Who likes web­site colour swap­pers? Anyone?

When I devel­oped the theme I am cur­rently using, I searched high and low for some­thing I could steal take inspi­ra­tion from. The funny thing is that most people don’t even know where the colour swap­per is on my site. So few in fact that I had to add a cap­tion to it to help make it a little more obvious.

In any case I felt that I would share the method I used to create the swap­ping func­tion­al­ity on my web­site. I’m aware that most of it can be fig­ured out with a little imag­i­na­tion and some source view­ing, but I think that going through it step by step is more helpful.

UPDATE - 10/09/2008 - In record time, a second pair of eyes look­ing at this has man­aged to refine the process. Thank you Bart for point­ing out that if the CSS files are named the same as the Title attribute of the Anchor, then you can drop the whole If state­ment. I’ve updated the tuto­r­ial accordingly

So who out there uses Word­press? I’ve been told it’s some­what pop­u­lar.

I myself am a fan despite it’s assault on the CPU and data­base. It’s fast, it’s simple, and so long as your web­site isn’t gain­ing huge traf­fic (or you’re paying peanuts for CPU usage and stor­age) than it’s a great selec­tion. It’s fairly cus­tomiz­able, has a huge sup­port and user base, and it’s just damned easy to use. I’ve been slowly get­ting more and more into cus­tomiz­ing and extend­ing what Word­press can do out of the box.There’s more in the code than people think.

Recently I a friend of mine ripped a strip off of me for only using sum­maries in my RSS feed. He told me that he, along with other net-​savvy users, didn’t have time to get teased by RSS summaries.

I went to college.

Shock­ing, I know. I did though, and on the lovely diploma that I earned and gently stuffed in a drawer some­where it says that I am both a com­puter pro­gram­mer and a sys­tems ana­lyst. What that means is not only am I (sup­pos­edly) com­pe­tent at coding solu­tions, I am also (appar­ently) com­pe­tent at look­ing at a system and fig­ur­ing out how things should work.

I always chuck­led in my Analy­sis classes. “Come on, this is all common sense!” I would pro­claim. I took what the teacher said for a grain of salt and left it at that.

So I just spent four hours of my life fight­ing with Share­Point 2007. I can’t explain all the details because my employer pays me, which in turn pays the bills and they frown upon my telling of com­pany secrets. I can, how­ever, bitch about some things that have been irri­tat­ing me over the past while. As it turns out every­thing I hate con­verged on me today.

Let the story begin!