Tag: Wordpress

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Culture Me Other

New Theme

I’ve come up with a new design for the site, as I think should be pretty obvious. If you prefer the calmer qualities of the old look, there’s now a theme switcher in the sidebar so you can pick your favourite. The scarab picture is used by kind permission of elina. Fab, innit?

The main problem with the new theme from a design POV is that it looks a bit peculiar if you’re looking at a single post which isn’t very long. But I can’t think of an easy answer to that one. It’s also a wee bit visually aggressive, but hey, that’s what the theme switcher is for – you can take your pick.

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Me Other

WordPress upgrade

Well, I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.0 – despite the fact that they’re probably about to release 2.0.1 – and so far so good. Most (all?) of the changes are things which aren’t visible to you lot. It seems generally nicer to use, though the WYSIWYG editor doesn’t like Safari. *shrug*. The new Admin pages are a bit ugly. *shrug again*.

The main reason I upgraded was because you can now create categories on the fly as you write a post, although you can’t choose a parent catgory for it at the same time. And the post preview actually shows what it would look like on your blog, rather than just testing the formatting. I’ll have to take their word for it that the underlying code is improved.

EDIT: I’ve just trued tried the wysiwyg editor on Firefox. It does seem quite nice, I must admit.

Though it does that fucking annoying thing of automatically putting white space after a newline. Don’t these people write poetry?

EDIT again:

asdsad
sdasda
asdasdasd
sad

At least it looks like the old non-wysiwyg editor still works for single returns.

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Culture Other

blog design

I’ve been thinking about web design recently, specifically as it applies to a possible redesign for this blog. There’s no rush, because the current look is fairly new and I’m pleased with it, but I had set myself a more ambitious target. Inspired by an exchange I had with Will over at Corridor of Uncertainty, I wanted to come up with something which broke away from the standard layout of ‘header and 2 or 3 columns’, which looked genuinely distinctive and sharp.

Obviously you can’t get away from the fact that most of the content you want to present (posts, blogroll, categories) is naturally in a column form. What you can do, hopefully, is break up the boxy visual appearance, both by disguising it – rather as I’ve tried to do with the fading-out of the blue boxes in the current design, which softens their appearance – and by laying them out somewhat differently. And that’s quite apart from all the decisions about typography, visual style, colour-scheme and so on. I would want to get the look stylish without being über-tasteful, modern without trying to present myself as terribly hip (which I’m not), and low-key while still being distinctive. And no Flash or Java, both because they’re completely unnecessary with this kind of site and because I wouldn’t know how to do them anyway – it took me long enough to learn my way around basic HTML and CSS.

I do have a few ideas, but it’s not coming together just yet. In the meantime, I had a (not very thorough) scan through the long poetry blogroll to see what other people have done. Most, sensibly enough, have just used one of the blogger templates. And there are plenty with good, simple designs based primarily on sensible colour and type choices. But here are a few that have managed something a bit more distinctive. In no particular order:

Equanimity (probably my favourite of the lot, though the one-column layout is a bit limiting)
jane dark’s sugarhigh!
Shanna Compton
{lime tree}
JewishyIrishy
Jacob’s Ladder
One Good Bumblebee
Odalisqued
Postcards from the Imagination
Watermark

Note that I’m not talking about anything particularly radical or super-ingenious, just good design.

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Me Other

New design for the blog

As should be pretty obvious, I’ve re-designed the blog. Again. If it looks peculiar on your computer, let me know. I’ve pretty much decided not to make the extra effort to make the site work on early versions of Internet Explorer, but if it’s not looking right on IE6 I might need to do something about it.

Can I just say how fucking annoying it is that CSS doesn’t seem to support blocks where the bottom is defined relative to the bottom of the webpage (i.e. the document rather than the screen).

The swifts are taken from this picture on Flickr.

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Culture Other

A silly new feature!

I’ve added a list of music I’m currently listening to in the sidebar on the left. It uses a neat little WordPress plugin called WP-Scrobbler that grabs the info from your Audioscrobbler feed. So that list on the left automatically updates as I listen to music thorough iTunes. Or at least I think it updates every six minutes.

The default setting is to give the song title, artist and date and time for each song. That seemed like too much information, so I’ve got it just giving the last eight artists. But if you click on the name of an artist, it’ll link you to the Last.fm page for the particular song I listened to.