
• Day 13: Building my blogroll – say what?
• Days 13 & 15: More and more stuff to learn
• The Community of WordPress (Zero to Hero Day 4)