The New Web Font Specimen

June 24, 2010 – 9:49 am

Tim Brown released the Web Font Spec­i­men in con­junc­tion with his arti­cle Real Web Type in Real Web Con­text on A List Apart back in Novem­ber. He updat­ed it last week to v2 which is laser-focused on see­ing what your type looks like in your browser.

One very cool com­po­nent of this release is that Type­kit—who Tim now works for—has inte­grat­ed the Web Font Spec­i­men into their ser­vice. See, for exam­ple, FF Meta Serif Web Pro Book.

But the part that makes me blush is that Tim decid­ed to include Font­Friend on the new Web Font Spec­i­men home­page as an ide­al com­pan­ion to the spec­i­men. In order to feel like I deserved a spot on there, I’ve added a spe­cial fea­ture to Font­Friend: it now detects if you’re on the Web Font Spec­i­men demo and auto­mat­i­cal­ly updates the font name when you select a font family.

Don’t have Font­Friend yet? Go to the Font­Friend project page and get it now.

Tagged , | By Matt | Posted in Design | Comments Off on The New Web Font Specimen

The Erudite 2.7 Released

June 20, 2010 – 12:58 pm

Word­Press 3.0 was released last week (and there was much rejoic­ing). I received a few bug reports about my inte­gra­tion with the new nav menus — essen­tial­ly if you did­n’t have a nav menu in use yet, you’d see a weird extra box in your main menu area.

I also did the long-over­due task of comb­ing through the theme (which was based on the old Sand­box theme) and remov­ing all dep­re­cat­ed func­tion calls. Scary.

Also in this release are a few new trans­la­tions from intre­pid trans­la­tors: Pol­ish (props Paweł), French, (props Ver­mont), and Indon­sian (props Cahya).

As always, the down­load is on the project page if you’re too impa­tient for it to show up on WP.org.

Tagged , , | By Matt | Posted in WordPress | Comments (4)

Good Web Fonts

June 11, 2010 – 1:42 pm

This isn’t “new” news, but in the web­font wild west, qual­i­ty might pass you by. One large prob­lem with web­fonts is that the qual­i­ty of most fonts that are suit­ably licensed for web­font embedding—in oth­er words, free fonts—is not that high. Ser­vices such as Type­kit remain the pre­dom­i­nant way to get your hands on high-qual­i­ty com­mer­cial fonts (although FontSpring is a notable exception).

But, for those look­ing to find the best qual­i­ty free web­fonts, the good folks at Good Web Fonts have put togeth­er an excel­lent list of high-qual­i­ty free fonts suit­able for web use. I’ve dis­cov­ered some hid­den gems there, and it’s now first on my list of places to con­sult when decid­ing on a web­font for a new design.

Tagged , , , | By Matt | Posted in Design | Comments Off on Good Web Fonts

The Erudite 2.6.1 Released

May 26, 2010 – 9:14 am

First off, it’s been a wild ride since The Eru­dite was made a fea­tured theme in the WordPress.org themes direc­to­ry. It went from about 20 down­loads a day to over 200! With it has come an increase in bug reports and a some help with more trans­la­tions. I hope that all of these down­loads means that some kick­ass writ­ing is being done.

The Eru­dite 2.6.1 is a main­te­nance release pack­ing a lot of pow­er for such a lit­tle incre­ment. It includes:

  • Bet­ter sup­port for the upcom­ing WP 3.0’s cus­tom menus. You can now explic­it­ly set a menu as your “Head­er Menu”.
  • Prop­er­ly inter­na­tion­al­ized some strings that weren’t pre­vi­ous­ly. If you’re a trans­la­tor, update to the newest the-erudite.pot in the translations/ directory.
  • Removed pre­vi­ous use of get_the_modified_author() in favour of get_the_author(). I have no idea why I thought the for­mer was ever a use­ful idea.
  • Added a Swedish trans­la­tion. Props Fredrik.

EDIT: I neglect­ed to add the Nor­we­gian trans­la­tion to 2.6.1, so 2.6.2 includes that. Thanks Rune!

As always, you can down­load from the project page while wait­ing for it to show up in the themes direc­to­ry.

Tagged , , | By Matt | Posted in WordPress | Comments (1)

Smarter Custom Post Types 1.3

May 19, 2010 – 11:47 am

First­ly, you can now find every­thing at its own project page: Smarter Cus­tom Post Types. Updat­ing the orig­i­nal post every time I edit­ed some­thing was­n’t awesome.

In 1.3 I tweaked the label UI han­dling to work prop­er­ly with recent updates to label han­dling for cus­tom post types, and cleaned up the code a bit. Go to the project page to down­load 1.3.

Tagged , | By Matt | Posted in WordPress | Comments (1)