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March 02, 2004

Frequently Asked Question

Recently Movable Style has attracted quite a few visitors (current at around 200-300 unique visitors per day), and sorry if I have not updated the site or respond to your comments. I have been busy - just moved to a new place that needs lots of work, wife expecting a baby in July, lots of demand at work, working with new students at church, etc. I will try to answer some of your questions this entry, and hopefully when I finally have more time on hand (if ever), I would go back to work on more styles.

FAQ Index

Can I use the stylesheets that I downloaded from Movable Style on my own blog site(s)?

Yes.

The initial intention of developing this site is to share some of the stylesheets I designed with people who have just started blogging, do not want to tinker too much Movable Type templates, and want to have a style that is different from the stock ones. All stylesheets here are created to be shared, so please use them!

How do I use the stylesheets on Movable Style?

The stylesheets are designed for the Movable Type default templates. Here outlines how you can use the styles.

  1. Go to the index page, and you should see a side-bar section called "Styles". Use the selection list to change the current style to the one you desire, and then click on the download link to download the stylesheet and optional image files.
  2. If the file downloaded contains only one single file 'style-site.css', go to the next step. Alternatively, you would download a file called 'style-site.zip' that contains the CSS and other media files (usually images). Upload those image files (.JPG or .PNG) to your blog site, and move them to the same folder as your index page. You can use Movable Type's Uploading File feature to achieve that.
  3. Now, replace your current 'style-site.css' with the one you have downloaded. In a stock Movable Type installation, you would need to:
    1. Go to Manage Weblog page, and then click on "Templates" on the left-hand side.
    2. There should be an item "Stylesheet" under table "Index templates". It defaults to output to file 'style-site.css'. Click on the link.
    3. Replace the content inside "Template Body" with the content of your new 'style-site.css', and then press "Save" and "Rebuild".
  4. Try to reload your weblog, and it should now be formatted wit the new style.

How are the stylesheets licensed?

Currently stylesheets on Movable Style are licensed with the Creative Common Attribution License. Generally, if you want to use it on a blog site, please use CC and attribute this site. A link back either in yor blogroll or links section would be appreciated.

How do I attribute to Movable Style?

From the license it is required that you provide attribution to Movable Style when you use one or more styles from this site. I am not looking for a permanent spot on your site, but a small blog entry will do. For example,

Hi. I have changed the stylesheet for this site, and I got it from Movable Style! Blah blah blah...

There is no logo, "official" slogan, etc. Just say where you got the blog from and that's it.

There is no update for ages! What's the future direction for this site?

Well. I am busy. Really busy.

I initially designed this site to share my own styles, and then last couple of months I have been receiving emails from people submitting their styles. As I stated before that managing a site with other people's contribution can add quite a bit of burden on myself, but I think it might be something that can better benefit the community so it would the direction that Movable Style would move to.

I need to work out a way to manage the licenses (or force everyone to agree on CC Attribution + GPL), plus some scripts for people to submit their styles. Technically it should be an easy task, but I just need time to sit down and code it.

How do I contact you?

Use the contact page on my own blog site.

How is the style switcher implemented?

The style switcher on Movable Style is implemented using some PHP scripts. More detailed implementation can be found in this blog entry.

Posted by Dasme at March 2, 2004 05:23 PM

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Comments

The stuff you provide is of great help to ppl like me who cant really play around with CSS

Thanks a ton for all this !

:-)

Posted by: Murali at March 2, 2004 08:02 PM

I really like your styles and use it in my site(http://matrix.foresee.cn/blogs/neo/). Hope you return with happiness and more excellent styles and a really cute baby :)

Posted by: Neo at March 3, 2004 05:02 PM

My suggestion would be to allow people to upload stylesheets that use the default MT templates. I'm sure there are other great ones out there, but it'd be nice to have as many as possible in one place.

Posted by: Jake Ortman at March 5, 2004 05:00 AM

OK, I guess I should read through the entire post...you already plan on doing that. So never mind :-)

Posted by: Jake Ortman at March 5, 2004 05:01 AM

Great site. I'd never seen css before, so this was a great site for me to start out at. I've figured enough of it out to get my site to look how I want it to without having to fiddle with general layout issues (I use a variant of the Modern Lines style). Anyway, thanks for the great site, and I hope you can get some free time to make more awesome looking styles :D.

Posted by: Meph at March 11, 2004 01:39 AM

Love the site / am useing a couple of the stylesheets in my hack-job of a style sheet switcher. Would like to see how your switcher is implemented.

Posted by: Drew at March 12, 2004 01:39 PM

Anybody having problems with these style sheets and IE users?

I'm attempting to use the 'Boxed' style sheet and I have a couple IE users who are seeing overlap of the two columns, such that they can't easily read the blog entries. I've played around with sizes and positioning, but nothing seems to really help. And it's only a few of the IE users, which I find strange. Everything works fine under Mozilla.

Posted by: Jerry at March 15, 2004 05:20 AM

I would also LOVE to see how the style switcher is implimented. It's an incredibly clever trick and a great enhancement to the user experience to let THEM choose how the blog is presented.

Posted by: Karl Elvis at March 15, 2004 07:21 AM

An update of sorts... I was able to simplify my implementation useing this outline on synapse:
[ http://blog.raena.net/entries/2003/12/06/return_of_the_php_skin_switcher_change_style_and_font_size_together.php ]

For it to work I just needed to add/change a single line to each page/template I wanted to effect - pointing it to the style-sheet feeding php script.

Yes I needed to adjust the example php a little bit - but worked well in the end!

Posted by: Drew at March 16, 2004 02:56 AM

I'm also having problems with the Boxed style and IE. From what I can gather, it's IE that doesn't render CSS correctly, using a different formula to calculate the padding between boxes.

I use Firefox, which renders perfectly. I just wish the rest of the Internet would switch over as well!

Posted by: Andrew at April 22, 2004 10:00 PM

I've been informed that my style sheet doesn't display properly - the right hand column overlaps the text. I couldn't work out why - they were using IE6, 1024 res and mine looked fine. Then I discovered its an issue when people set the text size to larger or largest in IE. Is there any solution to this please?

Posted by: pj at May 9, 2004 03:44 PM

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