I completely forgot that today is CSS Naked Day. I got an IM from Donn to inform that my style sheet wasn’t loading and, to my partial credit, I instantly searched Google for CSS Naked Day to check what day it’s on. I had this recollection that I installed a plugin to make CSS Naked Day happen automatically every year.

Looks like it’s working!

So, once again this year I’m baring all and you can see my pure semantic HTML markup. Hopefully you can still find everything easily accessible on my site (whilst maybe not being quite as refined as the main design). This lasts for the full international day as such, so will stop when it becomes the 10th of April on the high seas between 180° and 172°30′W longitude.

If you’ve gone naked let us know in the comments and happy CSS Naked Day 2010!

Date Added: April 8th, 2010 | Leave a comment!

WordPress have just announced the launch of version 2.8 today and I’ve already upgraded thanks to the super handy in-built upgrade tool.

Looks like there’s a heap of nice tweaks and changes but the most noticeable thing on first use was the speed of the admin interface, which definitely feels like it’s moved up a good notch in speed. Other improvements include:

• Better widget management
• Theme installing and improved theme editing through admin interface
• Post management and dashboard display options increased
• Timezone fixes (you can select your timezone and it handles summer time issues)

They’ve also launched a whole new Widget API. So good work Automattic and the community! Keep the fire burning!

Date Added: June 11th, 2009 | Leave a comment!

I’m currently learning the joys of programming in PHP thanks to a friend of mine, Ian Huet who runs Kestrel ID, a web development business. He suggested that he teach as a means of refreshing his own understanding and also going through the new areas that exist as part of PHP5 with the aim of him doing the certification exam later this year. The theory is that I might also be able to sit the exam at that time – but I’ve got a long long way to go.

We’ve been doing a 3 hour session every Thursday night for the last few weeks and this week we’re meant to be delving into arrays. Last week was functions, and I instantly found myself in a situation where I was able to apply my new knowledge (with quite a bit of help from the aforementioned Milorad Ivovic) to a little coding issue on a new WordPress based website we’re working on.

This is the most focussed I’ve been on the learning front since I trained myself in (X)HTML and CSS. However, with PHP there are actual exams that I can sit, unlike HTML and CSS, for which there aren’t really any standard recognised body qualifications available (as far as I know – please correct me if I’m wrong). It’s great to have someone like Ian to guide me through it all, patiently listening to my questions

So now I’ll be forging on with a proper goal in mind, the attaining of PHP certification, and the promise of faster development time on our websites.

Date Added: June 5th, 2008 | Leave a comment!

WordPress 2.5 comes now with a Gallery feature built right into the system. Huzzah!

This means that in the back end you can upload 10, 20, 30 pictures etc, and then choose to insert them as a “Gallery”. WordPress will take care of the rest, with default basic styling of your thumbnail lists, and then each picture links off to its own page which contains that picture.

A lot of themes won’t have taken advantage of the new template structure for this – which involves a new “image.php” template file. If your theme doesn’t have this file then your gallery images will just default to the standard single.php (or perhaps index.php). There’s little documentation regarding this template file usage at the moment, so I’m going to have to play around with it a bit more to suss it out. However this does mean that you could have comments on each photo, you can have your photo description and caption included as text for the image, and you can include next and previous images as well.

There’s a post outlining some of the basic functions of the new template option over at Laura Fisher’s blog, and there’s a little bit of information about the gallery shortcodes in the WordPress codex.

Gallery Test

So here’s a gallery, just thrown in here to see what happens. I’m not going to even bother to check whether I have the image.php template file that would be required, but whenever I get round to actually coding a theme for this site, I’ll definitely be taking advantage of it. Random photos ahoy!

Date Added: June 3rd, 2008 | Leave a comment!

Today was an excessively long day of computer grinding. Whilst the sun was shining I was writing code and staring into the ever bright double pane of LCD in front of me..

Still it went well. I’ve just started some proper guided learning of PHP thanks to Ian at Kestrel ID, who’s giving me one-on-one training, and today I got to practice coding functions – with a lot of help from Milorad Ivovíc who selflessly gave his time in helping me work out a fairly simple use of PHP. There’s a very long WordPress support forum thread over here showing how much he helped out.

What a delightful way to spend a Friday, from morning til what, 2.40am.. Perhaps I should get out more.

Date Added: May 31st, 2008 | 2 Comments

In an effort to slightly improve the look of my RSS reader of choice, Google Reader, I had a look at the “Stylish” extension for Firefox.

Stylish allows you to add a “user style” to a website so that it changes the colour, layout, and other items that affect the look of the site. In addition Stylish goes beyond that to allow modifications to the look of Firefox itself. Think of it as a Firefox extension that is instantly applied or removed. It’s a really nice little plugin and I can see it being something I’ll dabble with on a regular basis, especially due to the instant results (instead of having to restart Firefox).

There are two ways of changing the look of things.

1. You can go into the add-on settings (or click the Stylish icon in your status bar) and start writing your own styles for things, or
2. You can visit UserStyles.org and browse through a wide selection of styles for various popular sites.

So, after some digging around for Google Reader styles I found one or two possibilities that might make it look nicer, although I only ended up using one of them which increases the font size and justifies the text – you can load it up by going here: http://userstyles.org/styles/1459

Writing your own?

So what, pray tell, does writing your own user style entail.. well, at the very least you’d want to have knowledge of HTML and CSS and it would be good to have a couple of handy tools about for analysing the site you want to affect.

If the site in question is well coded, there’s pretty much no end to the changes you can make – however, be warned (before you go spending weeks on a new style), there is always the potential that the site you’re restyling could decide to rework their outputted HTML, and the smallest change of an ID or a class could completely ruin your special style.

Still, a lot of sites retain their HTML output for a long time, adding small changes which could be easy to tweak, and certainly it can be fun to change the look of elements on a website – especially things that have been bugging you for a long time.

With this in mind I instantly had a look at changing the look of Jaiku, which has an awful lot of a particularly suspect green in use. Once I worked out the correct format of my first user style it was just a matter of settling into a familiar land of CSS and making some changes. After about 45 minutes of messing around I had the basis of a new user style for Jaiku, and whilst it’s a little rough around the edges (I focused on altering the main page style) it’s pretty usable (I hope..).

Here’s a before and after shot.

It’s imaginatively titled “No Jaiku Green” and you can get it over here: http://userstyles.org/styles/7584

Date Added: May 28th, 2008 | Leave a comment!