the
Old Fashioned

Clarín, the most read newspaper in Argentina, has a free blogging service for its readers, Clarín Blogs, that was running using custom installations of Movable Type and La Coctelera.

Because the company migrated to Wordpress, they needed to redo all their existent blog themes to make them work in this new blogging platform.

The objective of the project was to migrate 200 blog themes, not only those that can be chosen by its users, but those from Radio and TV Shows that are also part of Grupo Clarín, the biggest media group in Argentina and one of the biggest and most important in Hispanic America.

The challenge was to identify shared elements in all the designs in order to cut off development times.

We came up with the idea of composing each theme by using two files: one master stylesheet for the general layout and typography, and another that will have the color and imagery needed to build each design.

Using this modular system, we could easily modify the master template as needed, resting assured that all the changes will reflect perfectly in all the blogs.

In addition, since the service has a lot of traffic, optimization was a crucial requirement for balancing server loads.

CSS sprites for the icons helped to reduce server hits. Also, since the icons are transparent images, their colors can be easily changed right in the CSS file to fit each theme’ color scheme —no needing to export a new image file each time a design is built. We call these, chameleonic icons.

Completed in partnership with Agencia Blog.