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!

The good thing about web design (and the web in general) is that for all it’s power as a new medium of expression and communication, it exists in a relatively static state. And although in reality the web is constantly changing, you can usually get back to a web page after about a week and it will look mostly the same. This constraint can make for an excellent learning environment that is conducive to experimentation via trial and error, and the developing of a creativity that is essentially self taught. Incidentally, there is currently a new technique being put forward known as Web 2.0 that aims to take the web to new levels, by using a combination of programming languages to make the user’s experience a more dynamic one. More information on that topic can be found in a previous post entitled: Web 2.0 – Where are you?.

Anyway, the xml feeds that WordPress creates for RSS syndication are a good place to start testing out some basic skills in CSS. There is an article called Giving Style to XML that does a good job of describing how to create and include some basic CSS code in an XML document.

Some limitations with using css are: (taken from the previous article)

• Reordering and sorting of elements is not possible
• Generation of text is hard (or not practical)
• Adding functionality, such as creating a link from certain content elements, is not possible

Solving some of these shortcomings requires the use of XSLT. Now this is one of the coolest languages i’ve seen for the web. Actually, XSL is a family of languages of which XSLT (Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations) is a major part. Read more about this on the W3C site. The article Using XSLT for Adding Style does a good job of walking you through the process, picking up from where the previous article on designing with CSS left off. For a complete review visit: W3c Schools – XSLT Tutorial.