And I thought, what about a two-column design? I like the links that I post and I’d hate for them to be ignored so they should have a prominent position. Plus there are a lot of them so they’ll take up a lot of space. On the flip side, my own written blog posts are important too; they don’t get updated that often but they are generally pretty lengthy.

So I thought about a two-column design where the columns are the same size. One column would display my blog posts and the other displays my links.

Step 1: New blank WordPress theme

I made a copy of the default WordPress theme and deleted all the CSS. Then I moved the sidebar to the top of the page.

Step 2: Setup some columns

Using an ugly ob_start() kludge, I filtered out the links into a second column. Then I wrote some CSS to the columns were at 50% width and floated next to one another. I also resized some images so they wouldn’t break the layout.

Step 3: Install Sideblog Plugin

Removed my kludge and went looking for a proper WordPress plugin to extract out the link posts. There are various technical reasons why you don’t want to use the hack I did, the big one is that if your front page is set to display 10 posts and 8 of them are links then the page ends up being lop-sided.

I managed to find Sideblog, the answer to my prayers.

Step 4: Play with color

After I got the layout in a “good enough” state, I decided to play with color and set the mood.

Here’s some blue:

Earthy green and brown:

Grey and black:

I have to say that this last one is probably what I’ll use. As much as I try to run away from bland greys, it’s still my favourite.

All of this took me about 2 and a half hours to do because I was chatting with people and reading some blogs on the side. The remaining of creating the design will probably take around 8 – 16 hours as all the spacing, color and styles are fleshed out. Plus I have to style comments and archives and chat, etc. Yikes.

Are you missing important CSS classes from your del.icio.us daily blog posting? Classes like delicious-link, delicious-extended and the always popular delicious-tags? If so, you had the same problem I did.

This problem is caused by:

• signing up for del.icio.us’ daily blog posting
• using WordPress
• creating a separate user for the daily blog posting
• setting that user at a role lower than “Editor”

The fix is is to set the new user as an Editor (or higher). As explained by the WordPress documentation on Roles and Capabilities, these custom css classes get stripped out unless that particular user has a role with the unfiltered_html capability.

If you do not use WordPress, this tip is in no way useful to you.

Victoria Harbour

There is javascript everywhere

Yes that’s right. There’s shitloads of javascript running rampant all over the place. Javascript for dynamic headline replacement, link hover styles, relative date formatting, faux dialog boxes and probably some other things I forgot about. Whatever, javascript is fun now that something like the Prototype library exists.

If this site takes too long to load because of the javascript, I will think about cutting back a little.

What’s this big space on the right?

Yeah, I got rid of the sidebar. I’m tired of looking like a default blog template. Sidebars are for pussies who feel they need to link to everything. I have gone in a different direction and I’m going to need to dust up the searching templates to offset the loss of a sidebar.

If I get bored, I might write up some fake Google ads and put them on the right side just to fuck with people.

There’s a blogroll hiding around here

I thought it would be neat to have a blogroll entry randomly picked and displayed on each of the individual entry pages. The idea has soured on me a little because the big black bar is too prominent. But who knows? It might just work out. If not, it’s a 2-second fix to remove it.

There are photos at the bottom of the page

Yes, I have integrated with my flickr because these days I really like my photos.

Speaking of photos, there are 5 cat photos hidden on this site. It shouldn’t take too long for someone to find all 5 and win the super duper prize that is on offer for finding cat photos (hint: I just email you another cat photo).

What do you think?

I like this design. Hopefully I will write more insightful blog entries as a result of it.

I forgot to mention. Completely untested in any browser except Firefox on Mac. I am getting sloppy in my old age.

Theme support is awesomeboat

The amount of customization permitted by WordPress is amazing now. Even before adding plug-ins, you can do a lot of things design-wise. I don’t know when someone added all these hooks for different templates based on filename and things like query_posts()but they are very welcome.

Stop releasing these damn 0.0.1 updates

Every other week there’s a new WordPress security patch. It’s a real pain to backup, cross my fingers and overwrite all these files. Last time I updated a site, I got my ass kicked because of Mac OS X’s tendency to replace folders rather than merge them (not WordPress’ fault).

Fuck you, Akismet

Yes, Akismet is the amazing savior when it comes to comment spam. Every time I load up the admin page, Akismet is sitting there smugly telling me that it’s my lucky day and thank god I have it installed because it has stopped a stunning total of 12 spam comments. Akismet, I specifically told you that 8 of those comments were not spam. You are not allowed to count them in your amazing tally of miracles performed.

Dammit, Ultimate Tag Warrior

Another release, another typo that can be fixed with a one liner. If the “Tidy Tags” functionality of Ultimate Tag Warrior version 3.14159265 isn’t working for you: line 483 of ultimate-tag-warrior-core.php needs to be changed to:

$tagidstr .= $tagid->tag_id . ', ';

UTW is a great plug-in but seeing careless little things slip through kind of hurt my brain.

Also? The default admin theme still sucks.

Rails Fever

I started playing with Typo because I thought, finally a capable blog engine with some decent development momentum behind it. I’m a natural tinkerer and I like being able to upgrade things and see its progression into something great.

Typo has a lot of features straight out of the box with no messy plugins. Things like Akismet spam filtering support, tagging, sidebar customisation, Markdown, etc.

The admin backend is also really polished and it’s pretty hard to fault.

From a nerdier perspective, Typo offers powerful theme support with well laid-out templates that are a little saner than WordPress’. Installation is not nearly as painless as WordPress but all the fiddly stuff I had issues with were related with FastCGI and the Dreamhost environment in general.

Typo runs on Ruby which has a hype and love factor much higher than PHP but is also harder to support and not as fast (yet).

Fresh Goes Better

As a side note, the default theme, ‘Azure’ is pretty lame. It’s sort of pale blue and corporate to the point of boredom. The other default theme, ‘Scribbish’, is quite an improvement but won’t really suit everyone’s tastes.

In other words, do not install Typo unless you intend to theme it yourself.

Complaining

There are some annoyances. Like no button to require commenters enter their email. Instead it just quietly marks them as spam. And you cannot elect to receive emails about things being marked as ‘Spam?’. Instead I have to log in periodically to check.

I’d much rather just ticking something to require emails so we don’t have to dance around like this. I think I might do a javascript check for an email address or simply just implement it in the actual Ruby code itself.

And editing comments? Forget about it. So far I’ve had to fire up PhpMySQL twice to fix typos in some comments that have been made.

The big annoyance with Typo is that the development momentum behind it has sort of slowed. Their Trac wiki is all but inaccessible for me and the user community is just a trickle. Over the coming month or so I’m going to have to figure out how strongly I feel about this and maybe get involved in the community myself or just give up and switch to Textpattern, EE or WordPress.

As of November 2006, I’m running on Typo 4.0.3. I wouldn’t recommend anyone else run Typo though. It’s still a bit immature and you are better off running a steady workhorse like WordPress.

B&W Photographs

The photographs used in the header and footer were taken on my Sony Ericsson K750i; the 2-megapixel camera phone I’ve been using for all my photos this past year.

The header is a shot out Studds’ car window as his parents drove me home after seeing him off at the airport. He’s due back in Melbourne soon and everyone here misses him oh-so-dearly. The footer is a shot from about 5 stories up at the student lounge in RMIT’s Building 14. I picked it because I could see a tram and when I see trams, I think Melbourne.

Yes, I will need to switch these photographs over when I get to Seattle. Or maybe I might keep them out of nostalgia.

I Deleted Everything!

All the old blog archives are gone. I will repost some of the older stuff here if I’m feeling generous. But for now, this blog is a clean slate. There was no real technical reason to delete everything (it would probably take about 1 day to migrate all the old entries), I just felt like I needed a clean house. It’s nice to know all this embarrassing writing has been taken offline. I have turned a corner.

Please Stand By

There will probably be quite a few hiccups in the next week or so while I tweak some things. Right now, the search results still look sort of weird, the 404 page is boring and my comments are easily exploited (thank you very much, Mike).