Signature
Anyone notice the Ray in blue at an angle at the bottom of my posts lately? Just in case you did not notice, it is down there to the right. I had explored something of that ilk sometime ago with a signature plugin in WordPress of some nature or another. However, at the time I was not completely happy with the solution that was offered. There were three issues if I recall correctly. There was a pretty big overhead for what it was doing. The signature was located on a different server and really slowed down the load time of the pages. Worse of all, was the white outline that showed up around the signature when done in color on a different color background. I had made a note to revisit the issue at some point and finally did.
I noticed over on someone else site that they had installed the tool or something similar that I had back over a couple of years ago. There signature image looked great because they had it in color on a white background. Hence, they did not have the issue with the halo outline in white that I had. I will point out they have some options now to not have the image stored on their site now either. In my testing with their site generated signatures though, I still got the white outline image on my background even with transparency settings.
So, I moved on to my original thought I had a few years ago and decided to spend a few minutes actually working with it. I pulled up GIMP, a really awesome freeware graphics manipulation tool that runs both on Linux and Windows, to get started. I also downloaded a scripting flowing kind of font that I wanted as well. That is was simply a matter of finding the size, putting the font on and rotating it up to an angle that I liked. Setting the colors was simple, but getting the transparent background took me a bit of effort and was probably the reason that I had stopped before.
A very detailed step by step guide for doing this can found at aplawrence.com but here is the steps in a quick format without explanation. Open image. Right click image, LAYERS, ADD ALPHA CHANNEL. Right click again, SELECT, BY COLOR. Click the color you want to be transparent in the image. Right click, EDIT, CLEAR. Save image as a .PNG or .GIF.
At this point, I just uploaded the image to a specific location on my website and embedded the appropriate HTML code in the right location to have it show up in the place I wanted it to be in my theme. I did this on the pages that only pull code for a single post. For those with less desire to manipulate down that level, you could put it in your footer, but then it show up down there on all pages.
