FlyWEB's

I am back everybody

It is a real drag seeing my traffic plummit after a period of absence due to pneumonia. Ah well I am back that’s what’s important. I really missed scribbling up my ponderings here. So let’s get to it.

My new WordPress theme

I have been searching and testing so hard I almost (that’s the truth) forgot the first reason why I have this blog. And that is ofcourse writing stuff down. Shame, a real shame. Okay all over now. What do you think? Is this a usable theme? Is it okay to find your way in? I am real curious. I confess, got my inspiration from Veerle. She changed her styling only a month ago I think and it is gorgious as one commenter put it. Veerle is a professional designer from whom I learn a great deal. Mind you I still have to learn a lot. The thing that makes me drewl a bit at her site and quite a few others is the way they control Adobe Photoshop. Those sites are made with it. A real nice thing to look at.

Stuff I ran into…

Spam, spam and spam again. It is funny to ascertain the fact that as soon as you stop writing, and this is the case in my situation, that those guys start the attack. I don’t know why but I feel glad that I have a really good spam-filter to help me with. Ofcourse I am referring to Akismet. In this past month Akismet has caught 187 spam-comments. Unbelievable. Did you know that 83% of all blog comments is spam? I for sure didn’t. And they all (well nearly all) start with that sentence “probaly you should read this”. I find that intriguing. Were do those guys come from? What do they achieve by spamming? Is it a commercial reason? Or perhaps just a downright annoyance? From my previous websites I keep a (now closed) old guestbook. You know, the pre-blogging days ? Since I made an effort to get noticed on the web they (the spammers) found this guestbook a tasty bit to shoot at. Just idiotic. Dozens of spam I have deleted from this guestbook. Now I have locked the database for writing so they’ll stop I hope.

New stuff on the site

I have implemented, with some difficulty, gravatars by way of three steps. First you’ll have to get yourself a gravatar-picture. Secondly sign yourself up at Gravatar.com from Tom Werner. Thirdly a way to let your own gravatar, and those from other visitors on your site, show up. Tom Werner offers a simple and effective little script. But as always there are more advanced plugins available. First gravatar plugin to mention is the one from Skippy. It is a plugin with lots of possibilities through an admin panel. Secondly the one from Mark Jaquith. This one is quite a bit different. It allows you to extend your comments page with a direct sign-up feature.

That was my stuf after a period of silence. Rest assured, more to come. Ideas in my head tell me so. Bye.

Will this go any faster?

Slow is a pain in the …. So I had to get things faster. I am not praised for my patience so I need things fast. Posts, pages, scripts, all faster. Huh. Am I losing it? No, stuff, pc’s and so on must work with lightning speed. I am a dutchie, so in Holland we say “You paid for it so I want it”. How many transactions per nano-/millisecond? Millions, trillions? Don’t know. But WP is sooooo damned slow I had to crank it by hand almost. Found a solution. One who isn’t strong must be smart, ain’t that so! I found Owen Winkler through (who else) Lorelle. Owen had it. A twin-turbo to boot WP into sixth gear, I hope. Take advantage of it, use it, drive a Ferrari or a Beetle? Your choice.

Update:

Yes ladies and boys, it certainly is faster. Testdrive came out at 200mph. Not bad for WordPress version 2.01 hey? Let’s hear it for WordPress.

Filtering my XHTML code again

The past few days I have made the go ahead for myself to start with recoding everything to meet XHTML Strict 1.0 standards. Yes, it is quite a job to start with. But it gives such a feeling of satisfaction. This site was already up to the Transitional Standards so it wasn’t too painful a task.

Adjusting the html tags

The main issues I had to deal with were the link tags. It is forbidden to use the oh so loved “target” attribute so that had to go. At first I was fiddling with inline javascripting but that was too intense. Had to let that one go. Until I stumbled on this from the people at Sitepoint. A very nice javascript that could be used from a remote file. In the head of the page I had to call it using <script src=". Benefit is that is was there whenever, i.e. always. Secondly I had to activate the script using the onload event in the body tag. No problem whatsoever. The script does something very nice (browser independent) with the DOM. It calls a XHTML 1.0-valid attribute, which you must provide in your links, called the “rel” (relationship) attribute. Then it transforms this to the deprecated attribute “target” again but only in the background, it will not be parsed to the browser. Hence it’s validity! A few tweaks in the WordPress coding and presto. No more cumbersome extra typing those target attribs. It’s now a part of WP, voila Ofcourse the ‘target’ deprecation is only one of many. I had to go at a load more others to get validated. You can read all of the differences at the W3C site itself to learn more about XHTML Strict 1.0 a very informative piece. Something else for a change at W3C I think

WordPress tweaks for the ‘external’ links

Again it is “Quicktags” time…Just add this code in your /wp-includes/js/quicktags.js file:

edButtons[i].tagStart = ‘<a rel="\external\" title="\External link\" href="’
+ URL + ‘">’;

But hey, how about my ‘blogroll’ list:?: There are external links there aswell. How do we modify those:?: For they are only accessible by means of the WordPress Admin sections. Not a problem. In your /wp-includes directory open the file ‘links.php’. Look for this line:

$output .= ‘<a href="’ . $the_link . ‘"’ . $rel . $title . $target. ‘>’;

at line number 243. Then modify it as follows:

$output .= ‘<a rel="external" href="’ . $the_link . ‘"’ . $title . $target.’>’;

Notice the addition of rel="external". That is the trick. All the links in the blogroll added by you in the WP-admin will now have the extra ‘rel’ attribute in them. Again, be very carefull what you do. Make backups first then go and edit.

Some pointers to get your Strict way

• Lorelle VanFossen has made it a shear quest to tell you all there is for making webpages, valid, accessible and just plain accurate. Go and have a look there. Her posts maybe quite lenghty but persisting in reading them makes one a whole lot wiser.
• Start simple. In making all the changes from, let’s say HTML 3. something to XHTML Strict might be quite a step to make. Maybe first going to HTML 4.01, then XHTML Transitional is better.

One site you will see a LOT is ofcourse this. . . . the VALIDATOR. The hyperlink I just mentioned states /referer, that is your URL or URI or plain and simple your website’s address, i.e. “http://www.yoursite.com”. Use it well, it is a real live saver. Happy coding . . .