Design

You have two sources of information for styling your posts. On top of the post form you have a series of buttons. These buttons allow you a minimum of formatting with no knowledge of style coding in either HTML or CSS.

inserts the tags to create italics.

inserts the tags to bold the text.

is absolutely necessary to introduce quotes from a source that are a paragraph or more long. You wrap the text in


tags in order to get the following effect:

culturekitchen is a community blog aimed at cultural creatives who believe progressive activism starts in the kitchen, the bedroom, the home, the wallet. It is open for all who believe the decline of progressive and libertarian values have set us back as a democratic nation.

For more information on how to handle quotes, please go to How To Quote Sources.

makes it easy to create links to other sites. Now pay attention because there are two parts to using this button.

• When you click on the button you will get the . You need to put the internet address (URL) to the place you are linking to after the backward slashes [ // ] and right up to the quotation mark with closing bracket [ "> ].
• Right after the the quotation mark with closing bracket [ "> ] is where you put in the text you want to use to point to the link.

  Normally I prefer people use the title of the article or page they are pointing to; but you can use text like "Source", "Here", "Link", etc.

• Click on the button again to insert , the link that closes your code.

So culturekitchen looks like this : culturekitchen.

is used to insert the <"!--break--"> PHP tag (without the quote marks) to divide the content that will go the front page from the rest of the post.

1. Go to your home page
2. Click on edit
3. Scroll down to find the Theme Configuration.
4. Click on culturekitchen_red.2

This is the design I am working on at the moment. Please note that it is far from finished; but if you want to see what I am obsessed with at the moment, you can switch to this design and see it change right before your very eyes. If all the changes make you crazy, then switch back to the original (which is culturekitchen_red).

Use this post to log your questions or comments on the new design. All imput and opinions are most certainly welcomed.

Come out, come out wherever you are...

I'm not asking you to come out of the closet :lol: I'm asking you to come and play on the site --especially if you are one of the thousands of people reading us through our feeds.

In the past few weeks I have been working on the technology and design of culturekitchen. Check out our growing list of features. I actually have a longer post to make about what I am rolling out this weekend; but right now I need your help with two things :

1. ONLY EDITORS CAN MAKE CHANGES TO PROMOTED POSTS
First off, if your blog post gets promoted to the front page, unless you have front-page privileges, you cannot edit your post. If you do so, the updated version will be saved with your privileges and the post will disappear from the front-page. For that matter, make sure you send me or any of our editors the edited copy. We'll be glad to make the update.

2. ALL FRONT PAGE ARTICLES ARE NOW AUTOMATICALLY SHORTENED
I did this to fit more articles on the page. If you don't like where the system automatically shortens your entry you can always change it by putting the following bit of code (but without the spaces) under the paragraph or image you'd like the cut-off point to be:

< !--break-- >

Remember, no spaces if you want the code to work.

3. YOU HAVE TO GO TO YOUR USER PAGE OR WORKSPACE TO START A POST
The side bars were starting to get unruly and for that matter I decided to move the work sections to ... ahem ... your workspace and member page.

4. FEEDS ARE NOW IN A SEPARATE PAGE
In my quest to clean up the sidebars, I set up a page with links to all the varieties of feeds to the front page available to you. But we have other feeds as well.

I decided to take a break from reading about the historical development of states and rights in Europe to check in on the Australian Open women's singles final. Since I don't have ESPN, I tuned in to the on-line audio broadcast of the final just in time to hear Justine Henin-Hardenne forfeit the final, giving Amelie Mauresmo a 6-2, 2-0 victory, and her first Grand Slam title. As much as I enjoy Henin-Hardenne's game (lord, that backhand is a thing of beauty), I'm thrilled about Mauresmo's victory (she, too, has a lovely backhand; yeah, I like one-handed backhands (Roger Federer's is the most beautiful I've ever seen)).

Tomorrow, Mauresmo became (sorry, just had to do that since the final is played on Saturday but it's still Friday here) the first openly gay player to win a Grand Slam singles title since Martina Navratilova won her last Wimbledon title in 1990. (Amazingly, Navrativlova's last Grand Slam title--number 58--came in 2003, when, at age 46, she won the Australian Open mixed doubles title with Leander Paes. Navratilova still holds the overall record for professional singles titles--men or women--with 167.) While the fact that Mauresmo is a lesbian may not seem like a big deal, it was a big deal the last time she was in a Grand Slam final, the 1999 Australian Open:

Something amazing happened last night. I was going to sit down and write this post. The working title was, "Look Back In Anger", and homage to John Osborne's 1956 play. Then, I did some yoga. More exactly, I did the Ali MacGraw - Yoga Mind & Body exercises.

I've been studying yoga on and off for 15 years. I don't do yoga in the sense of a scheduled daily practice; but I do yoga everyday throughout the day as I stand, as I walk, as I breathe. But I did do yoga on a a weekly basis, up until I had Thing #2. There was a time I used to be able to do the exercises in video sequence without batting an eye. I can't these days.

My body, my mind and my soul are living parallel busy lives and have very little time to commune. Mind is cluttered with the cacophony of ideas, anxieties, dreams. Soul has been bettered and bruised with the pain and misery around her but also with the reality of growing old and the heaviness of not knowing if everything she wants is everything she needs. And that has encumbered Body, putting weight and pain and stiffness all around it.

Girl needs quiet, lightness, flexibility. She needs to learn how to move into serenity.

[This is your cue to scream, serenity now.]

Use the comments section to add any questions you think we should FAQ you.