I have been manually inserting drop caps on the first letter of my posts for some time now, just because I like the look – it reminds me of some of my favorite books, especially when they get all elaborate with calligraphy. But frankly it’s a bit of a pain, I have to insert this markup:
<strong class="dropcaps">X</strong> (where “X” is the First letter of the paragraph, duh), and so I put this in my theme’s style sheet (style.css):
.dropcaps {
font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, Serif;
color: #126126;
font-weight:bold;
float:left;
line-height:30px;
font-size:36px;
padding: 3px 3px 0 0;
}
Which made for a nice boring drop cap, but I’d frequently forget to do it and would have to edit the post later. So I started using this nice Drop Caps plugin by Thomas Milburn which has a cool drop shadow effect (done with CSS!) which I really like, plus it just automatically puts dropcaps at the beginning of every post. Sweet.
BUT, when combined with my CSS, all of the post that already had the dropcaps look HUGE (and horrible. Not so sweet). So I wanted to edit the posts to remove my markup, but the prospect of editing 50 posts sucked. So I found this REALLY cool plugin – Search and Replace, which lists these credits: Original plugin ist von Mark Cunningham and was advanced (comments and comment-author) by Gonahkar. More increments by Frank Bueltge.
It’s a little scary, it actually replaces strings in your database (SO BACKUP YOUR DATABASE BEFORE USING IT IN CASE SOMETHING GOES HORRIBLY WRONG GAHHH!) but it worked beautifully, and I’m glad I have it installed in case I want to change something site-wide.
Say, for instance our drummer Kent changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol – all I would do is search for the word “Kent” and change it, piece of cake. Here is what Kent’s symbol should look like:
