Gabriel de Kadt

graphic arts & design

web-dev
RapidWeaver beta

Yes still running this baby with RapidWeaver. Now v3.5 Beta. It's buggy as f***. Very annoying after the grand fanfares that alluded to a finished product.

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Lightboxing

Found this «nifty» tutorial on how to make a lightbox

"an unobtrusive script used to to overlay content on the current page. Because it places content above your current page, it frees you from the constraints of the layout, particularly column widths."

OK - its www browser version of our old favourite the Modal Dialogue Box but with CSS and a bit of JavaScript. Via Treehouse Magazine.

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Text Editor update

Thanks for the recommendation Dan. TextMate looks very good. There's a couple of interesting articles about it out there in blogland and beyond:

Trick Your TextMate: The Series. Very nice bunch of hints and stuff from Mr Garrett Dimon

A decent short Text Mate vs TextWrangler article at infocraft

Michael Alderete’s Weblog has a post on TextMate vs BBEdit with nice links:

… a few new tricks in this capsule review of TextMate at Vitamin, and someone built this nifty customized quick reference card generator for TextMate that could be indispensable.
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MAC WYSIWYG XHTML

All I want is a simple tool to help me write web content and clearly formatted text. In particular a proposal for a web site redevelopment. <rant>Seems very wrong to be using Microsoft Word. The bloated wee shiite won't start up on this machine anymore anyway. Frankly very glad to see it gone.</rant> Something that does headings, helps with links and HTML entities.

Finds so far:

Nvu.

Mmmmm. OK - starts life in HTML transitional mode. Set to XHTML. Looking promising then it drops in a span with inline style into the text when you hit the BOLD button. What's wrong with just <b> or <strong>? Breaks go in as <br>.

SEEdit

Nice, but without the WYSIWYG.

Amaya

Grrr. It's got all the tags to hand - but is not a "Mac" app. Feels very much like an unpolished Open Source app. Screen redraw is odd. Very bad: I can't find a way to [select all]

Taco HTML Edit

Naw - not WYSIWYG, not XHTML ready (option for uppercase tags)

Well …

Perhaps I'll stick with TextWrangler after all

aside

Completely forgotten the very smart looking application that posts to WordPress et al. … Found it. In the end. MarsEdit. Loads of google searches and head scratching trying to remember where that one came from. Anyway, in the end it's no good for what I'm looking for right now. And its job of easing the posting of content to a WordPress blog looks to be under threat from within WordPress community: the shuttle has launched. That looks great. WordPress has been cumbersome in that regard.

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Drupal book

Fresh from the press. The wonders of new publishing methods. I now have a (fairly useless) screen-view-only secure PDF and a real book on its way. Shame they don't do a WordPress Book.

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Last FM in iTunes

Only came across this service due to inclusion in the Scrible theme for WordPress - liked the look of it but left it at that. Now have seen a HInt about how to get going with Last.FM and then then keep using iTunes. We shall see. Added interest due to the work n La Hora Violeta site (development currently stalled due to lack of content from the lads). We shall see. Not sure about background re-encoding on my already struggling PowerBook - but hey - I like the idea and need some new music.

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shared server issues dealt with
Simple - had to put in a simple request for Power Mode PHP so no fancy PHP is run as CGI. Which is safer in a shered server environmnet you see. All good.
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shared server issues to deal with
My mt shared server package runs php in safe mode - so I'm getting permissions errors. Two plugins so far refusing to work (the default WP 2 database backup plugin and a Flickr Photo Album for WordPress) - with similar permissions errors for both and a third WP-admin by orederedlist which doesn't show up at all...


Doh.

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Squible is sacked.
That there squible theme is far too complex for its own good -needs some inline CSS and has too many stylesheets- but the hora violeta site is (god-damn-it) getting there.

Aside: flickr code for WordPress
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Oh balls to it.
A WordPress powered gdekadt.com is sacked [was never hired - lets say postponed].

RapidWeaver lives to site another page. [Or something.]

I'll set up the Hora Violeta site with WordPress, using that ole Squible theme and the little knowledge I've gained thus far.

Meanwhile I've seen something new and exciting to keep half of one eye on (damn you Dan: it's a Ruby On Rails thing.) It's over here.

[Aside. New fave: orderedlist]
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Wacking HordPress
Grrr and double grrr.

I've done something somewhere that prevents the content displaying.

I've also spent quite a lot of time looking at other more CMS heavy options this week. Bit geeky is not enough when you're after a quick fix. How does it go, "Cheap, Fast, Good. You can only ever have two out of three." Something like that. I'm after 1 and 3.

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It all becomes clear

or does it?


The Lazydada site is testing a redevelopment of gdekadt.com in a WordPress stylee. Benevolence is the starting point. But I'm now looking at removing all the blog stuff from gdekadt - running two blogs seems a bit to much. KISS.

Once the "professional" gdekadt site is (re-)done I'll move on the personal site & testing ground: probably to be based on a the WordPress Squible theme.

In the meantime I'm still very much enjoying the ease of RapidWeaver. (Except for the FTP issues it has)

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Hacking WordPress
TO DO:Static Front page - no sweat. Simple instructions here.

Hacking Benevolence Theme


Making custom templates


Making custom "home.php" file - and "sidebar_home.php" to differentiate blog style pages from dynamically generated static content. Arse. ... need to use "include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/sidebar_home.php');" rather than a simple "get".
The get command template tags call to standard template files. The include PHP command gets template files that are standard AND non-standard template files.


home.php


home.php loses pretty much everything from original index.php - just calls in header, sidebar_home, content and footer.

sidebar_home.php


TO DO: Get a list of Pages displaying ... (need to include template tag to get Pages) example
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h2>Pages</h2>'); ?>
and following on; to include the "Blog" category (no breaks - so it is a seamless list). (Blimey - getting php code to render in html is not nice.


TO DO: Getting list of Pages in the Sidebar, without "Pages" repeating...
DONE: Just remove "Pages" from inside the example above. Donkey.

TO DO: Benevolence Theme needs a (CSS?) solution to render sub-Pages nicely in the sidebar.
IN PROGRESS: using a .pagenav li.page_item li selector I can add indent - but it seems the text color won't change...
(NOTE: since I've had to re-do sidebar_home.php due to it losing all its contents - I'm getting a nice rendering of this. Magic. One thing I changed was to put the php calls to display Pages and Blog inside a title div.)

Hacking the standard templates


header.php


TO DO: Remove title from header.php (the "lazydada" bit: this should be done with some fancy graphics and such-like).
DONE: Commented out bloginfo link from blogTitle div. Knocked out a banner graphic. Very much a v1.
TO DO: do that properly - (perhaps an Image Ready navbar with fancy roll-overs: in the CSS of course)

sidebar.php


TO DO: Need to add the pages call into the regular sidebar, then exclude category "Blog" from the category listing to avoid duplication in said sidebar.
DONE: wp_list_cats('list=0'); replaced by:
wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&exclude=2'); where my "Blog" category = 2

footer.php


TO DO: Modfy footer.
DONE: easy.

TO DO: Sort out permalinks
DONE: Created .htaccess file - (WP 2 is not creating the file despite what is says - tried changing permissions (using Transmit) but no joy. ) - added code as promted by WP-admin.
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in the beginning (the move to WordPress starts)
hmmwokay...

Got a new host as recommended by the Zeldman himself. Mine (Powweb) needed me to set up a new account to mess about/test/run the new project: henceforth lazydada.com. So fuck em. (mt) let me have 5/6 sites within my shared server which is nice. Anyway moving on... this is about getting WordPress to power a site.

So how's it going?

Not too bad at all: It is simple as they say. (I am a bit geeky already - but nothing much of that is required.) The only plug-in I'm after right away is Static Front Page from Semiologic. Flickr nonsense will come next. As for themes - I'm looking at hacking either blix or Benevolence by Theron Parlin. We shall see....

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WordPress to come
OK - WordPress can do Pages which contain static information that is generated dynamically. And setting up a non-blog home page is no big deal either. Last year when I was first looking into setting up this website it had seemed much more hassle than it was worth. Now I'm getting used to the faffing about involved in running it this site; I'm ready to do my homework on it. B'gads even Zeldman's using it now. It'll take a while though. Lazydada by name...

[aside] good grief - Sin City is a terrible movie.

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New favourite ftp client and other stuff
Transmit by Panic has replaced Interarchy as my ftp client of choice. Been having trouble today with uploads to my host using either RapidWeaver or Interarchy. Transmit has so far been faultless. It's a nicer application in use too.

Flickr Uploadr is the tool for Flickr uploading. Beats the other option. Third option was nice - but needed iPhoto - which I'm currently dropping like a sack of big mouldy onions. I'll definitely have a look at version six when I get round to it - for easy printing and those nice books but not in a big hurry. Recovering 6GB of space by dumping its duplicated files (which are all archived anyway) will be lovely.

Oh yes - and while I like RapidWeaver - I'm begining to see this as a temporary solution. I'm not keen on the way it duplicates common resources for each page - it's missing the point of lovely lithe CSS standards. I wish that WordPress was more friendly to static page requirements. Oooh - the beauty of CSS done properly.

Most useful web tools:


TextWrangler


Transmit


CSSEdit


Xyle scope

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