A big thanks to Stefano Aglietti and Mario Núñez Molina for providing localizations of the Giraffe theme in Italian and Spanish. I've added a small localization selector in the sidebar so that people can change the theme language and see what it looks like. It doesn't translate the posts, but it provides dates and other phrases in the chosen language, making for a better experience for non-English speakers.
My Giraffe theme has now been updated. I've made some pretty major changes and these are summarised below:
After the (almost) complete restoration of my system I can now get back to finishing off the things I was working on. The result of this is I've now made the theme for this website available for download.
I've tried to tidy it up as much as possible, although it's still not perfect. There is also one small issue with Firefox 1.0.4. Sometimes, on a wide screen (1400 pixels on mine), FireFox will incorrectly add a 1 pixel gap between a border in the comments section. I'm not sure what the cause of this is, and it only occurs on FireFox - all other browsers display it perfectly. I know it's a browser inconsistency because resizing the screen causes the gap to disappear. Until I can figure out a fix, or if anyone else knows the reason, then I will put it down as an acceptable problem that will hopefully disappear in the next FireFox release.
My last post was June 6th, and today it's June 21st. In the time since then my hard drive had a spasm of identity, and I went back to England for a short holiday. Actually, both happened at the same time, which has left my computer pretty much incapacitated until I got back to Prague. Now I have the fun task of restoring its former glory. And they say computers are designed to make our lives easier.
While most of my work and emails were backed up, I had 10's of gigs of photos and videos that were not, and not all of them survived. It's quite disheartening really, as some were the only copies I had.
I've been tinkering away on a WordPress plugin idea I've had, and it's now finished and available for download.
It's a bit of a complicated plugin to explain fully, but the core effect is very simple: it is an expandable pattern matching script engine. Phew, what a mouthful!
Basically it means that you can insert patterns into posts, or have patterns applied to dates, titles, even the whole blog. These patterns can contain variables and functions that, when InScript processes them, will insert or manipulate the data as the page is being generated.
A lot of people have asked for a printable version of my WordPress theme dissection and so I've been beavering away and have now released a PDF. This has been fully revised and expanded, and weighs-in at just over 1MB.
In a further fit of productivity I've also made a version available to buy from the online publisher Lulu. The guide is the same, so you can download the PDF and print it out yourself, but you also have the option of ordering a professionally printed and bound copy. As more of an incentive, the Lulu version has an extra chapter including my guide to installing WordPress on your own computer, as well as extra bookish things such as content pages etc. There's also a full-colour durable cover - just like a real book!
We generally become WordPress users to create a blog for everyone to see. This can involve the purchasing of a domain name and web hosting. These we treat as black boxes on which the WordPress software is installed, and everything magically works. This is exactly how it should be.
Although WordPress provides a comprehensive management interface, there are times when it would be better to have our own local copy, running on our own machine. There are several reasons we would want to do this:
In previous guides we have concentrated on the building blocks of creating a WordPress theme. A basic design structure has been defined, followed by enclosing header and footer elements, and finished off with a navigational guide. While important aspects of any blog, they are secondary to its main purpose: the content.
In this fourth and final part we carefully dissect the process of taking the content from WordPress and arranging it on screen. Attention is paid to the many alternative methods of grouping this information, from the many posts of the front page to search results and archives.
We will look at how WordPress distributes the responsibility for this work, and how everything is tied together with the all-seeing all-knowing construct known as ‘The Loop’.
By the end of this guide we will not only have a fully working theme, but we should have enough experience and knowledge of WordPress to be able to extend our theme beyond the basic design presented here.
There's a great Japanese translation of the WordPress theme dissection (part one), written by Tai over at Tekapo. There's a link directly from the article.
Nice work Tai, and thanks for the translation!
I've decided to change my hosting company.
I am prepared for a lot of pain and suffering, but so far it's going rather smoothly. This wasn't some well thought out decision, but rather a fit of activity after becoming frustrated with the averageness of GoDaddy, my current host.
Finding a decent host is a real chore, and I came to this conclusion pretty soon the first time round. The internet is flooded with copy-cat hosting companies who are mostly resellers that buy bandwidth from real companies. Even their websites all look the same, with identical prices, identical features, and identical hidden setup fees. This makes me both weary and wary.
Those all-important RSS feeds:
Posts (or get it via email)
Comments RSS