Archive for the ‘Meta’ Category

New, extremely minimalist redesign

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I’ve been working for a while on a single consistent theme and templating system for the entire website. A few months ago I finished everything but the blog (which was using the ClockWorkAir theme), because, being powered by Wordpress, I wasn’t familiar with the theme system.

Anyways, I’ve finally implemented the new, extremely minimalist design everywhere. The plugin Theme Switch helped a bunch, because it allowed me to preview what I was working on without the general public seeing it. WordPress itself was a pain though, because I’m used to coding by hand and not using any kind of framework to generate HTML. I ended up doing some pretty silly things. For example, I first started by trying to get WordPress to simply call my custom templating files for the rest of the site. Following the logic of my system I did things like:

$title = wp_title();
//...
require('head.php'); //My custom templating system

Whenever I loaded the page there was a mysterious “Nomulous Blog” at the very top of my HTML source. This confused me at first, but I soon realized that (not having been designed to be processed, only displayed) the wp_title() function printed a value instead of returning one.

In the end I just went to my home page, copied most of the source, and modified the default WordPress theme to use that instead. Aha!

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Added Disqus, ShareThis, and Google Adsense

Thursday, October 22nd, 2009

I have added three new features to the blog; the Disqus comments system , the ShareThis social media button, and Google AdSense advertisements.

Disqus because it looks awesome and has a trillion more features than regular old WordPress comments, like signing in through Twitter/Facebook/OpenID, great comment approval and flagging, and Gravatar icons. At first the admin page was giving me a blank grey screen, but I looked at my error logs and it turned out that for some reason disqus.php couldn’t find the admin-header.php file when it require()’d it. I just edited the plugin and replaced line 370 with the actual path to the file on my server.

ShareThis was added because Reddit is the best and I want to be a part of it. And I’m an internet whore and I want to be paid attention to. I might eventually write my own version of this, because it’s a bit clunky and not customizable enough.

I added the AdSense block just as an experiment, I don’t actually plan on monetizing anything. I really just want to see how the system works and all that. It looks like I’ve already made about $0.47!

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Now in Helvetica Neue Light

Tuesday, October 6th, 2009

Articles and links in the sidebar have been upgraded to my official favourite font, Helvetica Neue Light. It’s pretty easy to do, but hard to figure out on your own. After searching for a while and experimenting on my own, I came up with the following CSS.

font-family: "HelveticaNeue-Light", "Helvetica Neue Light", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
font-weight: 300;

Some browsers (IE + the older ones) use fonts based on their family name and their style, that is “Helvetica Neue Light”. Others use the PostScript name, under the Adobe spec, e.g. “HelveticaNeue-Light”. Others still, such as the latest versions of Safari, Firefox, and Chrome, conform to the W3C specification when it comes to fonts and their styles, and take only the Family Name. The W3C dictates that you must use other CSS directives to get “light” or “bold” fonts. In this case the “Helvetica Neue”, along with the “font-weight: 300;”, will display Helvetica Neue Light to the user.

Arial is included for the sake of the poor Windows users out there, who have to use the font Microsoft put on their computer because they were to cheap to pay for Helvetica, despite it being one of the oldest and most widely used fonts in the world. As any typography nerd would know, Arial was a total rip off of Helvetica and should never be used.

There you have it. Mac users get to look at Helvetica Neue Light, while Windows users still get crappy old Arial.

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That was a Technorati verification post.

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Apparently I should be in this great blogging database, Technorati, which actually kind of sucks because it forces you to make a post in order to verify that you own the blog. Now I have a random post with a few letters in it that might have been picked up by god knows how many RSS readers and what not. Why can’t they just let me put an HTML file somewhere or something easy and subtle like that? Maybe cause Google did it first? Fuck, I don’t wanna have to make a friggin’ post to verify that I own the blog. A lot of blogs even let people post who don’t own them. So what the hell is the advantage to that? Damn you, Technorati. </rant>

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Hello, world!

Tuesday, June 9th, 2009

First.

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