Burningbird

I added an entry to the top of the sidebar for my individual entry pages that lists information about the post, including: author, date and time of post creation, categories, a link to syndicate the comments for that post, post comment status, and other information.

I didn’t like the PREV_POST and NEXT_POST line at the top of the page. No reason why, just personal preference. But once I moved the entry navigation over to the sidebar, I started thinking of other bits of information that would go nicely with the individual post navigation links.

To populate this information, I’m using several WordPress functions that normally only work in what is known at The Loop — the opening and closing code to process the post(s) for a specific query. However, you don’t have to use these functions within The Loop as the data is global to the page — the last data set should persist throughout the rest of the page. Once you’ve processed the post in a page, the data should be available from that point.

Since I process my posts before my sidebar contents in my layout, to make the page more accessible to those using speech browsers, the data last set is still available to my sidebar. It’s just a matter of adding the function calls. Now, I can print out any type of information about the post in the side without having to re-create The Loop.

Of course, the results won’t be effective in pages that process several posts, but works nicely with individual pages.

I would be adding more photos to Tin Foil Project, but the weather has been abysmal. Either extremely hot and humid, or thunderstorms, and now we’re looking at flash floods combined with thunderstorms and a tropical storm across the entire eastern portion of the country. Rather furious weekend, weather wise.

I made a version of the Tin Foil Project stylesheet for this weblog, as part of the switcher. I like the green background, and the faint image to the side. However, I have modified the overall look from Tin Foil Project, adding in a bit more color and other odds and ends. And I’ve disconnected the items much more than any of the other styles.

I know I do owe Danny Ayers an apology for doing a ‘green’ weblog when I said I wouldn’t. But at least it wasn’t the green that Danny dislikes. That one is very close to one of the colors published as part of the color forecasting done yearly. It’s called soho green, described as … A fusion of bronze and gold creates this 21st century neutral, elemental and enduring.

My color of green was from using a wonderful little shareware tool Color Cop to sample the colors in this photo. The colors from all my sites are found using this digital color eyedropper.

I used to worry about ‘web safe’ colors until a wise man told me that most monitors can handle millions of colors, and why limit myself to a couple of hundred? Now I test my colors on my Dell laptop, my TiBook, and sometimes the computer at the library. If it looks okay, then I don’t worry about other monitors. I figure if a color comes out glaringly wrong in someone else’s monitor, they’ll just assume I have taste as abysmal as the weather. Most importantly, it doesn’t stop their ability to read the text.