I would like to take a moment to just point out that I have improved a few things here at the big B.
- I have finally fixed the way you access the archives. Have a look at the time and date information for each of the entries. All date and time elements are now links that point to a place in the archives. Clicking the month for instance, will take you to the archive for that month. There are still some adjustments to be made, but overall I think it works fairly well.
- I moved the meta data section on the sidebar down to a new footer. It doesn’t work on the gallery pages yet, but then again, what’s new?
- I’ve updated the about page with various new tid-bits.
- I have cleaned up significant portions of my CSS, making it much easier for me to work with, though there’s a long way to go still. I’m hoping to merge my own CSS with that of the Kubrick template. Hopefully this week. I have gotten all your mails, don’t fret, I will send it to you as soon as there’s a new version to test.
- I have removed all the proprietary Mozilla CSS (the rounded corners). They were nice, but I want to set an example by moving away from proprietary code and staying on the straight and narrow standards path.
- I have switched a few form buttons from their styled form back to an unstyled form. I think that’s the way to go in terms of usability.
- I’ve added a contact form on the about page, and removed the other contact information. Following one of Dunstan’s new redesign ‘gimmicks’, your comment info will carry on over to the contact form. So if you’ve commented on the blog, you won’t have to worry about name and email info.
- The server is now catching 404 Not Found errors and redirecting them to a specific Binary Bonsai-styled page, that hopefully will help any people who get lost in the tangled wines of the web… Try it out.
- Added a small triangle in the header navigation, that shows you what part of the site you are currently in.
- I have changed a great deal of the internal structure and composition of the pages, allowing me to be much more precise in my CSS, which in turn allows me to for instance show you which part of the site you’re in, with a small triangle in the navigation. Entirely in CSS.
- The comments section is now much more intelligent, regarding whether there are any trackbacks (if there aren’t, why should you have to see redundant text?) or whether comments are turned off (and if they are, it’ll check to see if there are any comments, if not, it’ll just show a discrete “comments are off”). Also, I have cleaned up the comments section to make it easier to absorb the needed information.
- Hopefully you will never again see a simple “Information not present” message, but rather the 404 page, which is now also integrated into the blog itself.
- The Master Blog Archive is now operational, though I am waiting for a code snippet that’ll allow me to only show the current and last months.
- There are now only 2 main sizes for bread-text and two header sizes. This makes it infinitly easier for me to control the layout
Now, if only WordPress allowed me to delete a category and have all the entries in that category be moved to another category of choice, then maybe I could clean up the category mess.
You can do that I think, or at least when you delete a category it auto places all entires in that category into teh default one.
If you want to move say all your MAC ones into a TECH one but your default was GENERAL you could simply change default one to TECH then delete MAC and then reset GENERAL as your default.
If you wanted to seperate the entires into various different categories then I dunno :)
With a little database work, you can easily move all of the entries. All categories have a numeric ID. Create your new category, see what the ID is, and look for all entries within that category, and do a few little SQL cleanup bits.
Or maybe instead of removing it, you can make changes to the category itself in the database.
Nice tweaks. Looking over your profile, I must admit that I too am an on and off again Coke addict.
However, I had a total meltdown in the 90s when Coke and Pepsi released their clear versions.
Might wanna glance here.
Not sure if is what you need, but sounds like it may be usefull if other methods fail.
As far as Coke goes, I try quiting every time there is a 4 story pyramid of cans located somewhere in the room.
(gasp! everything isnt using the moz-border-radius anymore)
The category delete fuction within WP will automatically set all posts from within that category into the General category. You can tweak that function just slightly to move them to a specific directory. Otherwise, use that batch cat plugin.
Stew: Good point. In fact I had thought of that just before you wrote it :)
Mark: Yeah, I took the moz-border off of everything, in an attempt to once again move away from proprietary markup. I don’t really miss it that much…
I think if you move a category to be a subcategory of where you want to move the posts, then delete the subcategory, the posts should go to the parent category. I think. Don’t quote me on that.
Jeez Matt, if you don’t know – who does?
Nice subtle changes Michael – tweaking is fun!
Yeah Matt, if you don’t, who the hell would? ;)
I’ll try out your suggestion later today (don’t worry, I’ll backup first, thanks for the warning).
I had to think a bit about it before I used the rounded corners on my otherwise standards compliant blog.
But in the end, I decided that it was ok. CSS is designed to be forward compatible.
The CSS1 standard specifies proper behaviour for properties that are not understood.
This means that you can be sure that a CSS compliant browser wont choke on a property it does not understand.
Since the –moz-border-radius property does not affect functionality in any way and there is no danger in using it.
There is a CSS3 property that does the same thing, but no browsers support it yet.
Mozilla already has some CSS3 support (opacity and CSS3 selectors), so it can only be a matter of time before someone sticks the line of code into mozilla that changes –moz-border-radius to border-radius.
The only thing I don’t like about using it is that it makes me fail the CSS validator on w3c.org.
Yeah, that’s another reason I chose to take it out (validation). But I agree, it’s a very useful property, and I hope to see it in CSS at some point.
I looked and found the code that handles the –moz-border-radius property, and it looks pretty easy to make work with the CSS3 compliant property. I think I’ll take a look at doing that tonigt. I’ve been meaning to get involved in some mozilla hacking for a long time.
Michael, as I wrote: It’s already in CSS3. Which means it has existed for somewhere between 3 and 5 years.
Oh sorry, I misread. So, how do you plan on ‘making it work with CSS3’?
nice website… :)
Michael, I mean make the change in the mozilla code and submit a patch that will hopefully be accepted into the source tree.
It looks like I need to do a bit more programming that first anticipated, since the CSS3 property has a separate width and height of the corner radii. The –moz version uses same width and height for the corner radii, which makes it a quarter circle rather than a quarter ellipse.
Still, it’s not that complicated, and I think I’ll do it. It’ll be a patch with a bit more substance.
That’d be very nice indeed. Do you know what the average speed for the such patches to be integrated into the core is?
Michael: In reference to deleting categories; I had this problem before and just cooked up a quick and dirty way round which should work. Just goto WordPress’s admin screen and work out the new and old category ids in the category screen.
Fill in the relevant bits and bobs (username, password, the cat_ids and the database name) in this file: http://www.geoffreytang.com/catswitch.php and just point your browser to it. I think if nothing comes up on the screen it means everything went fine, only will it spit out an error if something goes wrong.
The categories should have been switched. You can now delete your empty category…. I think.
Please for the love of god back up!! And don’t sue me if it goes wrong, I have no money, nor am I likely to get any in the near future.
Ehm… just wanted to be clear… obviously download the file and stick it on your local web server before running it first =P.