16th November 2007
One of the nice things about the world of Linux and UNIX is the availability of multiple workspaces. In Window, you only ever get one, and the likes of me can easily fill up that task bar. So the idea of parcelling off different applications to different screens is useful from a housekeeping point of view so long as icons only appear in the task bar for the open workspace; Ubuntu respects this but openSUSE doesn't, a possible source of irritation.
However, a case can be made that UNIX/Linux needs workspaces more than Windows because of the multi-window interfaces of some of the software applications. The trouble with each of these sub-windows is that an entry appears in the task bar for each of this, rapidly creating a mess. And it can also be an issue working out which window closes the lot.
Examples of the above that come to my mind include GIMP, XSane and SAS. The Windows version of the latter's DMS is confined to a single application window while the UNIX incarnation is composed of a window each for individual components like program editor, log, output, etc. Typing "bye" in the command line of the program editor is enough to dispatch the GUI. With GIMP, Ctrl+Q will close it down in any window, apart from the "Tip of the Day" one that pops up when GIMP is started. The same sort of behaviour also seems to dispatch XSane too.
Switching from one workspace to another is as easy as clicking the relevant icon in the task bar in all the UNIX variants that I have used. Switching an application from one workspace to another has another common thread: finding the required entry in the application window menu.
On Ubuntu, I have seen other ways of working with workspaces. In the interface with visual effects turned off, hovering over the workspace icons in the task bar allows you to move from one to another with the wheel of your mouse. Moving an application between workspaces can be done as simply as dragging boxes from one task bar icon to another. Turning on the visual effects changes things, though. It might appear that the original functionality still works, but that seems not to be the case: a matter for Canonical to resolve, perhaps?
The visual effects do provide other ways around this, though. Keeping all your application windows minimised means that you can run through workspaces themselves with your wheel mouse. Moving applications between workspaces becomes as simple as grabbing the title bar and pulling the window left or right until it changes workspace. Be careful that you do the job fully, though, or you could have an application sitting astride two workspaces. It would appear that ideas from the sharing of a desktop across multiple monitors have percolated through to workspace behaviour.
Aside (regarding Ubuntu visual effects): I don't know who came up with the idea of having windows wobble when they're being moved around, but it certainly is unusual, as is seeing what happens when you try prising a docked window from its mooring (particularly when you're pulling it up from the bottom task bar). The sharper font display and bevelled screen furniture make more sense to me, though; they certainly make a UI more appealing and modern.
19th June 2007
One of the caveats of using themes authored by others is that you don't quite know how things are set up. The reason that this has come home to roost for me is that I was trying to change the title of a widget last night and was wondering why it wasn't filtering through to the blog pages. When I went for a spot of googling, as you do, it dawned on me what might be going on. The plug-ins used by the Andreas09 theme are defined in its functions.php file, and I was being scuppered by a naughty piece of hard-coding in there. If it was using the standard widget from widgets.php in the wp-includes directory, then everything would have worked as expected. A quick spot of code porting resolved the issue and all was well again.
What this has to do with WordPress.com is that they seem to have encountered the same problem and fixed it using what could be viewed as a more ham-fisted approach: deleting the widget functions from functions.php for Andreas09. This would have meant that the default widgets shone through, thus explaining the changes that I had seen and why my nice categories listing now grabbed less attention. I reckon that my more surgical approach is the better one: at least, I still have my categories looking how I want them...
24th May 2007
This whole Web 2.0 thing is producing an embarrassment of riches for those wanting to share their thoughts on the web without having to go to the effort of developing their own websites from scratch. A decade ago, Geocities was pioneering the idea of web communities but, without the infrastructure and tools that we enjoy today, it and its kind were ahead of their time.
In these blogging days, life is a lot simpler, which means that temptations exist. Temptations like those caused by garish animated GIF’s in the late nineties, a lame attempt to spice up otherwise dull websites. Returning to the present, it is plug-ins and widgets that could convey the excess.
With WordPress, the plug-ins are more “behind-the-scenes” sorts of affairs, but it is so easy to accumulate several for stopping comment spam and keeping an eye on web traffic, to name just two applications, and so on that you need to be careful that a bag of nails does not result. In fact, I am now considering the rationalisation of what I have got while the number remains in single figures.
WordPress 2.2 adds widgets to the list of temptations; while WordPress.com already has these, the number is small, and you can be sure that that will explode now that self-hosted WordPress blogs get the functionality. The trouble with these widgets is that you need to be adept with CSS so as not to end up with an eyesore akin to those seen a decade ago, though theme authors can help with this. I am not activating widgets on my hillwalking blog because I have many other (better?) things to be doing.
Another thought on widgets: the tag cloud widget previously held in captivity at WordPress.com surely must now find itself in the wild, a worrying prospect given how rubbish they can appear. However, Jakob Nielsen et al. shouldn’t get too concerned, as trends that go too far scar the memory and preclude their return. Just consider those animated GIF’s…
13th May 2007
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. While I have selected a few for mention here, 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, which is how added my online photo gallery teaser. Don’t try adding any scripting, though, 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 your Google Reader account 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 dropdown 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 Calendar widget makes up for visitors not spotting what the dropdown represents; that’s why the Archives widget can be a dropdown menu rather than a list.
1st May 2007
While I don’t know whether it’s me or not, I seem to remember there being a Register link on the Meta widget that you see here. Anyway, its absence prompted me to go doing a spot of fiddling to (re)introduce it. My motivation for doing this is my preference for allowing only registered users to post comments so that I don’t encounter too much comment spam.
Speaking of widget functionality, it did take me longer than it should for me to work out how to configure widgets; the button in the widget with lines in it does the trick. Once this twigged, I built a register widget from a text one so that you can get an account with the WordPress.com empire and use it for blogging or commenting as you choose. Registering here allows comment posting on any WordPress.com blog.
Speaking of widgets, the latest WordPress.com ones allow bloggers like me to use tag clouds and even convert archive and category lists to drop down menus. I am not sure about tag clouds but making a dropdown menu of the monthly archives certainly took my fancy, as you can see here.