This site was in maintenance mode for a good part of the evening due to an incompatibility with WP 2.3.1 and the previous theme used here on Techblog. I spent some time trying to work out the problems but the breakage was pretty severe so i figured it was time to either design something new from scratch, or just grab one of the many readily available WP themes and use that for a while. I decided to go for the latter choice.. i might still spend some time adding more customizations, but for now i needed something that worked well and looked clean.

Anyway, after trying out a bunch of themes from the WP Theme Viewer and playing around with the WP Theme Generator, i was able to narrow my choices down to about 5 themes and finally went with the blog.txt theme by Scott.

I’ve already made some SEO related modifications to the header.php template file. Also, i had to upgrade my tags structure – twice! Once from some really old wordpress tagging plugin that kept your tags in a key called: ttaglist, in the postmeta table. I had to use the UTW plugin to import these old tags. Then came the second upgrade. I used the new built-in tag import feature in WP 2.3.1 to convert my newly created UTW tags into the native WP tagging structure. Everything seemed to go smoothly, and i was able to get rid of all my old tagging plugins and install Simple Tags for advance tag management. I had to get rid of a few other really old plugins, but the site runs much faster now, and i’m sure it won’t take me too long to find a ton of new plugins to clutter up my site in no time!

So far, i have to say, i’m pretty happy with the upgrades. I haven’t tested everything too thoroughly yet, so more changes might still be on the horizon.. including another complete theme change. Just giving you all heads up!

anyway, got most of the site running pretty smoothly again.
still some functionality (ie: plugins) that are on the fritz.
looking into them shortly.
but until then – no tags feature, and some other minor things.

a lot more changes on the way..
stay tuned.

“When it rains, it pours.”

After a long silence (i.e. no posts in february because i have been way too busy), the site went temporarily offline for approximately 24hrs. If i had to describe what happen in a few short words, i would say something dramatic like: “it was the calm before the storm”.

and if someone asked me what i’ve learnt in the last 24hrs, i’d say: “never wear eleven hats”. the reason being: “ten is enough”. ok.. i get a little cryptic when i’m over-tired.

Anyway, everything seems to be up and running again, though i will be doing additional bug checking over the next week or so. Also, more posts this month.

The first of these sites is called Worn Fashion Journal, and if you check it out you’ll find that it is driven by WordPress using a custom template i designed for them. Many of the graphic design elements were already more or less prepared which is always good. The site is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0, hand-coded, using nothing more that a text editor and my imagination to bring it all together.

The second site is still considered to be beta, although the bulk of the coding is done. It’s currently closed to the public (but you can request an invite). It’s called indyish and you can get some more info on the small homepage that was temporarily set up. It too was built on top of a heavily modified version of WordPress using several custom templates. Once it’s done, it should validate as XHTML 1.0 Transitional and CSS 2.0 as well.

In any case, i’ll hopefully be posting more regularly this month, as there are currently no new projects on the horizon. There is still much to do with both Worn and indyish to keep me busy through to the next year so it’s probably for the best. Also, as promised, a redesign will hopefully be coming for TechBlog some time in the near future. i would hesitate, at this point, to pin down a specific date (seeing as how i can’t seem to settle on anything i’ve been coming up with recently), so let’s just say it’s coming. that’s all i got, for now..

On the down side, i noticed that the archives page takes a little longer to load initially (i don’t think it takes as long the second time). But the advantage of applying Ajax techniques to the archives is that it eliminates page refreshes, which means that browsing through the archives becomes a lot faster and easier as a whole.

Installing the plugin was fairly easy.

1. Upload the entire “af-extended-live-archive” folder to your wordpress plugins directory.
2. Add < ?php af_ela_super_archive(); ?> to your archives template.
3. Enable the plugin in the wordpress admin.
4. Navigate to the “Options » Ext. Live Archives” tab to recreate the cache.
5. Add the css file (or copy and paste the code) to your site.
6. Optionally, modify the css file to suit your needs.

So far, i’m really happy with it. The only potential problem that i saw was for people browsing the site with javascript disabled. These visitors would see nothing at all. Even though this is a pretty clean default result (as opposed to printing out some nasty error), i wanted everyone to be able to use the archives page.

As a quick solution, and because i had only hidden (commented out) the original code (xhtml) when i added the ajaxified archives code, i decide to simply add < noscript > < / noscript > tags around the old code that was commented out. This would effectively hide the old code from browsers with javascript enabled, while showing it only to visitors with javascript turned off. With the javascript fix in place, i think this plugin might be a keeper..

XML Parsing Error: xml processing instruction not at start of external entity

visitors who subscribed through Bloglines and Newsgator wouldn’t have noticed any problems, but if you tried to add the feed to Searchfox you’d get an error asking you to validate the feed or check to make sure that the site is online.

The feed was, in fact, invalid due to some additional white line-breaks at the bottom of a wordpress plugin that i had recently edited. The result caused a huge blank spot in the code, at the top of my rss feed (before the xml declaration, not good).

Anyway, once i figured out where the extra space was coming from, it was easy to correct (just delete the blank space). Now the feeds both validate (entries and comments), hopefully there was no harm done. i don’t think that this ever effected those who were already subscribed and just trying to reading the entries, still now everyone can see everything. alright then.