This is just a quick post about using Gravatars. A “Gravatar” is a global avatar that you tie to your email address using the online service. All you have to do is register (or login using a WordPress.com account) at gravatar.com. You can then upload an image and tie it to your email address.

Once you are set up, whenever you make a comment on a supporting blog using that email, the avatar will automatically show up on your comment. This allows people to visually recognize you across different sites. Gravatars are widely supported by many blogs. WordPress blogs, for example, support Gravatar by default.

If you do not have one set up when you comment on this site, you’ll get what is called an “Identicon”. An Identicon is a geometric representation of your email address, so it is unique to each author without requiring action.

Filed under: General by StevoTVR
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Well now that everything is settled, here’s what you can look for here. Soon, I’ll starting adding some reviews on things like music, movies, and games. I have some already written from a previous website, so that’s where I’ll start.

Something else you can look forward to is commentary on random topics I find interesting. I’ll try to keep things as entertaining as possible.

Anyway, that’s all for now…

Filed under: General by StevoTVR
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In the previous post, I said I would write about the making of this theme. I created it from scratch, but I used some free resources in the process. So here I will link to all those resources so that you may find them useful.

First of all, creating a WordPress theme is surprisingly easy. The obvious place to learn about making themes is the WordPress Theme Development documentation. You can also check out this tutorial, which starts with the very basics of HTML and walks you through the building of a theme. It is somewhat outdated, though, and doesn’t cover threaded comments for instance.

After creating the base structure, I started working on the header. I started with a base of a texture from the Tutorial9 Grunge Cement Texture Pack with some color and contrast adjustments. I also added some visual enhancements with some of these grunge Photoshop brushes. The warning stripe textures in the header and footer are the ETC Grunge Stripes Pattern. The font used in the header is called Stencilia-A, from which I created a template and used the paint tool to simulate spray painting.

The Stencilia-A font was also integrated into the navigation and headers using cufón, which uses pure JavaScript to render fonts. This allows you to use fonts that users are not likely to have installed. Other options I considered are sIFR and typeface.js.

So that’s the story of the StevoTVR WordPress theme. I may post some more detailed info in the future. I hope someone finds some of this useful!

Filed under: General by StevoTVR
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Hello.

You are looking at the new face of stevotvr.com. What was once just a utility domain name for various uses is now the home of a blog thingy. Do I know what I’ll be posting? No. But I will be posting something that isn’t nothing, but nothing that is something else.

Anyway, the theme was custom made from scratch by me. It’s really my first real attempt at a “grunge” style theme, but I think it turned out pretty well. I plan to improve it as I go along, so any suggestions or criticisms are welcome!

Comments are open to everyone. Registration is not required to comment, but your first comment will have to be approved by me. So don’t panic if your first comment goes missing for a while. Police will laugh at you if you attempt to file a missing comment report.

Thanks for reading. Next post should be something about the making of the theme… 🙂

Filed under: General by StevoTVR
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