I’ll have to see if I think any of the old projects are still interesting enough to bring them back to this new section, I haven’t decided yet. I did kick off with two articles, the first explains how I managed to get WordPress to save and display code properly, the other describes one of many inconsistencies in PHP, one I didn’t know about until yesterday.

With these custom post types, WordPress is getting quite powerful as a general purpose CMS, provided you know some PHP to bend it to your will. Only the menu system isn’t quite there yet. The “Code” menu item is not in it’s active state (chevron on the left side) on article pages in the code section as it should be.

A few days ago, I acquired the domain hlvn.st, and now I also have the database structure and some simple PHP scripts in place to make the whole thing do its magic. For the keywords (the part after the / in the short URL) I decided to use 4 case-insensitive alphanumeric characters. That gives me 36⁴ (1,679,616) possibilities, minus a few ones that I blocked for obvious reasons. Seems enough for the time being. If I need more, I can always go up to 5 or even 6 characters, giving me 60,466,176 or 2,176,782,336 possibilities, respectively.

Now that I have my own working URL shortener, I removed all the existing bit.ly short URL’s from my blog posts (they’ll continue to work so long as bit.ly exists, though) and replaced them with hlvn.st ones. I currently intend to only use hlvn.st for blog posts or other parts of my own web site, but in the future I may decide to use it for anything and everything I need short URL’s for. An API is already in place, so WordPress can automatically shrink its permalinks for new posts (like this one).

On a (completely unrelated) side note, let’s cut the two-thousand-whatever-crap. It’s twenty-eleven (twintig-elf for the Dutch among you), which is much easier to pronounce.

The displaying of comments has improved, most notably the comment time, as opposed to only the date. I didn’t go as far as to implement threaded comments in my theme, because as they are now, with a fixed width, I don’t really see a viable way to clearly distinguish between levels. That will be something for an upcoming theme.

Notices and warnings now have a uniform appearance, with nicely rounded corners in browsers that support the CSS3 border-radius property. Same goes for form buttons, which had the default browser appearance until recently.

Other than that, there have been numerous small, less notable, improvements all over the place. As for the upcoming theme I mentioned above: don’t expect something anytime soon. It is currently no more than some vague ideas and sketches.

First of all, there was nothing to open full-size images in-page for thumbnails, they just behaved like normal links. I formerly used Lightbox for that, but was never really happy with it. Fiddled around somewhat with other implementations, and ended up using Shadowbox on this web site from now on.

Then, I recreated the Files section — which now makes use of Shadowbox for images and movies — and the font-size adjustment — which can now be found to the right of the main menu.

Also, since the fixes for Internet Explorer require JavaScript to be enabled anyway, I decided JavaScript could just as well handle the loading of said fixes. So I removed the conditional comment (nasty thing ) from the HTML.

And lastly, I didn’t particularly like the gray background, but hadn’t decided yet what to do with it. As you can see, I have now.

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.