Atomic Playboy

These are links I found interesting for 26/01 through 30/01:

• GlimmerBlocker — pAd blocker for Safari implemented as a non-intrusive proxy./p
• Noscope | Journal | Extra Image Tags Plugin — pThis is a very minimalistic WordPress plugin, which finds all images you insert into your posts, and wrap them in extra 's, so you can style the hell out of them./p
• The $300 Million Button — p”It's hard to imagine a form that could be simpler: two fields, two buttons, and one link. Yet, it turns out this form was preventing customers from purchasing products from a major e-commerce site, to the tune of $300,000,000 a year. What was even worse: the designers of the site had no clue there was even a problem.”/p
• Cops Talk Funny — p”From recruits in academies to senior officers and command staff, you talk funny when you take the stand. Is it in the water at the academies; is there a secret society where you're taught this special language?”/p
• Videogames outsell DVD and Blu-ray in 2008 — pRetail sales of videogames overtook that of DVD and Blu-ray for the first time, as sales of packaged media grew 6 per cent worldwide to hit USD 61 billion in 2008, according to Media Control GfK International./p

Jeffrey Zeldman wrote about content outsourcing and the vanishing personal site, which is exactly the direction I was heading with Reconsidering Blogging. I would have written more there, but it felt tough enough to just accomplish that much.

While I love all these wonderful social sites like Flickr, Tumblr, Twitter and various other clever services that tend to end in -r, I am starting to feel like I spread myself thin across the internet. So many places to post stuff to, so many places that contain fragments of my thought streams. It’s hard to keep track of me.

As I wrote, I feel that I have a certain expected level of quality for things I want to post on my personal site. While I grin just as much as anyone else at lolcats, that’s not really stuff I’d like to post here.

I’ve started experimenting a bit with Tumblr — you can find me here. Just like I enjoy the 140-character format of Twitter, the Tumbler format of posting various short text snippets, quotes and images is also very appealing. That default theme doesn’t quite agree with me about what a quote is, though. I have a habit of finding interesting quotes that can span several paragraphs, so blowing up the text size like that can get confusing. But I’ll fiddle with that later.

But Tumblr is still an experiment for me. I don’t find myself wanting to post there that frequently. Twitter is still the main source for my thought streams. I’ll keep fiddling with it for a while, and if I find a format that works for me I’ll try to incorporate it into my social stream.

So here’s the crux of it: do I try to tie it all together on my personal site, or just leave it with links to the various services I use?

Let’s look at what some other people do.

Jon Tan has a front page that is not the actual blog, but contains the first sentences from the latest blog entries prominently displayed in the center column. He then uses a very condensed format of asides, with just a link to the services he uses, and then a link to a separate page titled Asides, also linked from the top of the page. The Asides page itself looks very good and readable. One column with bookmarks from Delicious, one column with tweets from Twitter, and a third column with thumbnails from Flickr and Upcoming events below those.

Great idea, might steal it.

dooce has a two-column layout with Twitter and Flickr items in the sidebar. Classic blog layout, not much else to say about it. Still looking great though.

It started with Zeldman, so it might as well end there too. He has the two-column layout with a note on where he will be speaking (hey, offline thought streams counts too), a single tweet and a list of the recent entries in the sidebar.

Time to think it over. I’ll probably think by sketching out a new layout for the site. Tends to end up that way when I think design.

Today is CSS Naked Day. The idea is simple: strip all CSS from your site for a day. If your site doesn’t degrade gracefully, shame on you!

It may not be very pretty to look at (except in a 1995 kind of way), but my site is still fully readable. I didn’t make this WordPress theme though, but I use the very same design principles — and this is essentially how blind people read web pages.

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();.

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.

• header.php
  • #pageContainer: container for the entire page content, centered on the page.
    • #headContainer: container for the header image.
    • #navContainer: navigation menu.
• index.php/page.php
  • #entryContainer: container for the entry section of the page. Individual posts within it will be of the .entryContent class.
  • #metaContainer1: on the front page it will contain a list of older entries; for individual entries the metadata, trackback link, tags and stuff goes here.
  • #metaContainer2: individual entries have comments/trackbacks here. The front page gets the del.icio.us feed and some other junk, possibly in two columns.
• footer.php
  • #footerContainer: the standard copyright boilerplate.

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.

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.

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.

Why on earth didn’t I think of this myself? It’s so simple to do, yet incredibly elegant. Here’s what:

That’s the list of recent del.icio.us links over at Lisa McMillan’s site. When I first visited I wondered why those two links had marked checkboxes, and when I realized they were links I had visited earlier I instantly started to mentally slap my forehead for not thinking about that myself.

I’m totally stealing that idea for whenever I design my own theme for WordPress. It’s very simple to do: make a list with unvisited links having one background, and visited links another background. It looks much more special and attractive than changing the link text alone.

Yup, new layout is live, but only on the front page as of right now. But I’m not quite sure if I’ll use it — there’s something that’s not quite right about it, and I was really fond of the last one. I’ll work some more on it and see if I can take the best parts of the old one and combine with this one.

There are still a few CSS issues to iron out — Internet Explorer, as usual, is unable to center the contents on the page. To be fixed.

If you think the image at the top is huge, it’s because I intend to put some more content there. I’m thinking about writing my own photoblog software, with some random images grabbed from it to be displayed at the top of the page.

Yup. Took me all of fifteen minutes to make a quick PHP hack that points you to different style sheets. It’s in the bottom part of the sidebar. Currently only two styles available, but I’ll make more, you can count on that… I’m already getting tired of Warranty Void, the latest one.

I always pick strange names for my style sheets. The next one will be called Nuisance Value.