Image via Wikipedia

The w3schools website is where I learned a lot of the beginner Cascading Style Sheet writing.  The Cascading Style Sheets or CSS, is the set of instructions that formats your blog.  All the elements are put on the page with html, and we make them look pretty with CSS.

If you head to your admin panels and look in Appearance>> Editor, and click on the Stylesheet towards the bottom of the list on the right hand side, you will see a page of CSS code.  This code really is not hard to write.  Here’s an example:

Lets say we want to put a border around a post.

We go to our admin panels, click “edit” on the subject post.  Click on the HTML editor.  At the top of the post, put this code:
<div style="border: 1px solid black;">
THAT, my friends is all there is to it!  This example is called “inline styling” as it isn’t written in the stylesheet, but in line with the HTML.  This is only done on the rare occasion and only for one time things.  If you want every post to have a border, then you can do that with one line of code in the stylesheet.

To find out how to get a particular style or where to place the code in a stylesheet check out the w3schools website.

Isn’t that just so cool?

W3Schools

Here is the list of their references:

HTML & CSS
REFERENCES
HTML Tag Reference
HTML Event Reference
HTML Color Reference
XHTML Tag Reference
CSS Reference

XML Languages
REFERENCES
XML DOM Reference
XSL Reference
XSLT Reference
XSL-FO Reference
XPath Reference
XQuery Reference
XLink Reference
Schema Reference
XForms Reference
RDF Reference
RSS Reference
WAP Reference

Browser Scripting
REFERENCES
JavaScript Reference
HTML DOM Reference
VBScript Reference
E4X Reference
WMLScript Reference

Server Scripting
REFERENCES
SQL Reference
ASP Reference
ADO Reference
PHP Reference
ASP.NET Reference
.NET Mobile Reference

Multimedia
REFERENCES
Media Reference
SMIL Reference
SVG Reference
WAP Reference

So I’ll start with the first.

The Bloggess wants to know how she can change her font size on her blog.

It’s a good question.  The themes we get come with certain font sizes and they may be too small for us to read, so we fear that our readers won’t be able to.

It might also be that we can’t stand Times New Roman 12, so we want to change it to Century Gothic 14.

What ever it is that you want to do, regarding your font size, color, and type, you can do so within your Stylesheet (typically the style.css file under Design->Theme Editor.

(Note:  For WordPress.com users, you can also change the font size, color and type, but you will need to pay the $15 CSS upgrade charge.)

Each theme is different when trying to change the stylesheet.  Each designer calls various aspects of their stylesheet by different names and if you’re not able to spot sight it, then you have to get a little more creative.  (Or download Firebug for Firefox)

Using Firebug, I was able to see that the post content uses Gerorgia 12 pt font.  So, let’s say that she wants to make that 14 points.

She’ll find this section of her stylesheet (line 273, so you know that it’s a ways down the page):

.post-content, .page-content {

-x-system-font:none;

border-top:1px solid #BBC4A3;

font-family:Georgia,Verdana,Arial,serif;

font-size:12px;

font-size-adjust:none;

font-stretch:normal;

font-style:normal;

font-variant:normal;

font-weight:normal;

line-height:normal;

margin:3px 0;

padding:10px 0;

}