Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with Template

Linus said git was a file system!

jeffburdges — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:33:14 -0800

Anybody have opinions on abstraction vs. commuting patchs (git, mercurial, darcs) for handling short form letters in latex? I usually write form letters by first building a framework with various variables holding various bits that might change, and then tweaking the bits for individual letters. I found this "abstraction" approach was fairly efficient for very repetitive form letter, but I've encountered some situations requiring more flexible forum letters recently.

Does anyone have any comments about using distributed version control systems like git, mercurial, or darcs for forum letters? I'd imagine the main issue will be the enormous number of branches, so being able push a patch through to all branches simultaneously might become annoying.

I'd usually use git for version control, but maybe darcs is worth it here?

p.s. Anybody have other approaches for resolving this question?

Me vs. Word template

Marky — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 15:07:53 -0800

How can I rotate a Word template? I downloaded a Word template to print to Avery 5164 stickers. The stickers are 4"x3.3", I want to print landscape with the stickers 3.3"x4".

Just changing the page setup to landscape doesn't change the margins or the template.

Is there a way to rotate a template 90 degrees, or do I have to build a new template?

Web template for cleaning business?

zeikka — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 06:39:17 -0800

Where can I find simple, yet professional and elegant web template/ Wordpress theme for cleaning business? I'm helping someone who's starting a small scale residential/ business cleaning service. I have domain and cheap hosting for her, but would like to find nice web template to use.

Wordpress theme would be ideal as I'm not very experience web designer or don't have experience with complex publishing system. Free would be great this as is very small scale.

Me no write gud: Where can I find a certain paper, and how can I learn to write like a grown-up? (details inside)

Draccy — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 09:17:06 -0800

Bad Pen-me-ship Filter: I'd like to find a version of college ruled paper that has the faint middle line to keep me on track with letter formation. I'd really like the college ruled because it always looks funny when I am in a management meeting writing on first grader's training paper. I need your help to find college-ruled paper that has a faint middle line that will help me to keep my lower-case letters tame. I have trouble reading my own writing, and have used the many technique with repeating letters to change it. I can't ever seem to get a "grown-up" writing style, and write the same as I did as a child. So this might be a two parter, and I didn't find anything in previous threads that answered either.

Part 1: Do you know of a college-ruled paper that has the faint middle line as a guide that I can either buy or download the template for? Do you know how I could try to make one in Excel?

Part 2: How can I find my grown-up writing style? I still sign my name in awful big loopy cursive letters that I picked up in third grade.

Thank you so much in advance for your help. I love my mefi-friends.

Joomla header logo help.

futureisunwritten — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 10:14:56 -0800

How do I add a header logo to my Joomla site? I'm building a website with Joomla and I'm using the JS Education template because it's free and I can do drop down menus on it (actually, this part is already done).

The one thing that has me stumped is how to add our organization's logo to the header (instead of the text that's already there). There are tutorials out there that explain how to do this on the default template, but since I'm not using that, they're of little use to me.

I'm doing all this on local host, if that matters. And I'm a total noob and I don't know much about css/html, so please be gentle. Thanks!

Which PS Template for 16x9 DVD Menu

anonaccount — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 14:03:29 -0800

Ive created a series of 16x9 videos that I want to make into a DVD using Adobe Encore. My version has no templates for some odd reason. Which Photoshop Template do I use? PAL D1/DV
PAL D1/DV Widescreen
PAL D1/DV Square Pixel
PAL D1/DV Widescreen Square Pixel

?? and what's the difference between them?

How do I restore the formatting in my blog?

FireStyle — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 19:07:21 -0800

I'm using the Hybrid-News blogger template for my blog. After doing some tweaking to the code, I lost the feature I loved the most - the condensed posts on the front page. Any ideas on how to get it back? (more in explaination). Here is the link to the hybrid-news template

Here is the link to my blog

Notice how in the template the stories are condensed to a few lines. Somehow, I lost that formatting, and my skills in CSS are elementary at best. Any idea how to get it back?

Thanks much, and if you like politics, feel free to comment on the site!

In need of a Disaster Recovery Template

MattScully — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:56:46 -0800

Does anyone have an outline or template for an IT Disaster Recovery Plan? I have been tasked with creating our disaster recovery plan. The old plan is so old as to be pretty worthless so I am starting from scratch.

Any advice would be helpful.. a template or outline would be extremely helpful.

We know what we are going to do as far as the actual technology goes, so I don't need any help there. The difficulty is in writing the plan and the process itself.

Pretty Up My Word

Miko — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:37:48 -0800

How can I make my Word documents look less....boring? Seeking tips & tricks from people with an eye for design. As part of my job I have to write a lot of Word documents...reports, summaries, proposals, etc. These are for mainly internal consumption, but still, I hate the way they look: dull, and always the same. I don't know many ways to use design to state things like: this is important. This is professional. This is hip. I am proud of this product. This is for sharing.

Are there any simple tweaks I can use to avoid handing out page after page of 12-point Times New Roman? It would be great if things that come from my desk look like someone actually thought about their appearance.

I appreciate your thoughts. Thanks!

Looking for a multi-site searching template

peacay — Tue, 07 Jul 2009 22:36:05 -0800

I want to find a fairly easy-to-adapt template from which to do multiple site searching with a single term. My technical abilities are, let's say, modest. I sometimes need to search multiple art gallery/library/museum sites with the same term. I have a folder of about 20 links to the search pages for most of the major repositories - like NYPL, the Louvre, Met Museum, British Museum etc etc - and I normally go through each of them sequentially, when I need to do a blanket search, which is kind of time consuming.

I'm wondering if it's feasible to set up a *simple* html page locally that has a search box from which a single term can be searched from all these sites simultaneously and the extracted images/info compiled into a single results page? {It may be that this is best split between a couple/few html files so I'm not potentially loading 2000 images from 100 results each from the 20 repositories. Trial and error on this I s'pose.}

I have dorked around a bit with blogger templates and css and am moderately familiar with most markup. I haven't built anything really from scratch and I could probably recognise a few coding languages on a good day; but I certainly couldn't apply or modify them without help/copying. With that in mind, I would be happy to receive any tips or advice as to how this might be done (and indeed please tell me if it sounds a bit beyond my limited-ish capabilities).

I presume that a suitable template will be easy to find and copy, yeah?? And the adapting of it: will that be fairly reasonable?? We are not talking pretty: I just want something functional. {I guess one of the important issues will be identifying and compiling the correct search strings for each site hmm?}

generating tables using mako templates

zippy — Fri, 22 May 2009 04:01:42 -0800

Using a Mako template and CSS, I need to generate a m x n grid display from a variable length list of elements. For simplicity's sake, let's say what I want is a 2 x n table, but I'm fine with unordered lists as long as they appear on screen aligned as if they were in rows and columns.

What does the logic look like in mako to create such a structure? I'm having trouble figuring out when to start a new row or close and old one, while still keeping the template simple and readable.

Please spell things out and use small words as I'm new to both Mako and CSS (but somewhat conversant in Python), and keep me from the temptation to hard-code a solution for a fixed length list of elements.

Facilitator Guide Template

curiositykilledthelemur — Thu, 21 May 2009 08:30:39 -0800

Need a template for a facilitator's guide I'm creating. Does anyone know of an online template for me to use with a facilitator's guide I'm creating for a program to be used with high school students? It doesn't have to be free.

Making a monthly events calendar using seat-of-the-pants design!

soviet sleepover — Tue, 05 May 2009 15:54:27 -0800

I need to make a template for an in-print events calendar, and I'm not sure what the best way to approach this project is. Advice please! I've offered to create a monthly calendar template for a fantastic small nonprofit that I've worked extensively for in the past. My usual design style is a seat-of-the-pants combo of cut&paste and ill-suited Microsoft products, but because I have to hand this over to someone, I'd like to make it a little less haphazard this time. Help me figure out the best way to accomplish this!

The end result should be a monthly calendar to be distributed in print & maybe .pdf form. It needs to be designed in a commonly available Microsoft product (or open source equivalent; i.e. InDesign won't work), and should automatically populate the calendar with correct dates (probably a pony feature, I know!). It doesn't need to look glossy or high-dollar (their extant aesthetic is decidedly scrappy), but it'll serve as publicity for the organization, and needs to look eye-catching and interesting. So I can't just point them in the direction of a free Microsoft Word calendar template available somewhere online. Data can be entered "by hand," or drawn from iCal (there are few enough events that either are fine).

I'm reasonably tech-savvy (for someone who doesn't own InDesign, I guess), and so are the people who'll be updating/creating the calendar on a monthly basis. So kludges and workarounds are totally fine as long as they're simple (we're all familiar with--and do a pretty good job of--low-fi graphic design).

I'm not sure where to start, so I'm mostly interested in gathering ideas for how to work within the limitations (my own knowledge gaps, creating a simple low-work resource for whoever updates it in the future). Any suggestions or advice would be fantastic! So would any points in the right direction, any anecdotes, any chatfilter disaster stories of your own!

Hold my hand, teach me Joomla

wundermint — Mon, 04 May 2009 12:23:05 -0800

What are the best resources for learning Joomla? Help a poor designer wrap her head around the CMS. I usually build websites with Dreamweaver and use my knowledge of html and css to get everything just so. Now I need to enter the (wonderful?) world of CMS templates and administration. The experience I have in this area is basically limited to Wordpress.

So far I am overwhelmed by the amount of information out there for Joomla, and underwhelmed at its quality. Every video tutorial I've watched is along the lines of "log in to the administrator area and look around, it's pretty straight forward." Nothing concrete on how Joomla structures everything or how to control where content goes. The interface is — to me at least — not intuitive at all. I need a guide to hold my hand and tell me exactly what everything does. And not only does the interface throw me; I also need to understand how to edit/create templates and shape the design.

What are the best resources out there? What was helpful to you in the beginning? Books, video tutorials, webinars, pdf guides, your advice... anything that is clear and specific to help me get started would be much appreciated.

By the way, I am using the most current version which at this time is 1.5

Send a templated email from a website where the template is hosted elsewhere?

doomtop — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 10:44:55 -0800

Send a templated email from a website where the template is hosted elsewhere? I want to setup a website that hosts a templated email form that someone can fill out their name and their friend's email address and it will send the templated email to their friend and fill in the variable of their name so the friend knows who sent it. Standard stuff, I think.

However, I would like to put the actual form itself on a completely different website because on this different website I will have much less access and can only post HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc. and not actually store a template or anything like that.

Is there an easy way to do this? Everything I've seen so far would require both the form and the templated data to be in the same place.

Easy content management?

monkey closet — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 14:34:40 -0800

A friend has asked me to design/build a website for an organisation he's involved with. He will be updating the pages, creating new ones etc. There's a very small budget, which only covers the intial setup He has no experience, and a copy of FrontPage (which I don't use or have). The host allows php and ssi, but not databases. What's the best option for providing him with a template that will let him create and change pages easily, without screwing up my layout and causing me more grief?

Baby's room is meaningless without (animal) pictures.

caution live frogs — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 14:24:46 -0800

Mrs. Frogs wants to decorate the baby room. We've come up with an idea using National Geographic covers as a starting point. Specifically, covers featuring animals. I'm looking for a little help and some suggestions. Despite our plan not to run with any kind of a theme, the kid's room is decked with critters. (Blame me I guess, I was a zoology major.) My wife (former art major) wants to use some of her hand-made paper to create animal shapes as decorations. My idea was to use National Geographic as a jumping-off point, re-creating covers that have animals on them.

We have six yellow 8.5" x 11" picture frames. What I want to do is to print the National Geographic typeface on plain paper, and put the handmade cutouts on top. Even better, I'd love to include the date and issue info for the covers we are re-creating. (Mrs. Frogs works in a library, so the bibliographic info makes her smile.)

So, a little help: Where can I get a template to create the covers, short of scanning a magazine into Illustrator and doing it by hand? I'm not trying to infringe on a copyright here, I'm doing this for our own private use.

And, some suggestions: Any ideas for specific covers? We're looking for single animals, mostly, and I'm kind of biased towards mammals. If you can save me several hours of digging through library archives I'd appreciate it.

Dreamweaver noob CSS/template/float/whitespace question

momzilla — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 09:55:00 -0800

Dreamweaver CS3 newbie CSS/template/float/whitespace question I have created a few pages in Dreamweaver CS3 based on the "Two column hybrid, left sidebar, header and footer" template. The pages render perfectly on my computer; I tested them at every available resolution -- no problems.

When the pages were viewed by someone who really matters, they rendered funky, naturally. I wasn't present when he viewed them but what was described to me is that the main content was pushed down below the sidebar, thereby creating a ton of whitespace to the right of the sidebar. I have tried to recreate the problem on my PC but have not been able to.

I'm new to Dreamweaver/HTML/CSS, but from what I've read this sounds like a "float" issue, no? Am I barking up the right tree? I need to fix this ASAP, so any suggestions or expertise that is shared is greatly appreciated. Also, how can I make sure the issue is truly fixed when I cannot recreate the problem? Thanks in advance!

Help finding a Wordpress theme

speeb — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 17:54:37 -0800

I found a Wordpress theme the other night and didn't download it. Now I can't remember where I found it. In brief: the color of cardboard, crayon-ish drawings with at least one being a hot air balloon. A little more detail:

There were maybe three other themes on the site, all extremely similar, mostly it looked like they had just developed over time. The site itself was using the theme and I THINK it was a .jp site... but in English.

At the time I was googling wordpress themes with keywords like 'kids', 'children', 'parents' and maybe 'crayon' for a site I'm planning.

It was a really cute theme and I don't know where else to turn to.

Thanks in advance for any help!

How do I embed php into blogger?

mzurer — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 12:16:41 -0800

Is there a way to embed php into a blogger template? It seems like the tags are getting stripped out before it gets to my site. Do I need to somehow escape the php code so the Blogger parser just skips those tags prior to publishing? I have already written the code that generates the html I want as a standalone php page (and as a perl script if that helps).

Recognize the Template?

fingo — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 22:07:22 -0800

Two political candidates have identical websites. Did one rip another off, or are they both using the same template? I was researching the third party candidates for the Virginia Senate seat that's up in November, and I noticed that the websites of Libertarian William Redpath and Virginia Independent Green Gail Parker(warning: AMAZING jingle plays when you load the page) look exactly the same.

Does anyone recognize this as a premade template, or did one candidate rip off the other? The navigation bar is in flash, which leads me to believe that the source for this exists somewhere, but I don't know how to find it.

float, padding, margins, wrappers, %0px1.2em!11!! oh my!

iamkimiam — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 11:03:55 -0800

I'm going crazy trying to adjust my blog template. It seems that when I change the browser window size, the body, sidebar, and header all move independently. If I make the window wider, the right edges of the sidebar and header do not align. If I make the window less wide, the whole sidebar crunches into body text (fine) and eventually gets kicked off the side by the body (not fine). Ideally, I'd like them all to line up, move/scale together side-to-side, and not get kicked around. I know this has to do with adjusting float, padding, margins, wrappers, percentages, and pixels. I've been tweaking with the variables, hitting preview, observing changes, for way too long. If somebody could please help me fix this, or point me towards an easy tutorial that won't take up too much of my time to decipher, I'd be forever grateful. Thanks!

Blog is in my profile, but I would be really appreciative if it were NOT linked to in this thread. Thanks!

Send that email, stat !

fizzix — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:34:14 -0800

I'm working for a newer growing, small business (4-5 employees or so). We have to send emails containing the same information to existing customers. For example, we have to notify customers about their accounts (for example, their CC/billing information becomes outdated) or customers send us a question. We're looking for an efficient way to do this. Right now, we want to send out emails more efficient and rich than our current system: using Apple Mail (our office is using Mac OS X Tiger, and will continue to use Tiger, and Leopard, once Tiger is no longer supported by Apple) having a templates folder, selecting the send again button and then inserting the person's email. More importantly, Apple Mail (to the best of my knowledge) doesn't send out emails in HTML. Also, the ability to edit these emails before we send them out (like, adding an extra sentence to it before hitting send).

Instead, my boss is looking for a system that would create more professional looking emails (ones that you get from an established web business) and will allow someone with no web development expertise to send them out to customers.

Related to this, is there a way to automate this so that an html version of the email, and a plain text version is also automatically generated ?
(For this second question, I'm hoping there's an easier way
than writing a script from scratch (I'm familiar with java, but I think that isn't appropriate for this) to assign the content that changes to variables, and then inserts the content to the variables in templates that already contain the formatting.)

Forms look like a way to go, but I'm not sure if javascript or PHP is a better way. I'm leaning towards php, because I read there's the ability to integrate php with sql, eventually creating a database record of customer interaction (phone calls, emails, etc).

Where Can I Find A Flyer Template

partner — Wed, 28 May 2008 16:36:44 -0800

Can anyone direct me to a free flyer template that I can download for my MacBook? (PC OK, but I'd have to do the work at home.) We're staging a concert/dance with a cowboy rock band as a fund raiser for the food bank. I've looked and looked with no luck.

Create PDF Letterhead Template

cmherskovic — Thu, 22 May 2008 12:00:31 -0800

Hi, How do I create a PDF Letterhead Template? or in other words: Does any one how to print to a pdf letterhead template? Thanks! I want to create PDF docs that would look like the printed version that I print on preprinted letterhead paper.

Thanks!