I’ve switched to the Tarski Wordpress theme for both this and my personal blog. Thanks to Jordan for the tip on the theme and for helping me to get up to speed quickly. I think Tarski is a nice theme with a reasonable set of configurable options. Being able to easily specify a custom style sheet is a big plus. With a couple of lines of css, I was able to widen my page enough to fit most of my code snippets.

After the theme switch, I took some time to reduce my category list considerably and use tags in place of the deleted categories. I also added category counts to provide some useful feedback.

Comments Plugin

Thanks to a comment on Jordan’s blog, I grabbed a simple plugin to change the text that’s displayed when there are no comments from “No comments” to “Add a comment”. The former could imply that “no comments are allowed” vs. “no comments exist yet”.

Just drop the following code in wp-content/plugins/change_no_comments.php and activate the plugin in the admin UI:

<?php
  /*
  Plugin Name: Change Comment Text
  Plugin URI:  http://tarskitheme.com/
  Description: Change comment text to something else.
  Author:      Benedict Eastaugh
  Version:     1.0
  Author URI:  http://extralogical.net/
  */

  function change_no_comments_text($text, $number) {
    if (0 == $number) { $text = 'Add a comment'; }
    return $text;
  }
  add_filter('comments_number', 'change_no_comments_text', 10, 2);
?>

Wordpress as a CMS

Next I’ll be testing the boundaries of Wordpress as a general purpose CMS. My initial assessment is that even though I much prefer Ruby over PHP as a programming language, the maturity, ease of use, feature richness, availability of documentation & developers, etc. of Wordpress outweighs the disadvantages of the implementation language for a large set of clients.

Now that I’ve been full time with Lojic Technologies since October ‘06 working on several web applications, I’m getting to the point of needing a better web presence, so last Saturday, with some help from my right brained wife, I gave the old site a face lift. It’s still small, and simple, but I think it looks a bit better now.

Besides the cosmetic changes, I also moved from a static site to Ruby on Rails and switched to XHTML 1.0 Strict.

Old Version

New Version www.lojic.com

I’ve also added a link in the sidebar now that the site isn’t an embarrassment. I’m quite pleased with how easy it was to get a Rails app running on Bluehost. I already host this wordpress blog there, so I thought it might be difficult adding a Rails app into the mix without clobbering each other, but it was quite simple (after spending hours researching it :) )

The site is almost entirely static except for the contact form. I finally arrived at a nice way to host a (mostly) static site with Rails, but I’ll have to blog about that in a later entry.

I researched HTML books recently to help my aesthetically gifted wife get started designing web pages and the Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML title got great reviews on Amazon, so she picked up a copy.

I thought I’d flip through the book, and I ended up reading the entire thing :) I really wish this book was available years ago when I started coding HTML; it’s an incredibly well written tutorial. It has a very unique style which the authors spend quite a few pages explaining:

Based on the latest research in cognitive science, neurobiology, and educational psychology, learning takes a lot more than text on a page. We know what turns your brain on.

After reading the book, I tend to agree with their approach. It was a very fun and informative read. Most of the book was review for me since I’ve spent years learning this stuff the hard way, but there were a handful of excellent points I learned from the book, and I understand a lot of the foundational aspects of XHTML & CSS much better than I did before. Expecting a newbie to get through a typical HTML reference book is unrealistic IMO.

For anyone wanting to learn the basics of (X)HTML & CSS, or would like a good review, I highly recommend this book. I don’t know if the other books in the “Head First” series are as good, but I’ll certainly consider them in the future based on my experience with this one.

UPDATE: I have found one thing to criticize about the book. The index leaves a lot to be desired. This is a particularly grievous deficiency with this book since it is organized as a tutorial as opposed to a reference book.

No doctype at all

• mail.google.com
• mail.yahoo.com
• www.alexa.com
• www.amazon.com
• www.barnesnoble.com
• www.ebay.com
• www.godaddy.com
• www.google.com
• www.myspace.com
• www.trianglemls.com

HTML 4.0 Transitional w/o URL

• www.fedex.com

HTML 4.0 Transitional Loose

• www.dell.com
• www.microsoft.com
• www.monster.com

HTML 4.0 Strict w/o URL

• www.ask.com

HTML 4.01 Transitional w/o URL

• www.bankofamerica.com
• www.netflix.com
• www.nuskin.com
• www.ups.com

HTML 4.01 Transitional Loose

• www.apple.com
• www.bizbuysell.com
• www.craigslist.org
• www.hp.com
• www.sun.com
• www.usps.gov
• www.youtube.com

HTML 4.01 Strict

• www.flickr.com
• www.slashdot.org
• www.walmart.com
• www.yahoo.com (for Firefox, no doctype for IE)

XHTML 1.0 Transitional

• www.aol.com
• www.digg.com
• www.expedia.com
• www.livejournal.com
• www.loopnet.com
• www.orbitz.com
• www.stumbleupon.com
• www.wachovia.com

XHTML 1.0 Strict

• del.icio.us
• maps.google.com
• www.blogger.com
• www.facebook.com
• www.ibm.com
• www.jaiku.com
• www.msn.com
• www.pownce.com
• www.twitter.com
• www.wikipedia.org

XHTML 1.1

• www.mayoclinic.com

Conclusion

There are enough mainstream sites using XHTML now, that I feel it may be ready for prime time. Since I don’t have a lot of legacy pages to deal with, I’m going to use XHTML 1.0 Strict.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">


1. Comment hack for JavaScript hasn’t been necessary for 10 years!
2. language=javascript has been deprecated
3. type=’text/javascript’ is ignored if you use the src attribute
4. remove any event handlers of a node before deleting it due to MS garbage collection incompetencies
5. avoid trickling, bubbling is where the action is

Theory of the DOM Part 1 of 3

Theory of the DOM Part 2 of 3

Theory of the DOM Part 3 of 3

35 designers. 5 questions. 5 precise answers. Result: 175 professional suggestions, tips and ideas from some of the best web-developers all around the world.

In the end we’ve received more answers than we expected. The results – over 80 CSS-based tips, design ideas, suggestions, fonts, design-related books and online-magazines – are listed below. It’s interesting to know, how designers work their magic. It’s interesting to know what you can actually learn from them.

35 Designers x 5 Questions