Helvensteijn.com

Yes, it’s finally finished (I think), so a few minutes ago, I took my new theme online, the third one in about 16 months. I call it TWAIN, or Theme Without An Interesting Name in full. If you own a scanner, you’ll probably know where I got my inspiration for that.

So, besides the looks, what’s new? Well, if everything went as I hoped, nothing really. I already made the necessary changes two and a half weeks ago.

I have tested the design in Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Safari 3 and Internet Explorer 7 and everything works there, except for some minor bugs with IE7 (complaining of JavaScript errors, but everything seems to work). Firefox 2, Opera 9.x and Safari 2 will probably work fine for the most part, but Internet Explorer 6 is explicitly not supported. If you’re still using that browser, you really, really ought to upgrade to at least IE7! Even better would be switching to a decent browser altogether — like one of those mentioned above.

One more thing to mention is the width of the site, and thus the minimum required width of the browser window to prevent horizontal scroll bars. Until now, I always kept my designs confined to within 800 pixels, or I used a fluid design. But a fluid design is tougher to get right, especially in combination with rounded corners.

The statistics for this site tell me that practically nobody uses such low resolutions anymore. That might change a bit with these mini notebooks that are becoming increasingly popular lately, but still I decided to go a step further and based the layout on a browser window of at least 1024 pixels wide. That requirement is met by over 95% of the visitors to this site.

Well, I’d say try it out, and if you encounter any problems, you can leave a reply below, or contact me directly.

Last Monday, WordPress 2.6 was released. Because I grew more and more unhappy with my WordPress installation hanging together by plugins and hacks, I saw this release as a good moment to do a completely clean install.

I made a database dump and a WordPress export, dropped all tables in the database and removed all files in the WordPress directory after a backup of wp-content. Then, I made a fresh SVN checkout, imported the WordPress backup, and tweaked the settings.

So right now, this web site runs a bare naked WordPress installation, the only active plugin being Akismet.

I’ve decided not to use my old theme again for this installation (it also became quite hacky after a while). Statistics show a rapid decline in Internet Explorer 6 usage. Last month, its share was about 15.7%, this month up to yesterday that number has dropped to 13.0. So either this month or the next, I expect IE6’s share to tumble beneath 10%, at which point I no longer deem it important enough to warrant support.

Then, I can finally make some more complex designs for this web site without a large number of visitors being stuck with crippled pages. Think about some more advanced CSS2 (IE7 is not quite the yet, but at least a lot better than is predecessor) and alpha channel support in PNG images without resorting to nasty hacks. Until that time comes, I’ll just use the default WordPress theme. It is fairly decent, despite being massively overused.

There’s a few other things on my todo list. First one is installing the few plugins that I do want to use, second is moving this web site to a new webhost again, this time a virtual private server, so I have root access and can do whatever I want. It also comes with its own IP address, so I can take care of the third item on the list: mirror this website on a subdomain and secure it with my SSL/TLS certificate — impossible right now, because SSL/TLS and name based virtual hosting don’t mix (without a not widely supported extension).

I also took this opportunity to move my photos page elsewhere. While NextGEN is a very decent plugin, I wanted to keep this installation als lean and clean as possible. So I chose to move my photo albums to my MobileMe gallery. In my upcoming new theme, I will link there more visibly, right now there’s just a small link in the sidebar.

As of today, I no longer offer support for my WordPress plugins, pretty much because I lost interest. I did fix a long lasting issue with one of them.

If anyone would like to take over, just download the code and do with it as you see fit. It’s all released under a BSD style license.

So, what have I been up to lately?

Well, there’s a thing called real life that’s been keeping me busy. Obligations here, weekend trip there, you know how it goes…
Then there’s the MetaD IRC network that I’ve set up with some other people. And I’ve been busy (well, sort of) with a new sort of web publishing software, called UniTextus. It’s still in the conceptual stage, no actual code has been written yet.

So, in all the fuzz, this web site has gotten little attention over the last few weeks. And I’m not sure how much time I’ll be able to put into it for the time to come. There’s one thing I have decided about this site: I want to get rid of WordPress. By now, this site hangs together by plugins and tweaks, which is not how I like to see it. I have yet to decide whether to wait for a reasonably stable version of UniTextus or to build something myself in the mean time. One thing is sure though: one of these days I’m going to drop support for my WordPress plugins. I do have an issue with one of them that I want to resolve before then, but don’t expect any more updates.

I’ll make an official announcement when the time comes. In the mean time, if you’re interested in taking over development for my plugins, go ahead and do so. They were released under a BSD license, so you may do with them as you please.

Upgraded my WP Admin Links plugin to version 1.1. It is now also possible to remove default pages from the drop-down list.

More info Download

Looks like I found a bug in WordPress 2.3. It so happens that I have some pages in which I frequently use HTML entities. Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.3, when I try to edit such a page, all those entities are gone and replaced by their plain text counterparts. So all that escaped HTML I use so often is suddenly unescaped.
Now as long as I don’t save those pages I’m fine. But this kind of makes it impossible to edit such pages. Pretty annoying.

So I first went to the WordPress support forums to ask for advice. Seems someone else had a similar problem, but the other way round. That ultimately turned out to be a misbehaving plugin, but my problem wasn’t solved with that.

So this night, a new ticket was opened in the WordPress trac, giving my problem official bug status. Let’s just hope they fix it soon.

Update: this bug was squashed in version 2.3.1.

My WP Last Posts plugin was pretty buggy. It interfered with tings like searching (getting weird results for pages it was used in). It made me think, try, fail, think of something else, try that and fail again. Apparently, a loop inside page content just doesn’t work right.

So I regret to announce that this plugin will no longer insert posts inside pages. It now simply offers a template tag that can be put anywhere inside your template. You could now for instance display the excerpt from the last post in your sidebar. Or simply display some post excerpts underneath the page content using a custom page template.

More info Download

I’ve been working on my WP List Files plugin. The code is completely refactored, and I’ve added a JavaScript to allow collapsing and expanding of directories. Because it’s pretty much a rewrite, I’ve raised the version number to 2.0. It can be seen in action here.

More info Download

I also made a dedicated page for my WordPress plugins, so they will no longer have to linger somewhere deep inside the blog.

Since the launch of this web site, I used a theme based on WP-Andreas01.

Back then, I said that I probably wouldn’t be designing anymore themes myself, mostly because of MSIE. But you know how these things go, it started tinkling again.

So I came up with the idea to base a layout on the “graphite” look of Mac OS X Tiger. The result is a completely rewritten theme. Some basic elements have made it into this new theme virtually unchanged, so those will look familiar if you’ve visited this site before.

The most notable changes are the header — which lost its bulky image — and the menu — which is now horizontal instead of vertical, leaving some more horizontal space for real content.

Below a comparison between the old layout and the new one:

Old layout

New layout

Personally, I think this new layout looks really clean, which is exactly how I like layouts. If you have any comments or suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.

Now that I have ample time available, I’ve looked at some issues that I still had with this web site.

First of all, the page navigation on the left was somewhat buggy. When one was somewhere inside the blog, the “Blog” item in the menu would not be highlighted. That’s been fixed.

Secondly, the page titles were inconsistent. Static pages were OK, but in the blog, somtimes there was a page title (when inside archives or posts), but for example on the main blog page, it simply said “helvensteijn.com”, without any page title. Not very nice. Now, whenever one is somewhere inside the blog, the title will reflect that correctly. On the main blog page, it now sais “helvensteijn.com » Blog” and deeper inside the blog, it will tell you where you are.

The third issue was that one could not post any comment while logged in. Since I’m the only user and I have user registration disabled, this actually only concerned me. But still it was annoying (there’s some top-secret password-protected pages on this site where I use comments to keep track of certain things concerning this site, like bugs to squash ). That was probably due to some stupid mistake that I made earlier when prepping this site for initial launch. It took me a while to trace it back to it’s origin, but now I’m finally able to comment on myself while logged in.
Then, I tweaked the home page to always be /home/ instead of / for more clarity. Whenever someone tries to access / on this site, he or she is silently redirected to /home/ to reflect that in their browser.

And finally, to the outside world probably the most visible change, the home page now lists the three most recent posts from my blog.