Category: Website

Excel theme fix list

I’m writing this working list so that I can keep a record of what I did to the Excel theme to get it the way I like it, as well as for anyone else who’s interested in learning how to hack up WordPress themes.

Issues:

  • The amount of vertical space consumed by the header region (seems to be a common trend among the themes I’ve tried so far)
  • Need to tweak styles — tags and recent comments run into each other, headings in the sidebar are too prominent, need some custom style work for the Delicious widget
  • The dark borders around images and the big blocky links make the top of the page feel too heavy
  • Category and single post pages missing blog title

Fixes to date:

Tags: I replaced the function call for tags that was in the theme to specify the following: the_tags('<ul class="pmeta-tags"><li>Tags: ',',</li> <li>','</li></ul>');. This basically made the tag a true unordered list with a new class, pmeta-tags, and inserted a comma and a space after each item in the list except the last one. Then I edited the stylesheet to define ul.pmeta-tags as display:inline. So the tags now displays as a comma separated list. I tried a different, very handy, css-only approach (example) first, but the browser didn’t pick up the specified commas or spaces as cues to break the line, and so the content disappeared off the right hand side of the box.

Recent comments: I used the CSS-only example cited above to style the comments and provide a semicolon as a separator between comments. Alas, IE doesn’t understand this approach so I’ll have to do something else here.

Blog title on other pages: I edited the header.php file to include the blog title in parens after the title of the object (post, category, etc.)

Today’s theme: Excel

Snapshot of JHN with the Excel theme.I switched on Monday to a new theme, Excel, that addresses a few of the issues I had with Cutline. The color balance is much better than with the version of Cutline I was using (which I must say, in all fairness, was a much older version of the theme). I also like the layout, which is a two column layout but which floats the post “trivia” (publish date, tags, categories, etc.) in a separate mini column, leaving just post title and text in the main column.

Things I don’t like:

  • The amount of vertical space consumed by the header region (seems to be a common trend among the themes I’ve tried so far)
  • Need to tweak styles — tags and recent comments run into each other, headings in the sidebar are too prominent, need some custom style work for the Delicious widget
  • The dark borders around images and the big blocky links make the top of the page feel too heavy

But it feels closer than Cutline did.

About today’s theme: Cutline

Cutline 3 Column WordPress ThemeI swear I’ll stop writing about the site soon, but right now the visual aspects are kind of front and center in my mind. Today’s theme is called Cutline, and it’s by Chris Pearson. It’s a very popular theme, currently number one at the WordPress themes site.

Things I like about it:

  1. Appearance: crisp, graphically well laid out, doesn’t use the Microsoft sans serifs (though I’m not crazy about Arial/Helvetica as they ship, and will probably make some tweaks here).
  2. Post layout: brings the interaction element right up top.
  3. Easy to manage.
  4. The headline image has interesting placement, the author has provided an easy way to randomize the headers, and the non-obvious image dimensions have made me think about how to pull details out of larger photos.

Things I don’t like:

  1. The typographic color is all off. The posts disappear in the middle of the page because the sidebars are so dark. Partly this is because of…
  2. The heavy use of horizontal rules as separators. The dark lines pull my eyes all over the place. And the bold Helvetica/Arial for the headline type in the sidebar is overkill.
  3. The title region plus the header image pushes the site pretty far down the page.
  4. Not liquid layout. I appreciate the fact that I don’t have to cram everything into one sidebar, but it makes the page harder to work from an information perspective, and it limits the resizing I can do. Plus the sidebars are sized in pixels, so that limits the amount of text resizing I can do.

I can fix #1 and 2, and have some ideas about #3, but #4 is something I’d rather not try to fix myself. I’ll have to see how other themes handle this issue.

Anyone have strong thoughts about this theme?

Housecleaning

Still working on getting the new site up and running. I reinstituted the blogroll today, starting from scratch (it’s amazing how many links, old friends’ blogs particularly, have lapsed). If you’re reading this in RSS, you’ll have to go to the site to check it out.

I also removed the del.icio.us widget from my sidebar, because (drumroll) I was able to get their autoposting service to work. So that post with all the links? That’s my bookmarks from yesterday. Right now it’s set to fire daily between 6 and 7 pm, so you’re pretty much guaranteed that you’ll get a daily update from me, though it may not be my wittiest, wisest prose.

One downer: There doesn’t seem to be a way to format the posts. So you’re stuck with my unfiltered output and an ugly format. Maybe once I finish rebuilding the site theme the autoposts will start to look better.

Welcome back

Things are still a little nutty here, but welcome to the newly rebuilt Jarrett House North blog. As you can see, we’re now rockin’ the WordPress, thanks to Erin Clerico, my good host at Weblogger. I’m also rockin’ a standard WordPress theme, but never fear, the house will be back soon.

There are a few things broken. There are broken images, which I’m fixing one at a time. I need to reintegrate some non-blog content, such as my genealogy pages, and of course I have to point all the old blog addresses to this one. But it feels good to be back online.

Trying to use Disqus

I read with some interest that Dave Winer is experimenting with the comment service from Disqus on Scripting News. I turned comments completely off on my site one year ago today and really miss the interactivity. So I signed up for Disqus to see what I could get.

Unfortunately, I can’t figure out how to make Disqus work with Manila. I use a hosted Manila site, so I can’t resort to back-end code to make the integration work, and there are two critical pieces that are missing for me to be able to implement Disqus:

  1. A unique page for each post. This is obviously not Disqus’s fault, but the version of Manila that I use has one page per day, not per post. So it’s not clear where the comment form should go.
  2. A way to modify the permalink URL. The generic Disqus instructions say to publish a version of the permalink URL followed by #disqus_thread. Unfortunately, I don’t appear to have access to a Manila macro that will do this—I get the permalink as a fully formed link.

So it looks like, unless the Disqus people come up with something, I have yet another reason to accelerate my move to another blog platform.

Except…hmmm, now I have an idea about how I might pull it off. Let’s see if I can make it work.

Photo sharing

I was contacted today by Schmap, an online travel guide, to use one of my photos of downtown Portland (the sand castle contest photo) in their guide. They found me on Flickr and actually had the courtesy to ask about the photo before they reused it—it’s a Creative Commons-licensed photo. Rather novel, really—I’ve only been asked about one other of my photos, though I have no way to know if any of the others have been reused.

Blogaversary VI

Six years ago today, I sat at a computer in the Seattle suburbs and updated this site, thinking I would manage to update it again only under extreme duress; hence the optimistic title Quarterly Update (I). A funny thing happened shortly thereafter, and I got the blogging bug. And I haven’t been quite the same since.

Oh, this blog and I have had our ups and downs: three redesigns in the first three years; periods of six posts a day and periods of a post every six days; posts about my family, technology, music, and beer; and our dogs and our house. And occasionally I might have written something worth linking to.

I’ve been through periods where I watched my hit counts and my referrers several times a day. Where I despaired if my month over month readership fell. Where I treasured reciprocal links like signs of friendship.

These days? Well, last year I was a little bummed over the fact that my frequency of posting was falling off. In retrospect that was an inevitable fallout of the Sony Boycott blog period, when I was updating two blogs several times a day. But I also think it was a year ago that I first decided that the important thing wasn’t post frequency or readership, blogrolls or PageRank. It was the writing.

So from here on out I think I’ll just keep writing. One post at a time.

After all, this blog isn’t a sprint. It isn’t even a marathon. (For one thing, no one’s kissing the writer in Wellesley.) It’s more like breathing.

MoreConsuming

I finally bit the bullet today and pulled the plug on my old manual system of tracking what I’m listening to, reading, or watching at any given moment. There were all sorts of reasons to do so, but three factors combined to make me make the change. The first was the eleven step manual workflow needed to update each of the entries in that list. The second was an honesty factor; I don’t need to show a movie in the list all the time if I only watch movies once a month. The third factor, though, is how easy AllConsuming makes it for me to track the information. Now all I have to do is tell AllConsuming that I’m listening to, reading, watching, or eating something and it will show it on my site automatically with a single line of JavaScript.

This, of course, flies in the face of what I said two years ago about blog related services. What’s changed is that I don’t have the time to maintain some of the more manual parts of the blog any more, and there are better services available now than there were then.

BlogUnrolling

So I was looking at my website and wondering: why do I still have a blogroll? And does anyone care that I still have a blogroll?

Used to be that blogrolls were what everyone did. There were bitter discussions about being linked or unlinked. Now? It’s probably just a measure of my declining time spent in blogs, because I haven’t updated it in a long time. I’m lucky if I see one or two blogs (besides BoingBoing) on the blogroll that are actually updating in a 24 hour period.

So drop me a line if you still want to be on the blogroll, but I’ll be taking most of the items off in the next day or so. It’s time.

Where is my mind?

I’ve been offline for a really long time, in terms of this blog’s history, and thought I’d surface for air to post a brief update.

It’s been a quiet Christmas here at Jarrett House North. My mom came up to spend Christmas with Lisa and me, and we’ve had some nice gift giving and some really excellent meals. With only two cooks at any given time, we had to simplify the feast of seven fishes for Christmas Eve—instead, we just did pasta aio i olio with shrimp covered in breadcrumb with parsley and garlic and baked. On Christmas Day we did a beef tenderloin studded with pancetta with a nice red wine and shallot sauce.

Christmas Eve services at Old South were nice this year, a ceremony of lessons and carols. The opening, as in the Anglican service, was “Once in Royal David’s City”; for us, the opening verse was intoned from the back balcony of the church as the rest of the choir stood in the aisles with lit candles, then sang the second verse a cappella before the organ and congregation joined the final verse. The choir was good, despite the last minute addition of a substitute tenor (and one other tenor—me—being exceptionally sleep deprived).

What else? We have upgraded the photo equipment here at the Jarrett House, trading our old sturdy Nikon for a Canon PowerShot SD600. (I wanted something with higher resolution so I could print photos larger than 3″x4″; to my delight, the PowerShot is also faster, simpler, and generally better. Proof eventually to come once I get a chance to take some serious photos with it.)

And my old trusty 10GB iPod has been upgraded for a 30GB video iPod, thanks to a slew of gift certificates to Apple from my family. Now I have more room for music—I can fit at least 20 playlists on the thing alongside my standard rotating roster of unlistened-to music, plus photos, plus videos, and the screen is beautiful, bright, colorful, and shows album art. Special bonus: it fits in the car cradle I bought prior to the cross-country trip for the old one.

Today: a trip to the North End to get cotechino, a little light housework, and maybe even a nap.

Closing the door: no more comments on this blog

I’ve touched on the problem of comment spam before, but this weekend I’ve decided to call a halt. Starting right now, I’m disabling access to the comments and discussion features on this site. If you have something to say, write about me in your own blog and I’ll read it in Technorati, or use the contact form to email me.

I hate having to do this; after all, this is supposed to be the two-way web. But I can’t keep up with an army of unpatched zombie PCs sending unsolicited spam comments. I had to delete over 900 spam comments last night, and there were 150 more when I checked this afternoon.

This will be a temporary measure until I can move this blog and its existing content over to a WordPress host, or to some other modern hosting system. But for right now I don’t have any other choice.

I guess this is the future of technology. Once it was only big players like Dave Winer who had enough comment grief that they had to disable comments. Now, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, everyone can experience what Dave was going through four years ago.

Piskawhat?

I’m getting buried alive under an avalanche of spam. Most of the offending items appear to start with the nonsense word piskasosiska, plus a unique numeric code that appears to correspond to the contents of the spam message. Presumably this is to make it easier to verify the spread of a particular unsolicited spam comment.

Anyone got any idea which bot network is sending these messages? I want them gone, and I’m about a heartbeat away from shutting comments down on this site entirely.