Today, April 9, is CSS Naked day. Today, you see my site as it would be seen in a text browser or a screen reader. We should try to make our websites as accessible as we can. Does your site still look good naked?
I just installed Dougal’s Easy Gravatars plugin. He’s just released version 1.1. Inserting Gravatars into your commenter’s comments is as easy as installing the plugin. It works really well. It was even super easy to move the image a bit with the built in “advanced” feature of being able to add CSS properties into the config page. I’ve decided to go back to using Gravatars because I’ve always liked them, and since they’re now owned and hosted by Automattic, they are blazingly fast, thanks to the gobs of speed and bandwidth they now have at their disposal. This is great!
So, I’ve actually gotten around to it. If you’ve been visiting on and off over the last few days, you may have caught a glimpse of this new theme as I tested it out with this blog. I’ve been working on and off on it for a few weeks now and its ready for public consumption, I think.
There are a few other things I’d like to refine on it, but this is the way that its going go look going forward. Its a tad different than anything that I’ve done before and some of the structure hasn’t been seen often at all. You’ll notice that there’s no traditional sidebar on the side. I’ve moved it below the first post and the treat from the past. I’m moving some of the clutter from the front page to its own page, such as my blogroll. I’ve kept it trimmed for a long time, although my bookmark list is looooong! So, I will get to work adding to it so that the links page is fleshed out. Once I learn how, I’ll probably change the template for that page (and maybe the archives page as well) to a two column design, like newspaper columns. That way the list of links (and older posts) will be lined up in nice neat lines to be viewed with pleasure.
I was originally going to try coding this one from scratch, which is why I didn’t have anything up months ago. If you want to know the inspiration for this theme, you should visit the site of J David Macor, who is the theme author that ported Deliciously Blue from Glossy Blue. I replaced the icons with the excellent free Drunky Love ones by Kevin Wetzels. I’ve left footer links so that you can go and visit their sites for yourself. This theme is sponsored by no one.
You’ll notice that this theme doesn’t look much like the original any more, either by color and artwork, or by design. But, if you dig into the code, you’ll see that I’ve left much of the code intact (even the css naming, which I will eventually clean up). Expect a tag cloud at one point or another and perhaps something in a big block at the bottom, once I figure out whether I want anything down there.
Tell me what you think. I really like how this has turned out - especially the double wordpress loop. I hope that you do too, as I have wanted to free myself of the sidebar for a while. If you see that something is missing, please let me know. If you have browser weirdness, let me know, especially if you use IE6 or IE7, as I haven’t done much testing with IE6 and I’ve resisted IE7 so far on my Windows computer.
Well, its late here (at least for the time I got up yesterday morning) and my eyes are barely still open, so I’m off to bed. Comments are still unmoderated locally. I’m just relying on Akismet and SSP, so you should have no trouble commenting and seeing the results immediately.
By the way, I’ve used the colors in the picture that you see above as my palette for the theme. Those leaves were plucked off a tree on the way to Caleb’s school.
To answer your question, Macbros,
I am hosted with a company called DSTinternet, and yes they’re fast! I did a lot of research before I unleashed my wallet on them and I couldn’t find enough negative about this company to not use them. The pricing seems to fit my budget and the features are fantastic! The company responds to support requests nearly instantly via the chat box off the site. I haven’t tried phone support yet, so I don’t know if the number will be reachable from Canada. My only gripe is that the use the Plesk control panel and I’m used to cPanel. I’ll have to see if I can simply add IP addresses to a ban list, as I can with cPanel, or if I have to add them to my .htaccess file manually (which I will, you spammers!). They allow FTP access so whatever!
As far as the rest,
This site runs on Wordpress. I usually am running a nightly build from the development repository. I’m not quite nutso enough (but close) to go with SVN commits, but the snapshot may not work for me every time either. I test the installation with similar plugins and theming on my own computer before I replace what’s working on this site. I don’t “upgrade” every night - more likely every 10 days or so. The current version is 2.3 alpha.
I am using a completely hacked and modified version of the Fresh theme, which was ported to Wordpress by LEMONed from the original design by Wolfgang Bartelme. I haven’t even left the structure intact, as I’ve moved stuff all over the place. The theme is based on a header, footer, body, subfooter, and sidebar. It has 3 sidebars (2 custom ones for individual pages, to which I employ the Page Template function) and 3 footer/subfooters. It will not always be the one I use. There’s something being cooked up in the background…
This site uses these plugins:
- Antileech - Prevent errant parties from stealing your content and bandwidth. By Owen Winkler.
- Archivist - Selects a defined number of (random) posts from the archive and shows them on the front page By Martin Chlupáč.
- Bad Behaviour - Deny automated spambots access to your PHP-based Web site. By Michael Hampton.
- Compact Monthly Archive - Displays a compact montlhly archive instead of the default long list. By Rob Marsh, SJ.
- Digital Fingerprint - adding a customizable “digital fingerprint” to your RSS feed in posts. By Kirk Montgomery.
- DoFollow - Disable the “nofollow” tagging for comments. By Kimmo Suominen.
- Extended Comment Options - This plugin allows you to switch comments and/or pings on or off for batches of existing posts. By Mark Kenny.
- Extended Live Archives - Implements a dynamic archive, inspired by Binary Bonsai and the original Super Archives by Jonas Rabbe. By Arnaud Froment.
- Fancy Pullquotes - Creates pullquotes of given text to appear with a magazine-like style By Giorgio Gilestro.
- Google AJAX Search - Adds a Google AJAX Search box on your site. By http://dancameron.org.
- myQuote - myQuote is a simple and small Wordpress plugin which enables you to place a Quote or Text on your website. By Jesper Avôt.
- Photopress - Photopress adds some image handling tools to Wordpress, including a popup upload and browse tool, a random image template function, and a simple album. By Isaac Wedin.
- Recent Comments - Retrieves a list of the most recent comments. By Nick Momrik.
- Related Posts - Returns a list of the related entries based on active/passive keyword matches. By Alexander Malov & Mike Lu.
- The Excerpt Reloaded - This mod of WordPress’ template function the_excerpt() knows there is no spoon. By Kaf Oseo.
- Ultimate Tag Warrior - Ultimate Tag Warrior is a tagging plugin, that’s heavy on tag visualisation. I Like Pi! By Christine Davis.
- Wayback - generate a list of posts from a previous period. By Chris Goringe.
- WP Grins - A Clickable Smilies hack for WordPress. By Alex King.
- WS Tooltips - Let’s you display cool JavaScript fading tooltips! By Christopher Hartmann.
For the moment, that’s all, but I will be changing and moving things around now and then. I have more plugins installed but not activated.
That’s about it for now. If I’ve left anything out, I may add to this post later.
Do you see the way that today’s date is rendered below the title to this post?
I had some help to get it done. (pull)I could have got this achieved eventually, I am sure, if I had sat down(/pull) with the BlueQ theme from tquizzle and Abe Olandres WP Date Image Hack. But, I didn’t. Somebody that I know was eager to help and spread the great thing that he had figured out. Not only was he willing to share, he snagged that old icon 
and used the colors to make the images required to do the fancy image date hack. We used the same approach with the exception that my images were to be lined up side by side, rather than stacked.
The images are as follows: 
These are examples. The things is that the images must cover the dates that are covered by the blog. So, since John made images to 2010, I’ll have to come up with more, if this theme, or date hack lasts beyond that.
So, the whole idea is to slice up an image (or repeat it with different front material) and stick it in place of the text. Some CSS is required. Here is mine:
.post-date {padding: 0px 0px;
margin: 0px 0px 0 0;
width: 105px;
height: 16px;
font-size: 0.5em; /* IE FIX*/
text-align: center; /* IE FIX*/}
The rest is from Macbros instructions. I got it now. If you have any questions, drop him an email.
In case anybody was wondering, I’ve been busy this weekend playing around in my sandbox (an XAAMP setup on my computer with Wordpress and a ton of plugins installed). What I really wanted to do was see what I could do with the theme that you’ve all seen for the last few weeks, since I migrated my site to another server. Since there was so much good reaction to Fredrik Fahlstad’s fGreen Wordpress theme, I decided to work with it, instead of build one from the ground up. I fear, though, that I’ve taken it a bit too far to simply say that I’ve made a few modifications. Its no longer fGreen by a long shot. So, I introduce you to, what I will call fGold, unless Fredrik objects.
Here are a few things that I can recall that I did to get the site to look the way it does now (and I’m not done with the archives page):
- re-colored the fGreen theme stylesheet to red and gold
- changed or replaced all the images in the theme
- changed colors in the css file for the AJAX live comments
- changed colors in the css file for the Extended Live Archives plugin
- changed the color of the balloon tooltip (may be changing the shape later)
- edited the footer to share credit with Fredrik Fahlstad since I used his theme as a guide
- fixed a few bugs relating to the archives page and how the photo gallery fit the theme
Something else, I’m sure, but I can’t remember now. I’ll make a list of plugins that I use, in case anyone cares, and maybe even go clean the code again. I have been trying to call plugins with the “if (function_exists(’function name’))” condition so that the page will display if the plugin doesn’t exist. However, I’ve not checked all of it yet, so don’t expect a release any time soon (I’ll want to keep it to myself for a bit anyways). But, you never know…
comments and bug pointers are welcome and encouraged - thanks
This site will likely undergo another facelift. I like the layout as it is now, but it needs a bit of tweaking and more individualizing (and lightening up, maybe?). What I mean is that I am going to finally try and code my own theme from scratch (with a few guidelines from some CSS gurus). This will not be happening soon, but a bit of early warning is a good thing, right SkyE?
