Well, this is the result of two weeks of work – an animated 3D Super Mario Icon built completely in CSS3 without images.

A still from Safari 5 with perspective and grids. Hover over the live demo to see this.

Demo

Demo: Pure CSS animated 3D Super Mario Icon
Best viewed with Safari 5 & Chrome 9.

Chrome prior Version 9 renders in 2D only due to an older Webkit engine.
Opera 10.6, Firefox 3.6 and IE9 are not supported.

Background

Please note that the source code is still a mess. You better not have a look at it ;-)

It’s based on top of my CSS 4D Framework I created therefor and will be released in the next few weeks (when it’s out of alpha).

tbc.

So here is my work, the All CSS Internet Explorer Logo, a logo built completely in CSS, without any graphics.

See the Demo (best viewed with Firefox 3.6 & Safari 5)
Chrome 5 has a lot of issues at the moment due to an older Webkit engine. CSS for Opera 10.6 and IE9 are coming soon. The CSS is a mess at the moment, I’ll clean it up later.

Internet Explorer & the Internet Explorer Logo are registered Trademarks of Microsoft. Download Internet Explorer.

If you use Facebook’s generator here, you’ll get some content very similar to mine:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fcordobo.com%2F&amp;layout=standard&amp;show-faces=true&amp;width=450&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:500px; height:60px"></iframe>

Note: I highlighted the parts I replace in the next step

This would be fine, if you had only one page on your website, as the plugin only shows the url you have entered in the generator – no dynamic pages. So here’s how you can add some dynamic flavour to your new button:

Replace the following code

[…]like.php?href=http%3A%2F%2Fcordobo.com%2F

with

[…]like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>

insert it into your theme’s single.php and upload it to your server.

The final code, ready for copy & paste

This is the final code you can use in your own WordPress installation without further modifications (except the width and height). Insert it into your single.php and upload the modified file to your server.

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=<?php echo urlencode(get_permalink($post->ID)); ?>&amp;layout=standard&amp;show-faces=true&amp;width=500&amp;action=like&amp;colorscheme=light" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" style="border:none; overflow:hidden; width:500px; height:60px"></iframe>

Note: I highlighted the parts I replaced

In case you use some caching plugin, clear the cache and see the magic as it happens.

If you like it, click on “like” ;-)

This is just a short announcement. The pre-release of Green Park 2 Beta 6 is available for download, the “final” Beta is due in a few days.

The improvements include built-in Twitter support, seamless integration of Disqus comments, 40% fewer http requests, up to 50% faster page rendering compared to Beta 5 and a total of 16 supported languages.

The current Beta 6 is not supported and not recommended for production use. Please check the complete Changelog of Green Park 2 Beta 6 Pre before you get your copy from the local mirror. Don’t forget to leave your feedback in the comments!

You should as well have a look at the Beta 6 preview.

Update

• 03/10/2010, 15:00 – Small fix for Twitter integration, Download has been updated.
• 03/16/2010, 23:00 – Support for WordPress 3.0 (Alpha)
• 03/31/2010, 18:45 – The release of Beta 6 is delayed to make it fully compatible with WordPress 3 and it’s new functions

It took me a while to get back to work on Green Park after a little break and some vacations. So, this is only a small update to the translations for Green Park 2 Beta 5 but Beta 6 is on the way. Thanks to the following users, the theme now features native support for 12+1 language.

1. Chinese by wxzbb
2. English (default) by me
3. French by Julien
4. German by Andreas Jacob
5. Icelandic by Jóhannes Birgir Jensson
6. Italian by Saverio Tonno
7. Norwegian Bokmål by Bjørn-Arild Eriksen-Woll
8. Polish by Tosiek
9. Romanian by Cristian Boba
10. Russian (formal) by Dr. Dmitry Tarasov
11. Russian (informal) by Perllover
12. Spanish (castellano) by José Manuel Mao
13. Swedish by Jon Klarström

Many thanks for your contributions!

The new release (still Beta 5) is now available for download from the Green Park 2 page and should be available within a few hours from WordPress.org.

The really simple solution we came up is resource-friendly while he can keep all of his links. Most probably the best thing of this simple usage of WordPress functions: it’s entirely based on WordPress’ template tags and there is no need for another plugin.

WordPress Template Tags

Our weapon of choice is the wp_list_bookmarks template tag. It comes in handy if you use a new WordPress theme as starting point, which already uses this tag. If not, now it’s the time to get rid of deprecated tags like get_links() or get_links_list().

To start, open the file where your link-list is located, most probably sidebar.php or footer.php. The default usage for wp_list_bookmarks is:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks(); ?>

Useful parameters: limit and orderby

Remember, we need to limit the output because of the new design while still giving link-love to all of our blog-friends. To achieve this goal, we applied two parameters to the tag:

limit and orderby.

The Function

These two parameters combined provide us with the limited set of randomized links we need. Seven randomized links fit into the available space, so here is the final template tag with two parameters applied:

<?php wp_list_bookmarks('limit=7&orderby=rand'); ?>

Jupp, it’s remarkably simple, but it works exactly as intended.