In a mirror, dimly

As I scroll back through the various incarnations of my theme (and look at what I liked about interim themes such as “Vista”) I have to conclude that there are design decisions that remain constant:

• Rounded corners
• Purple shaded “brushed metal” texture and white content area
• Right-hand sidebar
• Fixed-width and floating
• Dark grey background
• Content-area fully enclosed, containing posts and sidebar

Version 8 added a few more details:

• Stronger emphasis on pages with “page navigation” at the head of the sidebar
• Stronger emphasis on pages with tabs at top of the template
• “Search” properly integrated into the template
• Categories finally in a decent place
• More emphasis on syndication - allowing for a “podcast” audio blog link in the future

Version 8 was far from perfect though. “Vista” is far more concise - combining navigation, syndication and search into a single menu bar - where version 8 of my own theme separated the tabs into their own space. I like the real-estate gains by combining things.

I am running 4 plugins:

• Akismet
  The standard anti-spam plugin. Never be seen without it!
• Celtx CSS
  I participated in Script Frenzy a while ago. The goal was to write an entire movie screenplay in a month. The formatting of a screenplay is really specific and the free Celtx tool handled everything. I created the Celtx CSS to maintain the formatting of the screenplay when it’s posted to a Wordpress blog.
• Dimly Archive Table
  Three columns, broken down by year and month. It’s a layout I’ve not seen anywhere else, and one I have used for years now. This plugin exposes a standard Wordpress widget that plays nice with modern Wordpress sidebars.
• WP-dTree
  I’ve played with about a dozen different page navigation widgets and WP-dTree is by far the best of them. The continued emphasis on pages on my site means that this will need to be a standard feature in themes to come.

The downfall of the current (interim) “Vista” theme is the dual right-hand sidebars. They don’t leave enough space for the blog content. I got rid of dual sidebars in version 3 of the site! Going to a single sidebar will give WP-dTree more space to expand the tree nodes too.

Version 8 didn’t give enough definition of where posts start and stop and while Vista is better, it suffers the same problem. Version 6 (on the other hand) was a little heavy-handed in that regard. What has remained constant is the title and timestamp of posts remains at the top of the post, with version 8’s emphasis on the title being a good design decision. The purple “smudge” doesn’t give enough definition to the top of a post.

I like the idea of conditional sidebars too. There’s no reason to have Archives and categories when you’re reading the various pieces of writing. A single “home” link on the navigation bar is enough to break back to the timed blog entries again.

I feel somehow dirty. See, I really dislike Alanis Morissette and will leave the room if her music is playing. It was “hate at first sight” - she appeared on the Jools Holland show back in 1995 performing “You oughta know” - I remarked at the time that she sounded like an angst-ridden little harpy. I’ve not really changed my mind since. You can imagine the reaction, then, when I was writing the “about” tagline for the blog and I thought “Im a geek and believer …” and some song lyrics came to mind:

I’m a bitch I’m a lover
I’m a child I’m a mother
I’m a sinner I’m a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I’m your hell I’m your dream
I’m nothin’ in between
You know, you wouldn’t want it any other way

The song appeared, fully formed with full backing, and her voice attached. The words rearranged themselves

I’m a geek and believer
I’m a ‘limey’ I’m a husband
I’m a sinner, I’m a saint
I do not feel ashamed
I’m a writer and I’ll dream
I’m nothin’ in between
You know, you wouldn’t want it any other way

I filked an Alanis song? Ewww.

I am fed up to the back teeth of the way my theme here wont “stick”.  Something isn’t right.  In fact I will go so far as to say that something here is seriously messed up.  I just have no clue what.  If you were browsing my site around 1:30pm today you will have probably seen the effects of my drastic maintenance.  I killed it.  The entire thing.  Stone dead, drop the database tables, never even existed … dead.  Got the latest Wordpress and installed it, and then re-imported the posts, comments and what-have-you.  Let’s see if that cures things!

All of my fiction writing projects now have a “book cover” or “movie poster” and the fiction page on the site has had a make-over. In the process I reijigged some of the URLs. Apologies if that means some bookmarks are now broken.

I used the fabulous Celtx screenwriting software to participate in “Script Frenzy” last year. I also used it to write an original screenplay for a writing group that I’m part of. It takes a little work but it is actually possible to post the output from the application directly on a website like this. I’ll post step-by-step instructions later but suffice it to say, it means editing your site’s CSS to add screenplay related details, installing a Wordpress plugin and then some copy + paste effort for each screenplay you want to self-publish. Easy really.

For some strange reason the theme on In a mirror, dimly keeps reverting back to the “Default” one. One fix I saw was to put a copy of the correct (”mirror-dimly”) theme into the “Default” directory, but that’s missing the point. The question that should be asked is “why is my theme reverting in the first place?”

Seems that if Wordpress runs into errors in the theme, it will revert. Helpful but not so helpful as to pinpoint where the problem is. It’s like one of the testers in work who pokes the software and sends us bug reports saying “it’s broken”.

Yeah. About that.

[edit - June 10th]

Having worked through the plugins, and scanned the Apache error logs, I still find the theme misbehaving. Grrr. The only up-side to this is that the nifty plugins I had in my sidebar probably can return as I go looking for a large spade and begin digging deeply into the theme code. *sigh*

I started another blog, and podcast last November and you can certainly tell! It’s now JUNE and I am finally getting around to finishing the blog redesign. Its wholly updated compared to the previous version but carries through several key design elements:

• Rounded corners
• Purple shaded “brushed metal” texture
• Right-hand sidebar
• Fixed-width and floating
• Dark grey background
• Content-area fully enclosed, containing posts and sidebar

The new theme adds some elements too:

• Stronger emphasis on pages with “page navigation” at the head of the sidebar
• Stronger emphasis on pages with tabs at top of the template
• “Search” properly integrated into the template
• Categories finally in a decent place
• More emphasis on syndication - allowing for a “podcast” audio blog link

In the process of creating the theme, I also created several widgets to give me features I was looking for:

• Detailed “recent posts” box in sidebar.
• Modified and “widget-ized” the collapsing-page-menu plugin.
• Compact year/month archive listing.

All of which will be released in due course. Note: I’ve attempted to contact the original “collapsing page menu” author but there’s been no response. If nothing comes of the request I might see about aquiring ownership of the plugin as it’s jolly useful!

I am famous for starting projects and not finishing them. Its a male thing I suppose. In my case the remains of these 1/2 finished projects litter the hard-drive of my computer in the form of Wordpress themes, PhpBB themes, Wordpress plugins, Java projects and the like. Well, no more. I finished something! I released it and at the time of this post, there have been over 80 downloads so far.

The Wordpress theme “Henge” was released at the weekend. It was a statement on what I feel about the phenomenon of “sponsored links”, monetized blogs, search engine optimization and all of the rest of the “commercialized blogging” world. Specifically, it’s released under a Creative Commons “Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported” license that allows non-commercial use only, with the provision of freely sharing and hacking the theme to your heart’s content.

This is only the first such theme. I have others in the pipeline. Also coming are a couple of plugins (actually, sidebar widgets) that will be similarly for non-commerical use only.

This just puts me in mind of a scene from “The Mummy” where Evelyn translates a section of hieroglyphs and exclaims “take that Benbridge Scholars!” - releasing the software was my own “take that, sponsored link spammers!”

If it wasn’t already obvious, the site has undergone a major overhaul! The old template was looking a little long-in-the-tooth and I decided it was time for a change. I also wanted to improve the consistency of the look and feel for non-blog pages.

This blog has been managed since its very inception using Blogger.com and I’ve looked at several blog / content management systems over the years. My goal was to (eventually) host the blog, its comments, polls and a discussion forum using a system that I’d written. Until that time, I’ve finally settled on using Wordpress as both blog and CMS for static content. Big changes indeed!

Old (Blogger) posts were imported and in the process I noticed that formatting has been approximated for a lot of them - custom PHP in the original has been stripped - so expect some of the previous 606 posts to look a little bare compared to their original incarnation. I dont plan on categorizing any of the old posts, but expect that in the future, I’ll make liberal use of both titles and categories that Blogger never used to support. While their new beta supports them, I want more control. I want my own data on my own server. Moving 606 posts out of Blogger was a pain in the ______ so I want the data where I can get to it for future moves to my own system!

Expect to see some Wordpress widgets and plugins promoted through this site too. Getting this site the way I wanted has taught me a lot about Wordpress and has forced me to create custom code for archives and how I handle the CMS side of managing pages for my writing. If you need a custom theme created, or Wordpress implemented, give me a call!