April 2005 – Urban Giraffe

Dissection of a WordPress theme: Part 3

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Personalising a blog can require patience and perseverance. There are times when it seems a fruitless task and the blog absolutely refuses to do what you want, despite your best efforts. There are many sources of information on the internet, but it can be hard to locate exactly what you need.

One of the simplest solutions is to look at other people’s work and see if you can make use of their ideas. This is the third part in a series of articles concerned with the dissection of the default WordPress theme, Kubrick. The hope is that walking through this theme may provide help for your own blog or, at the very least, open up new areas of research. After all, there is no shortage of information out there.

Dishwasher music

Duran Duran Everybody has some musical cheese that they secretly enjoy. Beneath our oh-so-cool exterior beats a heart of wobbly glam-rock horrors, ’70s cornball, and New Romantic meltdowns. We’re born with this stuff so why fight it?

Having lived in the Czech Republic for nearly half a year I now realize that a great percentage of the Czech population are not afraid to show their love of kitsch music. I am sure a great underground scene exists here, somewhere, but the stuff that gets piped on the radio and in shops and other public places is firmly rooted in 80’s hair-rock and power ballads.

A bloodbath – Review of The Tenant and Gusher No Binds Me

Tenant I watched two movies at the weekend and I still don’t know what to think of them. The first was Roman Polanski’s The Tenant. I’ve not watched many Polanski movies and even though I enjoyed my flat-mates story about meeting him at a wedding last year, he was always someone I heard a lot about, but never quite managed to see.

Sometimes you can watch a movie and wonder if, when you blink, you actually fall asleep by accident. That’s not because of boredom but just because you feel like you missed a key scene. The Tenant is very much like that. There is a slow build-up of paranoia as a man rents an apartment in which the previous tenant jumped out of the window. He begins to suspect that his neighbors caused it to happen, and this first half of the movie is great with lots of wonderful Kafka-esque situations.

Warning: contains spoilers – don’t read further if you want to watch the movie!

Dissection of a WordPress theme: Part 2

Web design is a notoriously tricky subject. Often we give up any thoughts of innovation when the process of realising them is such hard work. Part two of this WordPress dissection continues to try and explain the basic workings of the software, how this relates to the layout, and how anyone can personalise their blog.

The focus will be on finalising the basic layout from part one, and then finishing the header and footer sections. Both of these are important as they stylistically define a blog and act as visual focal points – do it well and people will want to read your blog, do it badly and they may not even bother.

Convergence

They say that technology is converging and that our gadgets will soon do much more. I’m not sure who they are, but it seems to be true – mobile phones can take photos and play games, computers double up as VCRs, and even fridges are online.

My apartment here in the Czech Republic is a fine example of Czech architecture, and is lovely and spacious. It’s got most of the modern conveniences I could want, except for a telephone line. I have a mobile phone, but it’s very expensive to call my family back in England, and just as expensive for them to call me.

I hate shameless plugs, and this is sounding awfully like one, but for the past few months I’ve been using Skype. This is a nifty bit of software that allows you to talk for free to people on the internet. This is handy enough, but they also offer a service, at a cost, called SkypeOut. This gives you the ability to call normal telephones from your computer, and thus solving my landline problem. The bonus is the calls are much cheaper than you could get via a traditional phone.

Recently they’ve introduced a service called SkypeIn. This is where it gets clever. You pay your 10 euros and select a telephone number in a country of your choice. This becomes your number for three months and whenever anyone with a normal telephone dials it, they get put through to your computer (provided you are online and running Skype). The best part is that the people dialing you only pay a call to the country in which the number belongs. In my case, I have bought a UK number and so my family only pays a local UK call, even though it gets routed through to the Czech Republic. I don’t pay anything for the call either. Amazing!

Italian translation of theme guide

Stefano Aglietti has done an amazingly quick job of translating Dissection of a WordPress theme into Italian, over at the Italian WordPress site. I’ve added a direct link from the article itself. Very nice work Stefano!

The real reason for blogs

I came across a series of photos at Notes From A Desi Geek that show the amusing-yet-interesting cultural oddities in India. One thought led to another and I arrived at the conclusion that the blog is the perfect vehicle to show all my international oddities discovered on my own travels. I think I am developing a hobby in this respect, as this follows on from a previous post about the best onions in China. Still, photos for amusement sake are fine by me (and I so wish I had a photo of the Chinese shampoo ‘Ugly Girl’).

Anyway, the first picture is of the control panel on my Chinese microwave. It is innocuous enough until you look closely and discover that an ordinary microwave can possess the power to cause universal discord.

Sadly the actual meaning is ‘defrost’, but way to go on that translation! A nice touch is the coupling with ‘white fungus’ – you can either cause havoc, or zap mushrooms (white ones anyway).

Proliferation of plugins

Yet more WordPress activity. This time I’ve organised my collection of hacks and made a seperate plugin page, available from the navigation menu. Now I can contemplate the calm and zen-like organisation of the rest of my life.

The plugins are:

Jump-To – Direct navigation from multi-page posts
PageView – Embed an webpage inside a post
HeadSpace – Manipulate meta-data

Dissection of a WordPress theme: Part 1

Translation:

Resources:

Life as a WordPress blogger has become remarkably easy. If you can hold a mouse and follow instructions then you’re most of the way towards carving out your own niche on the internet. A fresh installation gives you a powerful and attractive system with minimal effort, and with a little luck you can be blogging in under half an hour.

Despite the availability of hundreds of themes, and the general goodness of the default Kubrick theme, sometimes you just want to give your blog that personal touch, and the only way to do this is by going under the hood and having a look around.

A month in to running a WordPress-based website and I find myself doing the very same thing. None of the themes were exactly what I was looking for, and after investigating the internals of WordPress I realised it was a lot more involved than it initially appeared. I could certainly imagine a beginner being overwhelmed by the mass of acronyms and incongruent technologies.

With this in mind I decided to write a guide that would help not only myself, but might also help others who have been put off trying to experiment with WordPress. I make no claims of being a style guru and will rely on common sense and basic design principles.

The Old Order

While I appreciate the cultural significance¹ of a band such as New Order, I was never much of a fan. Their music often sounded like it was made on a cheap Casio keyboard, or was the recorded drone from a tinnitus patient. There was never any incentive to investigate further, and this was reinforced by many years of suffering World In Motion – some say the high-point of English footballing music, but as I do not care for football then it just compounded my distaste for the whole subject.