Adventures & experiences in contemporary technology
If you’ve been here before, you’ll notice that the first rendition of the new look for this place has been introduced. It is based upon the intention WordPress theme but more work is needed before it looks as tidy as I’d like it. That’ll take a little while and improvements will come gradually but I hope that the new design is pleasing even at this point in time. At the very least, it looks natty to my eyes though there are little bits and pieces that I have ended up leaving behind for now. Even so, it gives me a modern menu at the top of every page so I’m far from disappointed. In any case, I don’t mind doing some extra tinkering.
My trying out WordPress 3.0 in advance of its final release has brought me errors on the links management page. After a spot of poking around the TRAC, I found that the bug already has been reported and that the cause is an extraneous column in the *_links table called link_category. The change in taxonomy handling over the years seems to have made it redundant so I removed the said column from the database using a command like the following from both the MySQL command line and MySQL Query Browser:
alter table wordpress.wp_links drop link_category;
That seems to have made those errors go away and I hop that their upgrade code takes care of this before WordPress 3.0 is let loose of the general blogging public. Taking out the coding brittleness would do too.
One matter that really came to light was how well or not the pages on here and on my hill walking and photography website came out on the printed page. After spotting a WordPress Codex article and with an eye on making things better, I have made a distinction between screen and print stylesheets. The code in the XHTML looks like this:
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/style.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
<link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/style_print.css” type=”text/css” media=”print” />
The media attribute seems to be respected by the browsers that I have been using for testing (latest versions of Firefox, MSIE and Opera) so it then was a matter of using CSS to control what was shown and how it was displayed. Extraneous items like sidebars were excluded from the printed page in favour of the real content that visitors would be wanting anyway and everything else was made as monochrome as possible with images being the only things to escape. After all, people don’t want to be wasting paper and ink in this cash strained times and there’s no need to have any more colour than necessary either. Then, there’s the distraction caused by non-functioning hyperlinks that has inspired the sharing of some wisdom on A List Apart. Returning to my implementation, please let me know in the comments what you think of what I have done on here and if there remains any room for improvement.
Early on in the first year of this blog, I got to investigating the use of Drupal for creating an article-based subsite. In the end, the complexities of its HTML and CSS thwarted my attempts to harmonise the appearance of web pages with other parts of the same site and I discontinued my efforts. In the end, it was Textpattern that suited my needs and I have stuck with that for the aforementioned subsite. However, I recently spotted someone very obviously using Drupal in its out of the box state for a sort of blog (there is even an extension for importing WXR files containing content from a WordPress blog); they even hadn’t removed the Drupal logo. With my interest rekindled, I took another look for the sake of seeing where things have gone in the last few years. Well, first impressions are that it now looks like a blogging tool with greater menu control and the facility to define custom content types. There are plenty of nice themes around too though that highlights an idiosyncrasy in the sense that content editing is not fully integrated into the administration area where I’d expect it to be. The consequence of this situation is that pages, posts (or story as the content type is called) or any content types that you have defined yourself are created and edited with the front page theme controlling the appearance of the user interface. It is made even more striking when you use a different theme for the administration screens. That oddity aside, there is a lot to recommend Drupal though I’d try setting up a standalone site with it rather than attempting to shoehorn it as a part of an existing one like what I was trying when I last looked.
Admittedly, I have been keeping away from Twitter and its kind for a while now but the current run of cold weather in the Britain and Ireland has alerted me to its usefulness and I have given the thing a go. With public transport operator website heaving over the last week, the advantages of microblogging became more than apparent, thanks in no small part to the efforts of Centrebus, National Rail Enquiries and the U.K. Met Office. The pithy nature of any messages saves the effort needed to compile a longer blog post and to read it afterwards. This aspect makes it invaluable for those times when all that needs to be communicated is short and sweet. Anything that cuts down on the information tide that hits all of us every day cam only be a good thing.
Along with Twitter, there is a whole suite of tools available for various bits and pieces. First off, there’s integration with WordPress courtesy of plugins like Alex King’s Twitter Tools. After that, there are numerous web applications for taming the beast. Though I only can say that I scratched the surface of what’s available, I have come accross HootSuite and Twitterfeed. The former is a console for managing more than one Twitter account at once while also offering the facility to do the same for Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress.com and others too. Twitterfeed may be more limited in scope with offering to turn RSS feeds into tweets but it has its place too. HootSuite might have something similar for WordPress but Twitterfeed is a good more universal in its sweep. Naturally, there’s more out there than these two but I am not trying to be exhaustive here. If I make use of any other such services, I even might get inspired to mention them on here.
There is a place on WordPress.com where I share various odds and ends about public transport in the U.K. It’s called On Trains and Buses and I try not to go tinkering with the design side of things too much. You only have the ability to change the CSS and my previous experience of doing that with this edifice while it lived on there taught me not to expect too much even if there are sandbox themes for anyone to turn into something presentable, not that I really would want to go doing that in full view of everyone (doing if offline first and copying the CSS afterwards when it’s done is my preferred way of going about it). Besides, I wanted to see how WordPress.com fares these days anyway.
While my public transport blog just been around for a little over a year, it’s worn a few themes over that time, ranging from the minimalist The Journalist v1.9 and Vigilance through to Spring Reloaded. After the last of these, I am back to minimalist again with DePo Masthead, albeit with a spot of my own colouring to soften its feel a little. I must admit growing to like it but it came to my attention that it was a bespoke design from Derek Powazek that Automattic’s Noel Jackson turned into reality. The result would appear that you cannot get it anywhere but from the WordPress.com Subversion theme repository. For those not versed in the little bit of Subversion action that is needed to get it, I did it for you and put it all into a zip file without making any changes to the original, hoping that it might make life easier for someone.
Now that the mobile web is upon us, I have been wondering about making my various web presences more friendly for users of that platform and my interest has been piqued especially by the recent addition of such capability to WordPress.com. With that in mind, I grabbed the WordPress Mobile Edition plugin and set it to work, both on this blog and my outdoors one. Well, the results certainly seem to gain a seal of approval from mobiReady so that’s promising. It comes with a version of the Carrington Mobile theme but you need to pop that into the themes directory on your web server yourself for WordPress’ plugin installation routines won’t do that for you. It could be interesting to see how things go from here and the idea of creating my own theme while using the plugin for redirection honours sounds like a way forward;I have found the place where I can make any changes as needed. Home made variants of the methodology may find a use with my photo gallery and Textpattern sub-sites.
One of the things that I do out of curiosity and self-interest is to keep tabs on what is happening with development versions of software that I use. It is for this reason that I always have a development version of WordPress on the go so as to ensure that the next stable version doesn’t bring my blog to its knees. There have been contributions from my own self to the development effort, mainly in the form of bug reports with the occasional bug fix too.
In the same vein, I have had a development version of Ubuntu installed in a VirtualBox virtual machine. There have been breakages and reinstallations along the way when an update results in disruption but it is intriguing too to see how a Linux distribution comes to fruition. In the early days of Karmic Koala (9.10), everything was thrown together more loosely and advances looked less obvious. It is true to say the ext4 file systems support was already in place but the interface looked like a tweaked version of the standard GNOME desktop. Over time, the desktop has been customised and boot messages hidden out of sight. Eye candy like new icons and backgrounds have begun to entice while other features such as an encrypted home folder, Software Store and Ubuntu One came into place. Installation screens became slicker and boot times reduced. All of this may seem incremental but revolutions can break things and you only have to look at the stuttering progress of Windows to see that. Even with all of these previews, I still plan to do a test run of the final revision of 9.10 before committing to putting it in place on my main home PC. Bearing the scars of misadventures over the years has taught me well.
Windows development is a less open process but I have been partial fo development versions there too. In fact, beta and release candidate installations of Windows 7 have convinced me to upgrade from Windows XP for those times when a Windows VM needs to fired up in anger. A special offer has had me ordering in advance and sitting back and waiting. With my Windows needs being secondary to my Linux activities, I am not so fussed about taking my time and I have no intention of binning Windows XP just yet anyway.
The trouble with all of this previewing is that you get buffeted by the ongoing development. That is very true of Ubuntu 9.10 and has been very much part and parcel of the heave that brought WordPress 2.7 into being last year. Things get added and then removed as development tries to fins that sweet spot or a crash results and you need to rebuild things. It is small wonder that you are told not to put unfinished software on a production system. Another consequence might be that you really question why you are watching all of this and come to decide that what you already have is a place of safety in comparison to what’s coming. So far, that has never turned out to be true but there’s no harm in looking before you leap either.
Being a user of Textpattern, I should have a vested interested in any developments in that venerable web platform. However, the latest release came out at the end of August unbeknownst to me and that’s with an entry on the Dev Blog. Those blog entries come irregularly so that might have been how I missed it but there were other things going on in my life like the installation of new windows in my house and weekends spent in Scotland and Ireland.
Still, the whole release was more low key than, say, a new version of WordPress where many would be shouting how important the upgrade would be and with messages turning up on blog administration screens too. There may be good reason for this given the recent problems experienced by those who fail to keep up with progress. Of course, WordPress is a major target for unwanted attention so it’s best to keep your wits about you. The low key nature of Textpattern might be an asset when it comes to warding off miscreants and its greater compatibility with more technically minded folk may help security too. Saying all of that may be pure speculation but you only have to look at the world of operating systems to see how the idea came into my mind.
A later posting on the Txp blog tells you about the new goodies available in release 4.2.0 but here’s a short selection to whet your appetite: themes for the administration area, multiple sites and new tags. Upgrading proved painless though I did try it out on an offline version of the microsite where I use Textpattern before making a move on its online counterpart. All went smoothly but it’s alway best to look before you leap or a site rebuild might be in order and no one needs that.
I was perusing a recent copy of Linux Format and encountered a feature describing a self-hosted alternative to the likes of Flickr: Gallery. From my quick look, it looks fully featured, offering themes and even shopping cart facilities for those who want to sell their wares. The screenshots on the open-source project’s website look promising but, for a fuller appraisal, I would need to spend some time trying to bend it to my will. Before anyone mentions it, I am aware that WordPress can be used for photoblogging, but this tool seems to take things a bit further. It’s the sort of thing about which I might have wondered, given the pervasiveness of content management systems these days. My own custom-built photo gallery is devoid of a slick back end, hence why Gallery caught my eye, but I’ll continue with it and may even get to adding the needful myself.