Browsing the blog archives for May, 2006
May 27, 2006 
This is pretty cool — a Java applet that renders a HTML page as a graph, where each circle represents a HTML tag. The black one is the root HTML tag. I think the grey “dandelion” cluster is what I have in my <head> tag. All I’m missing is a tooltip on nodes so you can see what is what.
Found via NSLog();.
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May 18, 2006 This spam to my Gmail account had me laughing out loud.
Subject: Ihre Domain www.gmail.com ist nicht bei Google gelistet!
It’s a German spammer trying to tell me that “my” domain, gmail.com, isn’t listed in Google!
So yeah, you stupid spammer dudes at Finke Marketing. Thanks for the chuckles.
May 8, 2006 Wow, I got kinda serious here. Normally I’d just sit down and crank out some XHTML and CSS, but I decided to make an outline mockup in Photoshop for Kestrel. This image took about ten minutes to do; actually writing a basic CSS scaffold for this layout would have taken five minutes.
Kestrel will be a single-column layout with the data in distinct rows instead. Here’s an outline of the actual CSS classes used.
Layoutwise Kestrel won’t be entering uncharted territories. That’s not the goal, I just want to make a nice theme.
Creating the actual design is the quick and easy part — it’s nothing complex, so I did the scaffold in five minutes. All it really needs is the artwork. (And the usual IE5 workarounds, but I’ll save those for later.)
The major part of the work will be tossing the Wordpress tags into the mix. I also have a bunch of plugins that I’d like to support, and I’m also planning to borrow parts of the K2 control panel in the WP admin interface. I like being able to release “sub-themes” for Kestrel in the shape of a small CSS file and some images, just like Vader for K2.
I’m as of yet undecided on Widget support. Since Kestrel will be single-column only, there’s not really any place for a traditional sidebar. I have some ideas for shoehorning it into the “other junk” section on the front page, but it’s on the low priority list.
May 7, 2006 
I just installed the Flickr Photo Album plugin for Wordpress, and I’m pretty impressed so far.
I used to post Flickr images by cut-n-pasting a text snippet I had stored as a Wordpress note and replacing the relevant links with those of the photo I wanted to post. It works, but it’s kinda clunky and slow to do. With Flickr Photo Album you get a bar on the Write Post screen displaying your latest Flickr images, inserting the proper HTML with just two clicks — one to select the photo, another to select the size of the image you want to post. Perfect!
But wait, there’s more! You also get an integrated Flickr photo album (hence the name) — mine is located here. It looks kinda boring, but I’ll fiddle with the design of it later.
Definitely going to support this plugin in Kestrel.
In the other news, allergy season has started. Yay.
May 7, 2006 It’s been a long time, but I’ve started fiddling a bit with web design again. While I do like K2, I prefer to make my own design. And K2 was always meant to be temporary here until I found my long lost design groove again. And I think I spotted it out in the gutter, drunk out of its mind. It’s in rehab now.
I’ve started work on a Wordpress theme tentatively called Kestrel. I’m writing the basic layout now with the theme development page readily available in another tab.
I do admit that it feels a bit messy to use pure PHP instead of a template language like Movable Type uses, but I’ll manage.
Since doing live editing gets messy I’ve set up a local web server hosted on my file server. lighttpd as web server, PHP and MySQL.
lighttpd is very nice for local development — it doesn’t include the entire kitchen sink like Apache does. It took a bit of work to get it going the way I wanted, though. For a while it decided to send me the PHP source code instead of passing it on to PHP – but only when I accessed a PHP file from my workstation. When viewed locally it worked properly.
