Archive for May, 2007

Using blog widgets

May 13, 2007 No comments

The theme that I am using for this blog, Andreas09, allows me to add widgets to the sidebars. And most of these are customisable to varying extents. I have selected a few for mention here but there are others like Tag Clouds (very Web 2.0 and, I think, very inelegant) available too.

The most customisable of all is the Text widget; you can add practically any (X)HTML to it and it’s how added my online photo gallery teaser. Don’t try adding any scripting or it will be removed for security reasons. Even JavaScript suffers this inglorious fate and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was the same for PHP.

Next up in usefulness, at least from the content point of view, are RSS feeds (just look for the headings with the orange logos beside them). The ability to show shared items from you Google Reader is a nice piece of convergence. Speaking of convergence, I also added the feed from my hillwalking blog too. Taking things further again, I have added ones for InternetNews, A List Apart and The Blog Herald and I wonder if RSS feeds will not replace email newsletters now that we have tools like Google Reader.

Moving to the navigation side of things, the Categories widget can be collapsed to a drop down menu like I have for the Archives one. I prefer things to be the way that I have them because I want people to see what’s here. The Calender widget makes up for visitors not spotting what the drop down represents; that’s why the Archives widget can be a drop down menu rather than a list.

Web 2.0, Web Development, Web Tools

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Adobe CS3 Tryouts

May 12, 2007 No comments

After what feels like an age, Adobe has finally seen fit to allow you to download tryouts of CS3 components and editions from their website. Bizarrely, they are offering to send you a demo DVD of one of the CS3 Web Premium and Design Premium editions on payment of $9.99; I assumed that this is U.S. only. I am not sure that I have heard of anyone charging for tryouts before, though I do remember Microsoft talking about levying a modest charge for downloading beta versions of the likes of Windows Vista and Office 2007.

Graphics, Imaging, Web Development

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Are developers and designers overcomplicating their CSS?

May 11, 2007 No comments

I have been tweaking the widgets in this blog and the thought has crossed my mind that purveyors of open source blogging and CMS’s may be overcomplicating matters with the CSS that they are writing. Using inheritance without much thought as to others having to pick it up is one irritation but bunching styles together can confuse too. For instance, you can draw from from two different styles for the same HTML element (it’s what’s going when you see class="class1 class2" in a tag definition), which is OK if done simply but can confuse matters when customisation is attempted later. Drupal particularly suffers from this bugbear but it’s their in WordPress too, though not to the same extent. Using a hierarchy to define and attach your styles (#id1 .class2 tag1 {style definition…} is the kind of thing that I have in mind), can also confound but I admit to finding the approach very useful for myself. I think that I know what’s driving this: the need to cut down the bulk of CSS files but using the advanced features that I mentioned above without clear commenting and other documentation hampers later efforts. It would be nice if every developer of a theme for use blogging or CMS software was forced to document their work extensively and share that documentation with interested users. After all, sharing is the whole purpose of their endeavours…

Web Development

Outdoors enthuasiasts blogging in the U.K.

May 10, 2007 One comment

What we call walking or hillwalking in the U.K. goes under the banners of hiking, tramping and yomping in other parts of the world. One term that we share with other parts is backpacking and this is much bigger in the U.S. than it is in the U.K. My hillwalking blog has come to the attention of members of the hillwalking and backpacking community and WordPress’s logging of who visited my blog has alerted me to this and allowed to find other similar blogs.

Why have I mentioned this here? The reason is that it has allowed me to see what blogging software others have been using. Blogger seems to be a very popular choice with a number using Windows Live Spaces, in the process making me aware that Microsoft have dipped their toes into the hosted blogs arena. Other than this, I have also seen Typepad being used and one or two self-hosted operations to boot, mine included. Intriguingly, I have yet to encounter a fellow hillwalking fan in the U.K. using WordPress.com to host a hill blog but I do know of a German backpacker having one. Videoblogging is used by some and the ever pervasive YouTube seems to be the staple for this, at least for the ones that I have seen.

It’s an intriguing survey and it will be interesting to see how things develop…

Web 2.0

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Twin-pane Windows file managers

May 7, 2007 No comments

When Microsoft moved away from its two pane file manager with the advent of Windows 95, I was one of those who thought it a retrograde step. While two Windows Explorer instances can be tiled on a desktop, the old two pane paradigm still has its uses and there are third party purveyors of such things. Salamander from ALTAP is one such option as is SpeedProject‘s SpeedCommander. I have been using the latter for most of a year now and I would gladly pay for it but for the fact that SpeedProject’s payment system isn’t working. It’s just as well that the demo continues to function fully following expiry of its evaluation period. It even takes the twin pane paradigm further by adding sub-panes within each of these but that isn’t all to this major update to the Norton Commander concept. Recently, I downloaded the free version of Salamander to take a look and, though basic, it does a lot of what I ask of it so I might continue to see how it performs and may even evaluate the commercial version to see how it goes.

Software, Windows

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Google PageRank jumps…

May 4, 2007 No comments

I was away in Ireland last weekend but a pleasant surprise greeted me on my return when I checked up on the welfare of my blogs: my Firefox Google toolbar was telling me of a jump from 0 to 4 for this blog, good news indeed. My hillwalking blog also benefited from such good karma; its PageRank has increased by 1. This is where I like to see things going…

Web Development, Web Tools

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