How to make a “child theme” for WordPress. A pictorial introduction for beginners

“Child themes” are a great feature of WordPress! — I wish I knew about them the first time I looked for themes. I found then some themes I liked but I discarded them all because of a few issues I saw in each; things like too small line height, justified text in paragraphs (ugly without hyphenation), a not optimal choice of Windows fonts, or, sometimes, no Windows font specified at all!

Now, such “details” only take a few keystrokes to change. With a basic knowledge of HTML and CSS and a reference at hand, you spot the rules in the stylesheet, change a value or two, and save your changes. But I never liked this option: you have to keep track of your changes, remember about them, and reapply them every time the theme is updated. So I settled for a theme that got most of the “details” right but which I did not like that much…

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Five clean, minimalist themes for WordPress

I recently decided to look for a good minimalist theme to replace the theme this site was using. I was not expecting it would be an easy search, and, in a sense, it wasn’t. (Partly because WordPress had been going for some time without a central repository of themes — and while a new repository was launched recently, it is not yet very well organized.) However, I found more good themes than I expected, and it was not very long before I came across one that I felt happy with. I saw several interesting designs that caught my attention and in the end I singled out five: the one that op111.net uses now and four that I kept on the server and I intend to follow. These are the five themes reviewed here.

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Το Λεξικό Τριανταφυλλίδη στον Firefox! (Και στον Internet Explorer 7 και σε άλλα προγράμματα!)

Το Λεξικό της κοινής νεοελληνικής —αλλιώς γνωστό ως Λεξικό Τριανταφυλλίδη— είναι από τα κορυφαία λεξικά της νέας ελληνικής γλώσσας. Όχι μόνο αυτό, αλλά εδώ και λίγα χρόνια (από το 2004, αν δεν με απατά η μνήμη μου) διατίθεται και σε ψηφιακή μορφή, δωρεάν προσβάσιμο στην ιστοσελίδα του Ηλεκτρονικού Κόμβου, όντας έτσι ένα από τα δύο καλά νεοελληνικά λεξικά για ηλ. υπολογιστή (το άλλο είναι βέβαια το Μείζον Ελληνικό Λεξικό). Για όσους χρησιμοποιούν λειτουργικό σύστημα Linux ή MacOS ήταν και παραμένει η μοναδική ποιοτική λύση, αφού η online υλοποίησή του είναι συμβατή με όλα τα λειτουργικά συστήματα, αρκεί να έχουμε σύνδεση στο ίντερνετ. Πρόκειται γενικά για σπουδαίο βοήθημα και μεγάλη ευκολία.

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