New home, new platform
Well, it took me long enough. I’ve had the domain set up for months, it was just a question of timing and inclination. Got there now.
A lot of work still to do, the template has taken me a lot of time this afternoon, and it now looks reasonable in Firefox. Unfortunately, I just checked it in Internet Explorer. Oh dear me no. It’s ugly, lots of stuff is in the wrong place, etc. I’ll, um, try to figure out what’s wrong, I haven’t actually changed any locations, so it should be fine (Edit:Back to the default for now…Edit 2:Fixed, sort of, it now looks almost the way I want it.). Ah well. Get Firefox, it’ll make everyone’s life easier. Plus I’ve done some nice little tricks that only work in Fx and on Macs.
Right, that’s enough for me. Substantive posts will start to follow, and hopefully a few new writers once I start chasing them up. Lots more fiddling to go though to make it work properly. Fun fun.
Incidentally, for those using blogger/blogspot and wondering whether to switch? Wordpress is so good. Really really good. And the import tool is great. Going back to add categories to nearly 500 posts is a little bull, but, y’know.
Looking a bit of a mess in FF1.5 at the moment - stuff overlaid no other stuff, and this textarea is huge - goes right off the right hand side of the window. You seem to have a sideways scroll bar too, even at 1024 x 768. I’ll have a look and see if I can spot what the issues are. The screenshots here show what I mean:
http://www.redbadge.co.uk/taktix/
When the positioning and everything is working right, it’s going to look really nice.
Comment by Pete in Dunbar | September 14, 2006
Blimey, that’s weird. I’m using 1.5, and that overlay happens for me for about ten seconds as the page loads, then disappears.
As you’ve probably noted, web coding is not my thing, I’m using a theme and changing the colours, that’s all I’ve really done. And yes, this comment box size is a little strange as well.
Good to see you back blogging at notes BTW, had stopped checking in until I saw a new site link to you as one of only a few.
Blogroll’s buggered as well, it’s in the wrong place and all the categories are gone. I’ll get there eventually.
Comment by TaKtiX | September 14, 2006
Ah, when I can summon up the anger _and_ the energy. I spend too much time reading other people’s stuff.
I thought that was a pretty good-looking theme, but I see you’re back to ‘kubrick’ at the moment. I do think Wordpress is brilliant, though. Have you added Akismet yet - I think you need to register with wordpress.com to get an api key, but it seems to do the trick on the work blog. I added Bad Behaviour (via Longrider) to the personal blogs and between them they seem to get everything.
Comment by Pete in Dunbar | September 14, 2006
Akismet is a default install with the download now it seems, which was good, and it was top of my list. Have a wordpress.com account, I own matbowles.* at everywhere I can think of, just in case, only I never really got around to playing with it. I’ll hold off bad behaviour for now, partially as I fancy seeing what it’s like first.
I looked at the site from work this morning, and gods it was awful, so I switched it to Kubrick, I’ve just uploaded a clean version of the theme, and I’ll just keep trying until I’ve got it right, int he meantime, this works.
I know what you mean about trawling around reading, there are so many good bloggers out there now, keep finding someone new. Ah well.
Anyway, time to think about writing something decent.
Comment by TaKtiX | September 14, 2006
It’s looking good now, even in IE apart from the positioning of the search box. ISTR that Akismet is in the default install, but to enable it you need the API key via Wordpress.com.
Comment by Pete in Dunbar | September 15, 2006
Mat, what plugin are you using for those lovely headers? I’ve been trying to get something like that, but the plugin I looked at wouldn’t work on my blog. :(
Comment by doctorvee | September 18, 2006
Hmm. *turns off flashblock, restarts*
So that’s what’s going on. No bloody wonder I can’t get the alignment right on the headers, he’s put flash into the headers in some way.
Ah, yeah, it’s part of the theme, and now I can see it’s there, it explains why I was having some serious problems styling it.
Um, you might like it m’friend, but there’ll be no bloody flash crap on my site thankee muchly. Wonder how to turn it off…
Pete/Dave? Found what’s causing the problem, I noticed some weird ‘do not display’ stuff in the CSS last night and wondered what was going on.
Ah well, there are drawbacks to browsing with flashblock always on, it means you don’t notice the stuff replacing what’s supposed to be there.
Comment by TaKtiX | September 19, 2006
Aha! I don’t use flash myself, but I don’t block it. Looking good now. Still got the weird huge textarea though - I guess it’s the ‘cols=”100%”‘ which isn’t an allowable value for ‘cols’, it should be a number of characters - in fact when you save the page in Firefox it changes ‘cols=”100%”‘ to ‘cols=”100″‘ - so Firefox is fixing the incorrect 100% and substituting a (legal) 100. Change it to 50 and it should be fine.
There’s also a sideways scroll bar at 1024 x 768 - I wonder if the widths add up to a few pixels too many?
Comment by Pete in Dunbar | September 19, 2006
Yeah, that’s what I’m currently trying to fix. The scrollbar is only there on post pages, might be the post box. You must’ve got here just as I changed the template back having found the javascript file that was embedding the flash and deleted it.
I’ll send a copy to Duncan though, if the silly fule wants to use flash it’s his site.
Comment by MatGB | September 19, 2006
YES!
Got it fixed, thanks, that was the exact problem.
Now all I need to to is tweak the little weirdnesses, but that can be done later. I have styled my site to look close to what I want. I am happy. Cool beans. Although the comment #s are now repeating themselves. Ah well, details.
Comment by MatGB | September 19, 2006
2 niggles with your design (I browse in Opera)
1. The yellow heading titles, when they’re long enough to wrap onto two lines, overlap the content that follows.
2. The large boxes that look like a tear-off calendar (”13 September”) look really great, but if you’re browsing an old post you need to know the year otherwise readers will get quite confused.
Comment by Jeff in Sussex | September 23, 2006
For the first point, yes, it’s a problem, and I’m torn between reducing the font size a little or not. Definately going to keep post titles short from now on, it’s the imported posts that cause the problem from what I can see.
For the second, yes, as it’s someone else’s theme not sure how to fix it (could put in another date area or something), but as a work around the url of the link is in the year of the post. TBH, it’s not a huge issue, we’ll have been going a year total next week, in the future it might be.
It’s a new theme, I’ve been tweaking it (more today, the editor is still open), but there are aspects I hate as well as love. Essentially, I can’t, really, code for toffee, and my aesthetic eye is quite bad.
One thing I have decided is to try and get a site logo (have a designer with an idea), and change the subhead to white text as a contrast.
Definately really liking the utilty of Wordpress, will never encourage people to use Blogger again, wordpress.com allows free usage and is nearly as good as a site install.
I’m torn about Opera, I suspect if it was a straight switch from IE I’d like it, but I’m so used to Fx now. Use it on my phone though, very (very) good.
Comment by MatGB | September 23, 2006