Anjasaurus

WordPress 3.0

I’ve upgraded both my blogs to WP3.0, and with all the new features introduced, I think it’s time to build a new theme. Any ideas or opinions are welcome, even if you just prefer black to white :)

Design fiddling

I’m playing around with some CSS3 features, like text shadow. It’s nice :D I never liked it before, but now it makes designs more interesting, everything looks flat and boring without it :P

I also upgraded WordPress to 2.8.1, but now the syntax highlight for the theme editor disappeared :( I have no idea why either, can’t find a setting for it. Sad Ylva.

My poor blog

It’s time to give this blog some love and time again :) I will try to upgrade to the latest WordPress version over the next days and probably tweak some settings and design stuff. Fun :D

New looks

I’ve built a new theme with cleaner, nicer code in the background and I also took the opportunity to restructure a few things, as you might have seen :) As always, please tell me if something isn’t working, I’m going to be polishing it over the next few weeks.

More design focus

I’ve been trying to come up with new ideas how to improve the design on my blog for a while. It’s hard, I like it as it is, and there is also a step to take to learn new ways to design things. I can’t just get an idea and then learn to build it, I need to base an idea on how you build it :)

TkJ recently wrote about a plugin called TTFTitles, which transforms your blog titles to images. This way, you can use fonts and special designs that a certain OS/browser wouldn’t normally be able to show. I thought it was really interesting, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea or not, it might result in a weird design, since I design mainly with Firefox/Vista in mind (aka myself) and others view both fonts and font sizes differently.

Upgrading WordPress functions

The comment threading introduced with WordPress 2.7 is now implemented into my theme, more or less. I still need to work out some kinks and find a layout I like, but the basic code is there.

First of all. When you release a totally new feature, isn’t it a good idea to write up the instructions on how it works beforehand? I know WordPress is open source and so on, and I also know smart people will get some instructions up in a matter of days. But to let people reverse engineer and experiment to even find out how this new feature works, let alone how it’s supposed to be used.. It just gets me a bit irritated.

Enough ranting. To get it working, I followed the instructions in the WordPress codex. They are quite good, a bit messy at times, but takes you through most of the steps needed. Since my theme is just for me, I didn’t do any of the stuff to keep it compatible for older versions. Also note that most of the code snippets in the guide are written with the assumption that you know when start and end tags are missing, and how to place them. It’s quite inconsistent.

Now comes the fun part. Styling. A lot of classes have changed names or moved around a little, and the comment threading creates a new array of classes for you to play with. But, and this is a strong point, any customizing you had done to the HTML code is now gone. Now, it is done in a code snippet added to functions.php, which is called in the new wp_list_comments() function. As I write this, the documentation on that function is less than optimal, and quite confusing. The example code given there for customizing the comment HTML works fine though, don’t hesitate to use it. Just remember to not add any spaces or line breaks outside <?php ?>!! This broke a lot of stuff for me. :P

I would never have managed to style it all, if it hadn’t been for Firebug and nice and patient friends. But now, it works.

Caution – women working

I got a sudden rush of energy and motivation to build and restyle things, so this blog might see some changes and weird things in the next week/month. If anything is broken or weird, just send me an email :) I’m at least going to try and implement the new commenting features of WP 2.7, so if commenting doesn’t work, it’s probably my fault. Bear with me.

The title is a reference to a funny sign in London.
“Caution! Men working above”

WordPress 2.7

Woots, I managed. I’ve now upgraded WordPress to version 2.7, and I had to do it manually. Stupid webhost :(

Although everything seems to work ok now. Please, poke me if you see something weird :)

Updates

I’ve updated some small design things on my blog theme, fixed some neat plugins (Lighter Menus is lovely!), updated my About-page and generally tweaked things to be a bit closer to perfect. :) I can’t decide if I like the second sidebar enough, or if I should just incoprporate it all into a single sidebar.

On another note, I’ve started a Swedish link dump/thoughts dump, which means there will probably (hopefully?) not be any more Swedish posts here. Just too much of a hassle to translate back and forth.

I’ve also considered making a blog roll. The blogs I read almost every day are so many they probably wouldn’t fit on a sidebar (without years of scrolling), so I’m thinking a separate page for it may work. Seeing as I have over 100 blogs in Google Reader so far, it is a long list and a lot of work to get it done. Is it really worth it? I add and remove blogs every week.. But I still feel I want to give something to those blogs (writers..) I really like.

WordPress update!

Today I finally updated my wordpress files to 2.6.1 (I had 2.5). It seems everything went smoothly, but if you see some hickups, please don’t hesitate to tell me. :)

I’ll reward myself with something fun :D