FlyWEB's

No not Asynchronous Javascript eXtensions. Last friday I went to a trainings-exercise of the proud of Amsterdam. The AJAX soccerteam. The school organised it, it was great. Once an acclaimed soccer club. Today still in the top regions of dutch soccer but not as gr8 as it used tobe.

I have uploaded my newest Flickr photos.
Two new sets actually:

• Vlissingen
• Tim

Thought you’d like to know

Mood changes

As you can see I made another change. Again You might say I am a bit restless. True. It is the fun of it. Really. The default Kubrick is just so perfect but. . . lacks some hype and further possiblities I thought. So obvious one should have a look at . . . right!, K2 by again that same Michael Heilemann, amongst many others who help out. Further readings and sightings can be observed here:

• Official K2 docu-site.
• Flickr has it’s own K2/Binarybonsai Pool.
• Colin built himself a true K2 home with lots of useful info about modding K2 and optimizing the theme.
• Matthew Stinson wrote some interesting tutorials about K2 adaptations.

So why K2?

It’s state of the art. What is? Primarily AJAX functionality. Livecomments, watch your comments been added real-time, no refreshing of the page you were reading. Amazing. Hitting enter after you’ve typed in a search, no more. As you type in your keyword(s) watch the main content on the left be changed realtime with the results. Cool. Behind the scenes, AJAX aswell. In the admin section of your WordPress blog K2 has made it super simple for everyone. Adding custom header images, on the fly. Changing blocks in your sidebar, on the fly, dragging and dropping, realtime changes. Wow. Options, options galore.

Rest ‘n peace?

Dunno. It’s something duallistic within me. One side says “knock it off”, get some sleep. The other is already thinking about more and more possibilities. It is a mental illness for sure .

K2 theme

Credits go to Th3 Prophetman. He made the fine K2-style ‘Blue-K2‘. The style from which I modded mine. Actually I only added Blue-K2’s header, footer and background images. The rest is 100% pure K2 native. Well almost. Many thanks go to the Th3 Prophetman. All in all Flyweb’s look is a bit like Kubrick-classic don’t you think? Precisely, that’s what I wanted in the first place.

Switch

Okay I made a decision. Let’s go back to basics. After spending much time in trying all sorts of themes I switched to the default WordPress theme Kubrick by Michael Heilemann. The themes I have tried out so far:

• Emire from Phu Ly
• Glued-Ideas Subtle from Christopher Frazier
• Hemingway from Kyle Neath
• Regulus from Ben Gillbanks

To name just the ones I enjoyed quite a bit. Another theme that caught my attention for it’s nice layout and use of AJAX snippets is ‘Lush’ from Marco van Hylckama Vlieg and Christoph Boecken. I haven’t decided yet for it has some limitations on the way it’ll render on FireFox.

So why the change to Kubrick?

Well I was a bit bored. It clearly seems that the more a theme offers in colors, layout, useability the faster it bored me. Anyway that’s one explanation. Another might be that I am still charmed by the raw simplicity that Kubrick offers. It’s almost like this theme is the foundation of all blog-themes. And maybe it is. Offcourse I adjusted one thingy or two. To name a few modifications I have made:

• Added LiveSearch AJAX powered search, instead of the default/conventional search method, by John Nunemaker.
• Altered the rather dull <h2> font family by a more stylish one, Century Gothic. I like it’s typography more.
• Added a more efficient way to navigate my blog by use of Liew Cheon Fong’s ‘SuperNav-bar’.

The plugins I use

• Taragana’s Del.icio.us mp3 Player. Which you can see in action here.
• WP Lightbox 2 and Falbum mashup by Lokesh Dhakar and Elijah Cornell respectively and Adrian (a.k.a. GrinGod) responsible for the mashup.
• Ultimate Tag Warrior by Christine Davis.
• Viper’s Video QuickTags by Viper007bond.
• The Excerpt Reloaded by Kaf Oseo
• WP-PageNavi by GaMerZ
• SEM Recent Comments and Recent Posts by Denis de Bernardy
• Anti Spam Image by Krazy Nio
• DD Formmailer by Aleister
• FlickrRSS by Dave Kellam
• Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith and Jennifer (ScriptyGoddess)
• Related Posts by Alexander Malov & Mike Lu
• AdSense DeLuxe by Acme Technologies
• Gravatars by Scott Merrill a.k.a. ‘Skippy’.
• InlineRSS by Cal Demaine. In action here.
• Exec-PHP by Sören Weber

And a few more I didn’t mention because it’s use isn’t visible on the blog but in the admin section.

Another nice feature I discovered was the Kubrick-Headermaker a.k.a. “Kubrickr” by Owen Winkler at RedAlt. You really should try it out. I realize that this might be old information but I was glad I found it. Result…look at the header image. Like it?

Conclusion

I am defnitely going to change again. I just love the work in getting a theme modded to my likings and making it XHTML Strict 1.0.

Wishes for Kubrick

I am still very interested in more AJAX control. This site is powered with the Script.aculo.us scripts. But other, maybe lighter/easier script suites are waiting like Moo.FX. And even maybe Ruby on Rails stuff. I have a lot todo. But to stick with Script.aculo.us seems difficult because of its bugs. In certain situations IE and FF crash because of Script.aculo.us. That’s a pitty.

Internet Explorer Features

A nice new feature of IE7 I noticed last week: ClearType is now a browser-specific feature.

When Windows XP was released in 2001, Microsoft launched ClearType as a way of smoothing on-screen fonts. Great, except for some reason, it was off by default. Most users never found the setting to enable it, so for the past 5 years, we’ve still had to assume users are seeing ugly pixellated fonts on the web.
But Vista aside, even in the forthcoming IE7 for XP, ClearType is a browser-specific setting and it’s enabled by default. Combine this with IE7’s presumed quick march onto user’s systems, and we’re going to see a whole lot of ClearType in the near future.

Nicely done, IE team.