Today’s Markup Changes

written 2 December, 02009 • Comments ⁋

Some Changes Around the Site

Last night I made some adjustments to the theme/design:

I changed my markup to be more in line with HTML5, primarily as a result of Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML5 chapter on the changed semantics. It’s not yet clear how microformats will be affected, so I’ve largely left the existing classes intact.

Of note:

  • I had to add a CSS rule to make HTML5 elements display as intended: article, footer, header, nav, section { display: block; }
  • I added quite a few rel='external's
  • I was pleased to see that we can, in fact, remove type='text/stylesheet' from CSS declarations (because what other stylesheet language is there?)

I also un-hid the Tumblr bar. Previously I’d had the CSS rule iframe#tumblr_controls { display: none; } because I felt the bar interfered with the design.

Keywords are now exposed for each post. This is something that I’d written about ten months ago, but was reluctant to implement because I liked the minimal amount of metadata I displayed on entries. I’m not entirely satisfied with the way it came out, but it works okay for now.

There are other changes I’ve been working on, but I don’t think they’re quite ready yet.

written 2 November, 02009 • Comments ⁋

rainbow sand

Today I had a fit of inspiration and created a new blog design:

(Screen capture of rainbow sand design)

It’s currently named ‘rainbow sand’, which is a pretty terrible name — unfortunately my word-choosing ability was not similarly inspired. The result doesn’t quite mirror my mockup, due to uncertainty about how to best implement the offset fills. I may experiment with it further; we’ll see.

At time of writing, it’s WordPress-only, but I’ll be converting it for Tumblr. The slowest part is always the stylesheet, and that only needs to be done once.

Have a look at the code!

Update: The Tumblr variant of the theme is now complete.

written 5 March, 02009 • Comments ⁋

ricardo theme ported to WordPress

See it on GitHub.

The process took about two hours, including updating WordPress and fixing a configuration issue. There is some slight mismatch between the two, largely due to platform differences, but I was able to simply copy and paste a good deal of the code.

Issues

  • Is there a template tag to check if next/previous pagination will be generated? I don’t want to have unnecessary markup rendered. Tumblr allows me to do this by wrapping all my pagination code in {block:Pagination}…{/block:Pagination} tags, and the next/previous links in {block:NextPage}…{NextPage}…{/block:NextPage}. WordPress only seems to provide a way to generate the links directly with next_posts_link.
  • I’m unclear on exactly how to set up archives. The instructions in the Codex seem to be a version behind.
  • Bizarrely, the page renders differently when I use local CSS, even though it’s exactly the same as the remote copy I use with Tumblr. For now the style.css file is present simply because it’s required to give metadata.

written 4 March, 02009 • Comments ⁋

See My OPML

When I wrote about journalism the other day, I noted that I generally follow my rule that sources should be open by sharing all my bookmarks. That neglects a major set of sources, though — feed subscriptions. So today I’ve pushed an OPML file with my subscriptions to the site’s repository. It’s almost exactly what I see, with two exceptions: the OPML export didn’t include the folders I use (so it’s pretty disorganized), and I took out a few personal blogs that I don’t use for source material anyways. In exchange I’ve left in some more lighthearted material that I don’t use for source material either.

I’ll push out occasional updates as I change my subscriptions, but that doesn’t seem to happen terribly often.

written 2 February, 02009 • Comments ⁋

Back on the Air

For the past day, I was unable to post here, or use Tumblr at all, because I locked myself out. This was a result of several actions on my part:

  • I recently began moving some accounts to use an email address at this domain (ratafia.info) rather than Gmail’s.
  • I use 1Password pretty heavily, so most of my logins are no longer in my memory.
  • There are few sites that don’t use cookies to keep users logged in.
  • The other night I installed GlimmerBlocker and wiped my browser to get rid of tracking cookies and empty my browser history. (More on this subject in another post, perhaps.)
  • I make mistakes.

Put together, this means that when I changed my Tumblr login to use the new email address, I only went halfway — moving it from @gmail.com to @ratafia.com instead of @ratafia.info. When I deleted my cookies, I was, naturally, logged out of Tumblr. When I tried to use 1Password to log in, it had the wrong email address.

After several hours of frustration, I emailed Tumblr support asking what email address I was actually supposed to be using. I didn’t have high hopes for a response, because that definitely looks like an attempt at social engineering. Nevertheless, this morning I got a response, discovered my error in the email changeover, and am now back in (and with all the login information corrected).

It’s certainly an unusual feeling to be locked out of one’s own website; it’s one I will hopefully avoid in the future.

written 29 January, 02009 • Comments ⁋

miscellaneous repository

I’ve created a new git repository to hold bits and bobs of my code. I’m still looking around to see what I can put in, so it’s a little thin right now.

Among other things, this allows me to finally make a gallery of page designs that never were. At present the archive begins in late 02001. I began writing HTML earlier than that — sometime in 01999 — but those files may be gone forever. There are a number of designs that are missing because they were part of custom blogging engines. I’ll work on creating a plain-HTML version of those so they can be shared too.

I’m currently planning on at least one more repository, to store my custom CSS that I use to clean up stuff like YouTube. Hopefully that’ll be up within a few days.

written 28 January, 02009 • Comments ⁋

Hosting troubles

It appears that whatever server was hosting my CSS file has decided to stop responding, so I’ve temporarily put a whitespace-vacuumed version in the page header. Hopefully this is only a temporary issue.

Update: Ten minutes later and it seems to have fixed itself. Who knows!

written 13 January, 02009 • Comments ⁋