Free Fonts for your Blog
I’m back to my gripe that blogs don’t support many fonts. Here is a collection of free fonts. You will have to use Photoshop to make the words into an image. I’ll put an example when I get a chance. I like the one called, “More than Enough.”
You Might Also Like:
8 Responses to “Free Fonts for your Blog”
Leave a Reply
June 7th, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Moon Star is more to my liking.
To really use the fonts in a blog, you would need to master the GD Library. With the GD Library, you would be able to generate font filled graphics on the fly.
The real stopper for most blogs is processing speed and bandwidth.
June 8th, 2007 at 10:30 am
Another great site for getting some free fonts is http://www.urbanfonts.com. Check it out!
June 9th, 2007 at 12:56 am
“blogs don’t support many fonts”
It’s not blog’s that don’t support many fonts, it’s browsers in general. we are limited to the ones that are most common across all platforms, and we use CSS to tell a browser to use a different font when it can’t be found on the platform the page is being rendered on. (Example: font-family:Georgia, “Times New Roman”, Times, serif;) Even if you use Wordpress or any other popular backend app you can still tailor the CSS to suite you.
The only options are to use images or as Moon Star above eluded too, use the GD Library to dynamically generate images that are rendered from text. I have used this approach in combination with PHP in the past, but it is not very resourceful and slowed loading times significantly.
The other down side with using images to replace text is it can effect your search engine visibility - depending on exactly what it is you want to replace. So if you are going to do that, use some clever CSS to keep the text there, but hide it from physical view. Then you wont be compromising important things like accessibility and SEO. It’s easy as heck to do. Remember search engines read the HTML, they don’t look at the page like you and I.
June 9th, 2007 at 9:30 am
Michael,
You’re right, it’s browswers don’t read many fonts - which makes a boring internet. You can use images but then as you said, search engines don’t read them.
I don’t know CSS…just enough to edit it. Do you have any examples of a blog or site that’s done it well? I don’t really want to change the text of everything, just headlines and mix things up on occasion.
Thanks for the good info!
Janet
June 9th, 2007 at 5:55 pm
Hi Janet,
I can give you an example right here. I notice you have the words “Affiliate and Internet Marketing” at the top of your page, which I assume would be a keyword combination you would like to be found under in a serach engine result. But replacing that text with an image compromises your SEO potential.
Here’s the solution. Create your nice new graphic. It can have those words or not - doesn’t matter. It just has to fit in the area you want it to go. Let’s say your graphic is 300px wide and 100px high.
(Note: Any code I note below will have deliberate spaces added just in case it tries to render when I post)
Let’s put the term “Affiliate and Internet Marketing” in H1 tags, like this:
Affiliate and Internet Marketing
To hide this from physical view and replace it with your new graphic, you introduce some CSS.
h1 {
background-image:url(images/my_new_header_image.gif);
line-height:100px;
height:100px;
width:350px;
margin:0px;
text-indent:-9999px;
}
The last line is the most important, as it says to render the text -9999 pixels left of the browser.
That’s the most basic form and it works a treat.
See it in action on my site (http://www.rustylime.com). I have my logo in the upper left corner. View the page with the CSS disabled (http://www.rustylime.com/no_css.php) and you will see a larger text header in its place.
As far as individual headings for each of your articles (which happen to be in the H2 tag), that’s a different story. But that said you can still use CSS to include graphics to make them more attractive using the same principal, but without the text-indent part of course
Hope this info helps.
June 9th, 2007 at 5:57 pm
I noticed the Heading1 tags got removed when I posted above. I am pretty sure you know what I meant anyway
June 10th, 2007 at 8:37 pm
Michael,
How generous of you - thank you for this information!
Janet
June 15th, 2007 at 5:03 am
Anytime….