Categories
Photography

Rainy carnival kind of day

Categories
Photography Weather

Moderation in all but storms

I managed to walk right into a major storm, and ended up having to take shelter until it was over. I was soaked, and I could feel the electricity of the storm on my skin, and the drop in pressure in my head.

I had a great time. I also managed to pick up some photos that are not usual for me, and I’ll post later today or tomorrow. My Nikon 995 does quite well in the rain. At least, for now.

Categories
Burningbird

First new look: Burningbird of Happiness

For those with the time and inclination, I’ve modified my third WordPress test weblog to one of the new looks I’m trying.

This one I call The Burningbird of Happiness.

It should validate as XHTML strict and CSS with a little more tweaking on my part. And no tables.

Site also uses several of my hacks turned into plug-ins, and uses the ‘invisible’ WordPress directory structure. In fact, all my tests sites have access to the plug-ins because I’m using the symbolic link to this directory from each weblog.

Whether you’re a techie or not, the Unix symbolic link can be your very good friend.

Categories
Technology Weblogging

I’ll take the dusty apple without the worm

‘You’ll have to excuse me if I seem focused on WordPress right now. This week if I’m not working the back end, adding in all sorts of new plugins and other general tweaking around; I’m working the front, creating several new looks for the Burningbird weblog–each as different from the others as possible.

Currently I’m playing with one look I’m calling “The Burningbird of Happiness”, and frankly having an enormous amount of fun. It’s colorful and very different from this look, and I rather like it. However, I fear that most people, used to the designs fostered by many of the popular weblogging tools, may find it a little, well, shall we say, unpolished? So much so, that I’m thinking of adjusting the titles for each look, just to set the expectations:

The Burningbird of Happiness (who flies outside the CSS Zen Garden)

Li’l Flame – the design guarateed to break TypePad (not the pages, the server)

Ode to Windows Hot Dog Stand (and don’t try this at home, kiddies)

The slightly off-center and irritating Missouri Green

To Ms. Moto: “Eat Pink and Die”

The one-too-many Margarita Look

The god-awful Clash of Colors

There’s something wonderfully liberating accepting the fact that you’re not known for your design acumen. You can, then, freely and happily break every rule of tasteful and elegant design and page layout. As long as the results are easily readable in most browsers on most systems, accessible, and validate, with a minimum of personal anguish to the more artistically sensitive among you, I’ll be happy. If it’s unpolished, at least it’s uniquely me.

Speaking of unpolished, I’ve heard this term used a lot with the WordPress administration pages. I’m not sure why, either. I don’t want to turn this site into a WordPress fandom site, but if WordPress administrative pages are considered ‘unpolished’ what will people think when they get to my pages? Perhaps what the problem is, I don’t understand the difference between ‘polished’ and ‘unpolished’.

I find that the WordPress administrative pages are easy to read and to navigate. They make good use of the space, and they’re clean and uncluttered. They load quickly and simply, and they provide enough space for me to add my tweaks, but not so much space that they’re wasting screen real estate. Frankly, what is so ‘unpolished’ about this?

Is it because the forms and writing isn’t set into miniscule format, and scrunched into a space that would work with the old 640×480 monitors? Is it because the text is black, plain, and easy to read?

Perhaps its the lack of graphics–Wordpress uses a minimum number of graphics. But without all those graphics, the page loads quickly and takes less resources.

In fact, WordPress has all the looks of an application designed to be highly functional and intuitively easy to understand. Aside from one small tweak to the CSS style sheet, to make some borders a tad darker, I find that the tool is very easy on eyes that can be tired at times, or perhaps not as good as they used to be when younger.

It’s odd, but when I first switched from Movable Type to WordPress, I also thought the interface was ‘unpolished’. Now, I’m not sure why, except for the fact that it doesn’t make extensive use of graphics, and the forms tend to fit the page, rather than leaving a great deal of white space.

Maybe that’s the problem: we’ve been looking at sites and styles that are so much alike that when we see something that’s ‘different’ we immediately equate the difference with being less somehow. The more conservative will point out failures in the design and attempt to create a ‘proper’ look; while even the most liberal of us, those who celebrate difference, will mentally ‘polish’ the image in their mind until they see it transformed into something ‘better’; discarding the unique bits along the way.

That’s not to say that a friendly suggestion and helpful hand is amiss–but doing so effectively rather requires one to step into the mind of those who we would help; to respect the essence and the truth of both the design and the designer. Maybe even realize that ‘better’, isn’t always better.

Categories
Weblogging

WordPress 1.2 release

The long awaited WordPress 1.2 has just been released. You can download the source directly at the Source Forge page if the WordPress site is slow.

A major architectural update in 1.2 is the tool now makes about 25% less calls to the database, which should make significant improvements in performance. I’ve noticed this improvement in my working versions of the product–as long as I don’t use automated trackback and pingback of URLs within each post. My recommendations is: do not do automated trackbacks, manually grab and add trackbacks and pingbacks as appropriate. Remember that a trackback isn’t necessarily a link to another post.

There’s all sorts of new goodies in this release, including support for internationalization (and yes, I realize that I need work in this area for supporting trackbacks from Japanese sites), category hierarchies, built-in blacklisting, thumbnail image generation, and the new plugin architecture. The plugin architecture is particularly nice, and I’m porting as many of my hacks to it as I can.

There was one change mentioned that I’m interested in but unclear about; according to the change log:

Directory flexbility: Now you can have all the WordPress files in one directory and the weblog in a higher level directory.

I wouldn’t mind a cleaner directory for my weblog, but I’m not sure the mechanics of this, and can’t find any documentation about this change. Speaking of which, I also wouldn’t mind more documentation on the plugin architecture. However, now that 1.2 has been released, I’m sure we’ll see an increase in the overall documentation for the tool.

Unfortunately, I’m right in the middle of something else and can’t work with WP 1.2 as much as I would like right now. I hope to start making the move towards the end of the week. As I do, and create plugins, I’ll add them to the WordPress Plugin list, in addition to documenting their use here. (That is, after first checking to see that a plugin to do the work hasn’t been written already.)

As for those hacks that can’t be done with a plugin, I’ll also document how-tos here, which the WordPress folks are more than welcome to copy for inclusion in the wiki in they wish. I won’t document these directly at the wiki, though; I don’t want these hacks to seem as if they’re officially sanctioned by the WP team. Well, unless they do get officially sanctioned by the WP team.

When the hacks and plugins are working in my test weblogs, then I’ll port this weblog. I also want to do a re-design first, so that’s another chunk of time. There are existing styles designed for WordPress I could copy and then modify–but I can’t find the list. If I find this, I’ll post a link to it. (Here’s the link, thanks to Tubedogg.)

This is a major new release, with numerous new features, so for those new to WordPress, all I can say is, patience. If you run into a bug, report it, don’t just drop the tool. If it doesn’t have something you want, check to see if the feature is planned for the future, add a feature request, or see if it does do what you want, but you need to make some modifications first.

All in all, I’m pleased with the move to this tool, and look forward to when I’ve migrated the rest of my old MT weblogs over, and have upgraded everything to the newest release.

Then I can go back to writing about…well, what exactly is it that I write about? Stuff?

Stuff.

Upgrade Updates:

Note I checked the support forum on this flexible directory modification, and found that a) this is an .htaccess redirect hack, and b) there are two fields in Options that control this. You enter the Blog URL, the WordPress URL, update, and then go to the permalinks option and generate .htaccess entries…but it sure didn’t work for me.

Looks to me like there’s a missing redirect to the index.php file in the .htaccess file to work. When I manually added this, and altered any other reference to index.php to point to the WP directory, it did work, then. But was that what I was supposed to do? Or leave some of the files in the weblog directory?

update on this item A documentation page for this option was pointed out to me at the forum. I’m so used to checking the documentation wiki, didn’t check the documentation at the site itself.

Modifying the file worked, and removed the redirect to index.php. It sounds like rewrite is only needed if rewrite is being used for managing archives anyway.

This works nicely. It’s more secure than having your weblog in the midst of your WP files, not to mention easier to work with from a design perspective. The application could generate the change itself, but that means setting index.php to global write – per previous LAMP essay.

One upgrade question down.

Update on Japanese trackback

Another support forum entry discussed the problems with getting trackbacks from Japanese language weblogs–but it looks like the solution is partially in Japanese. However, the code is in English, so looks like it could be used to make mods to the code. I hope because I don’t like deleting the Japanese trackbacks. Unless, I’m doing something else wrong with the trackbacks.

Too much tweaking.