WellMedicated - Inspiration Overdose

I’ve launched many a blog in my day.  So many, in fact, that I’ve got the whole procedure down to a science.  With every launch comes the inevitable grab-bag of tweaks, hacks and plugin installations that have been refined and remastered over time.

Every blog is different, they’re like snowflakes – it’s beautiful.  But these are the tweaks that I use on every blog I launch.  I believe these to be universally beneficial, regardless of the site… provided said site is WordPress powered.

The other day I finally got my act together and added some social bookmarking links to the bottom of my blog posts. Being a WordPress user I was presented with a lot of options to make this process easier. Plugins like Sociable and ShareThis will have your blog going viral within minutes.

But what about us hand-coding control freaks who want pixel-perfect placement? Or us plugin-phobics who try to avoid excessive use of plugins if at all possible? I just didn’t find these plugins flexible enough to meet my admittedly over-demanding needs.

With a little (and I mean a little) PHP you can have the perfectionist’s control over your social bookmark links.

The original wellmedicated layout, before it was recently rebooted,  had a rather high-concept design.  The basic idea being: “every website aligns to the top of the browser, I want mine to align to the bottom”…arrogant, I know.  Not surprisingly, this was easier said than done.  However, I did manage to figure out a way to pull it off by modifying some javascript from this a list apart article.

The final result is a script that detects the height of your browser and the height of your content “above the fold” (in pixels) and then offsets said content the difference of the two.

This is a very simple little trick that I figured out by accident.  It is likely common knowledge, but I didn’t know about it and thought maybe there were more out there like me.

In this tutorial I’m using Photoshop CS3 (I’m sure older versions will do the trick as well) and very little Photoshop knowledge is required as it’s ridiculously easy.  So load up Photoshop already and lets get started.