it's all beta

Pop up ads are back. Or is it just an urban legend?

Chris — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 20:24:31 +0000

If there’s one thing I loathe on a website, it’s pop up ads. Here’s one I encountered this week on www.snopes.com. As far as I’m concerned, it’s a completely pointless and irritating ad — if you can call a blank white square an ad. I’m annoyed, which is why I decided not to provide a live clickable link to snopes in this post. And from now on I shall go elsewhere for my urban legend and rumour information.

[Click on the screenshot to see a larger version. No pop up ads will appear.]

How many columns are there in a one-column WordPress theme?

Chris — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 14:21:36 +0000

WordPress is one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms. Little wonder, then, that a few unscrupulous web sites try to exploit that popularity in a bid to spread malware and viruses.

The safest thing, of course, is to only download WordPress — and the themes that go with it — from the official WordPress site. To be honest, you don’t usually find better themes anywhere else; and if you do, you shouldn’t be surprised to find spammy backlinks lurking in the code, ready to embarrass both you and your readers.

It’s a shame, therefore, that the Great WordPress itself doesn’t have a more intelligent search facility.

I did a search just a few minutes ago for one-column WordPress themes. Here are some of the results. Click the ultra-fuzzy low-res images below to see them bigger and ever so slightly better.

For the benefit of anyone who either can’t or really doesn’t fancy peering at the screenshots, the results included the following themes (remember, I was only looking for one-column themes):

Techozoic Fluid
Blog Design Studio NewBlue
Namib
alibi
codescheme_blue
slight

All the above were described as having two (or, in one case, ‘2 or 3′) columns.

Oh, there was one other theme on the first page of results:

AquaBlock — a quick loading 3 column theme.

Give me strength!

Quick Doctype Reference

Chris — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 23:55:07 +0000

Never bother with quirks mode again. Get yourself a doctype. Choose one from our wide selection:

HTML 4.01 Transitional

HTML 4.01 Strict

XHTML 1.0 Transitional

XHTML 1.0 Strict

HTML 5

How to display RSS feeds on your blog

Chris — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:26:21 +0000

Here are just a couple of easy ways to display an external rss feed on your Blogsome blog.

Go to Widgetbox. Follow their instructions on how to turn your blog into a widget (they call it a ‘blidget’) and then copy the code they give you and simply paste it into your blog’s index.html file. If you have another blog somewhere else, you could turn that into a widget, display it on your Blogsome page, and show all your readers what a busy blogger you are. Excellent!
Sign up free with webrss.com instead and follow their instructions.

As an example, we’re showing the latest headlines from CNN on the sidebar. It’s really easy to display feeds on Blogsome. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

Javascript: it’s time to go unobtrusive

Chris — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 14:30:04 +0000

It’s always good to learn new things. But to be sure you’re learning the right answers to your questions, it pays to be careful who you ask.

A List Apart offers a lot of articles on a wide range of subjects. Every webmaster should visit it regularly. And that’s exactly what I did a few days ago, when I was looking for some advice about javascript. Not just any old javascript either, but the sort of javascript that will work in most, if not all, browsers, and won’t cause too many accessibility problems.

Aaron Gustafson’s recent [November 2008] article, ‘Progressive Enhancement with JavaScript‘ offered some useful advice:

One of the keys to effectively integrating progressive enhancement is establishing a plan for script management. To do that, you must first become familiar with the concept of “unobtrusive JavaScript.”

Like an obedient student, I went straight to the Wikipedia page in the link above. On arrival, what I noticed was, as on all other Wikipedia pages, a box with the heading ‘Contents’. You can choose to either show or hide this box. A glance at the source code, however, shows how Wikipedia’s coders achieved this piece of javascript magic:

hide</a>

That didn’t look quite right to me. Sure enough, after a brief search, I found myself back at A List Apart reading Jeremy Keith’s article, ‘Behavioral Separation‘, which was published way back in June 2006. And here’s what it says:

Suppose you want to add some behavior to a particular link. You could use what’s known as the javascript: pseudo-protocol: click for fun</a> That’s a short-sighted approach. User agents that don’t support JavaScript will choke on that href value.

Oh dear. That ’short-sighted approach’ is what Wikipedia still uses a whole two years after Jeremy Keith wrote those words.

It’s not just Jeremy Keith either. Roger Johansson at 456 Berea Street agrees in his September 2007 piece, ‘How to create an unobtrusive print this page link with JavaScript‘:

First a look at the obtrusive way. Most of the time print links are hardcoded in the HTML, and look something like this: Print this page</a> [This technique] doesn’t separate content from behaviour. It also uses the fake javascript: protocol. But worst of all, it will confuse people browsing without JavaScript. The link will still be there, but when they click it, nothing happens.

So, to sum up, although Aaron Gustafson linked to Wikipedia in his article on unobtrusive javascript last month, if you really do want to learn about unobtrusive javascript, it is better to do as the Wikipedia says, rather than copy what they do. Maybe it’s time they cleaned up their own code, although one could argue that they’re leaving things a bit late. On the other hand, maybe it’s never too late to ‘go unobtrusive’. Will the Wikipedia see the light? Only time will tell.

Smarty and PHP date codes

Chris — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 15:55:58 +0000

Handy reference tables for when you want to change how dates and times are presented on individual blog posts.

Day
d	Day of the month, 2 digits with leading zeros 01 to 31
D	A textual representation of a day, three letters Mon through Sun
j	Day of the month without leading zeros 1 to 31
l	(lowercase ‘L’) A full textual representation of the day of the week Sunday through Saturday
N	ISO-8601 numeric representation of the day of the week (added in PHP 5.1.0) 1 (for Monday) through 7 (for Sunday)
S	English ordinal suffix for the day of the month, 2 characters st, nd, rd or th. Works well with j
w	Numeric representation of the day of the week 0 (for Sunday) through 6 (for Saturday)
z	The day of the year (starting from 0) 0 through 365

Week
W	ISO-8601 week number of year, weeks starting on Monday (added in PHP 4.1.0) Example: 42 (the 42nd week in the year)

Month
F	A full textual representation of a month, such as January or March January through December
m	Numeric representation of a month, with leading zeros 01 through 12
M	A short textual representation of a month, three letters Jan through Dec
n	Numeric representation of a month, without leading zeros 1 through 12
t	Number of days in the given month 28 through 31

Year
L	Whether it’s a leap year 1 if it is a leap year, 0 otherwise.
o	ISO-8601 year number. This has the same value as Y, except that if the ISO week number (W) belongs to the previous or next year, that year is used instead. (added in PHP 5.1.0) Examples: 1999 or 2003
Y	A full numeric representation of a year, 4 digits Examples: 1999 or 2003
y	A two digit representation of a year Examples: 99 or 03

Time
a	Lowercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem am or pm
A	Uppercase Ante meridiem and Post meridiem AM or PM
B	Swatch Internet time 000 through 999
g	12-hour format of an hour without leading zeros 1 through 12
G	24-hour format of an hour without leading zeros 0 through 23
h	12-hour format of an hour with leading zeros 01 through 12
H	24-hour format of an hour with leading zeros 00 through 23
i	Minutes with leading zeros 00 to 59
s	Seconds, with leading zeros 00 through 59
u	Milliseconds (added in PHP 5.2.2) Example: 54321

Timezone
e	Timezone identifier (added in PHP 5.1.0) Examples: UTC, GMT, Atlantic/Azores
I	(capital i)Whether or not the date is in daylight saving time 1 if Daylight Saving Time, 0 otherwise.
O	Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) in hours Example: +0200
P	Difference to Greenwich time (GMT) with colon between hours and minutes (added in PHP 5.1.3) Example: +02:00
T	Timezone abbreviation. Examples: EST, MDT …
Z	Timezone offset in seconds. The offset for timezones west of UTC is always negative, and for those east of UTC is always positive. -43200 through 50400

Full Date/Time
c	ISO 8601 date (added in PHP 5) 2004-02-12T15:19:21+00:00
r	? RFC 2822 formatted date. Example: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 16:01:07 +0200
U	Seconds since the Unix Epoch (January 1 1970 00:00:00 GMT) See also time()

How does your blog look in IE8

Chris — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 14:41:23 +0000

Not everyone has the latest copy of Internet Explorer. We haven’t. But now you can find out if your blog looks like a bag of spanners in IE7. Just use the new miracle tool, Net Renderer. [Note: IE8 is still beta at the moment but should be fully supported soon.]

You only ever need one theme

Chris — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 15:45:06 +0000

If there’s one thing that Blogsome users agree on, it’s themes. There aren’t enough of them, and they aren’t very interesting. But there is something you can do about it.

If you don’t like your blog’s theme, change it!

I know what you’re going to say: ‘There aren’t any good themes to choose from.’ Well, that’s where you’re wrong. Because here’s an amazing fact:

You only ever need one theme. By making a few simple alterations to that theme, you can create anything you want.

Yes, it’s true, and I can prove it to you. Just go over to CSS Zen Garden. They have a gallery full of excellent themes and they are all created from exactly the same HTML template. Only the styles have been changed.

So, there’s no need to worry about Blogsome’s dearth of themes. Now you can create your own. Here’s how to do it:

Pick a Blogsome theme that is similar to what you want. For example, if you want a sidebar on the right hand side, don’t pick a theme with a left hand sidebar
Tweak and change as much as you like.

Who knows? By custom building your own theme in this way, you might even become an excellent HTML coder, a CSS wizard, or a brilliant theme designer.

A few words of warning, though. Be careful which theme you use as your starting point. The only theme I’ve ever had any problems with was one called ‘dots2′. In my opinion, you need a bit of expertise before you try and alter that one. ‘Mars spirit’ is a nice theme, too, but I think it has a few too many graphics to make it easy to customise.

Personally, I’d start with one of the ‘Viewfinder’ themes, or ‘Green track’ or maybe ‘Minimaplus’. Start by changing the header image; experiment with different typefaces. And most importantly:

Switch off the WYSI-Wordpress WYSIWYG editor in your Plugins. If you want to learn CSS properly, stop using tags in your blog posts. The right place to change the font colours on your blog is in your style sheet.

Blogsome might only have a few basic themes to offer but don’t let that bother you. Just learn a bit about HTML and CSS coding, and you’ll find there’s a lot more you can do with Blogsome themes than you could possibly imagine.