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.
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.
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.
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.
Don’t fall down the stairs.
I think I broke two toes. Unhurt otherwise.
I am impressed with the comments and how active your site is. Some spam comment
Active? Ha! I’ve been anything but active around here lately. I keep trying to write more, but there’s not really much happening right now.
Things are finally starting to happen on the medical front. I’ve talked to a new doctor, and he was of the opinion that whatever ailed me, it sure wasn’t a depression — something my previous doc was hellbent on. So now I’m off the meds, and I already feel better.
He was also of the opinion that while I showed some characteristics (I can’t really call it symptoms, since I don’t see it as an illness; merely a non-normative state of mind) of Asperger’s syndrome, it wasn’t severe enough to call it AS proper. So right now it’s merely an autistic spectrum disorder until they’ve figured out some letter acronym that fits me. And I don’t really agree with the “disorder” part either.
The number of autistic traits present determines the severity of autism in the individual. These autistic traits may be beneficial for some disciplines like science, mathematics, engineering. Wikipedia
I can’t say that I have a very big interest in the various sciences, but I do recall having a pretty easy time grasping the concepts back in school, while others struggled with it.
I talked to a psychologist for a bit last week and did a computerized personality test; next Monday I’m meeting him again for a followup on what the test says about me.
Since I’m pretty interested in informatics, I pointed out several problems with that computerized test. Whoever designed the application clearly wasn’t a designer proper. The questions were of a “yes/no” type, but many questions were formulated so that answering no made the sentence a double negation. That confused me a lot. It would have been a lot clearer if the options were “I agree” and “I do not agree”.
And now I’m off for bed. I’ll try to write more frequently around here now.
Stop doing that, Warren. It’s wide open for abuse, such as me making all your readers who read via your RSS feed see this.
What I’m talking about is publishing all your Technorati occurences and Flickr comments in your article feed. Reading your own stuff? I love it. That’s what I want. Reading what every boring entity on the planet writes about you? In French? No thanks, not interested. I don’t speak French.
I suppose I could have e-mailed Warren about this instead, but where’s the fun in that? Feel free to call me a dick in the comments.
I had a letter waiting for me when I got home after watching V For Vendetta, of which I might rant later. US air mail, eh? I rip it open.
Some silly domain registrar, Domain Registry of America (who in the fine print state they are not affiliated with or endorsed by the government of the United States) wants me to host this very domain, and what a fancy name said domain has, at them instead of Gandi, my current registrar.
I would consider it if their yearly fee wasn’t 216% of what I’m paying right now. €26 per year? I pay €12 now. That pricing has no attachment whatsoever to reality.
And why does your spam look so much like a bill? Hidden deep in a paragraph you say that it isn’t, yet you do your best to make it look like one. Add some FUD about “losing your online identity” and I put you on my shit list.
Well, thanks for sending me something to light the fireplace with.
I don’t support Netscape, Firefox or any other webbrowsers since I believe that there should be one HTML standard and not a dozen. Pixels on the web
Ahahahahahahahaha!
Way to not understand what a web standard is, buddy.
