November 2005 – Urban Giraffe

AJAX Calendar

After all the hype and bubble-blowing, I decided to dip my little pinkie into the mix and experiment with AJAX. The result has been the release of a new plugin, cleverly titled ‘AJAX Calendar‘. Once installed this allows the standard WordPress calendar function to be enhanced such that:

Stepping through the months is now asynchronous, and only updates the calendar
Clicking on the calendar title takes you back to the current month
Clicking on the funny «-» button will expand the calendar and display the posts headings for that month
All content is cached
Works in most browsers

The plugin requires modifications to the WordPress theme, although these modifications have been included in version 1.23 of the Giraffe theme.

Have a play.

And there goes Autumn

After a long hiatus I am back in Prague, and it’s feeling good. Norway was a fantastic country to stay in. The countryside was, to use a ropey-old expression, drop-dead gorgeous. The people were very friendly, and I enjoyed myself a lot. Living in a hotel for so long did have its downsides, and I don’t miss that at all, but I succumbed to a reward scheme and have earned myself enough points to stay somewhere lovely.

My previous impressions of Oslo were more or less accurate, but I will update them here. The most important thing is that yes, Norway is indeed an expensive place. Even compared to London. When you look at simple items such as a stick of chewing gum or a can of coke, and find that they are up to five times more expensive, you start to take notice.

A curious fact is that even though the population of Norway is only 4,604,800 (half the population of London), they have two languages (and possibly more, but the distinction escapes me). Like most places I visited I managed to derive some amusement from words with dual meanings, and particularly enjoyed ‘spare bank’, ‘god parkering’, and ‘fartering’.

Giraffe 1.20

It’s been such a long time since I’ve posted anything here, and this is just going to be a technical post. Based upon feedback from different users, and the general direction of questions, I’ve released quite a major update of the Giraffe theme and plugin. The changes are:

Major overhaul of the admin interface – redundant options have been removed, and the interface has been simplified. Where possible I have used diagrams to show what the configuration options will change
Easy logos – a ‘logo’ directory now exists within the giraffe theme, and any image placed within here can be selected as the logo by using the admin interface. Additionally, two extra options exist to allow the logo to be randomly selected, and a custom function can be created to select a logo using whatever method you wish
Auto-news – the admin interface will now periodically check this website for changes to the theme, and will display this from inside the admin interface. This should make it easier for people to know when the theme has been updated
Curved corners and the left bar can be switched off
Comments order – comments can be displayed oldest first, or newest first
Gravatars – can be disabled
Calendar – can be disabled
Localization menu – now built into the theme
Most W3C validation errors fixed

A side effect of these changes will be that a lot of the administration interface is no longer localized properly. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too long before the new words can be translated.