[Categories: Site Announcements]
Dragged kicking and screaming to 2.3
If there’s one thing that derails a two-week daily blogging frenzy, it’s cross-browser CSS bugs. The reason why it’s taken so long for my WP 2.3 upgrade, apart from the lengthy persuasion that stemmed from a dialogue with Owen over the virtues of tags over nested category lists, is that I wanted a theme that’s compatible with this shiny new Wordpress back end. You’ll probably remember that I was a tad reluctant to change in the first place, but after converting the Reviews Archive and discovering the awesomeness of tags and being assured that the upgrade wouldn’t make the sky fall in, I took the plunge.
I have to say that tags are great, even though I’ve only just realised how handy they are in organising large numbers of posts (this blog is approaching the 300 mark if memory serves). I’ve stripped off all the ‘child’ categories, namely series titles, which has tidied up the category list no end. It keeps the names in one tag cloud too, which I’ll get around to styling properly later. What’s possibly the best thing of all is that the tags can be attached to pretty much any post…it was inevitable really that there are a number of posts tagged ‘Huerrgh!’. Obviously.
So yeah, it’s another Shinkai banner image which may or may not be swapped for…um, another Shinkai screencap probably. I’ve named theme itself, which runs on modified default Kubrik template files with a stylesheet that took me an entire weekend to code, To Here Knows When (sadly I doubt anyone would spot where the name comes from). I could have just modded an existing theme like I did last time but I really wanted something different so I’ve tried to keep the clean ‘freshy’ look but simplify the CSS a bit. There are one or two glitches still, such as the ‘#page’ div that doesn’t extend to the footer despite setting the footer to ‘clear: both’ and the the columns could do with a shadow gif to soften the edges or something but I’m pretty comfortable with how it’s turned out so far.
And yes, it still looks rubbish on IE (compared to FF anyway) and no, I don’t care if you have to scroll sideways when using 800×600. I’m in desparate need of sleep so don’t have the patience for people who won’t dig deep enough for a decent monitor. Expect the usual schedule to resume this week, mind, with some more ‘first impressions’, more Bokurano goodness and my first review for Kurau: Phantom Memory. BTW, thanks to the ABC for opinions and advice in getting this thing back online. You guys rule as always. ^_^ And to answer your question Marmot, this is a Jaffa cake. You obviously haven’t lived.
Posted on October 14th, 2007 @ 7:32 am
Just as planned. Not. Well. I’m glad you decided to make the jump — welcome aboard? Enjoy your hassle-free, 200% more efficient management system. Feel free to drop me a line/query/comment if you need me to recommend any plugins. Got quite a few I wouldn’t hesitate introducing.
Posted on October 14th, 2007 @ 9:56 am
“To here knows when?”
I knew that I knew that, but I had to look it up. Great song!
Posted on October 14th, 2007 @ 10:44 am
Tags would be great for the weekly round-up, but I’m just not ready for 2.3 yet! Seashore and I have just entered a fruitful relationship and I can’t jeopardise it now ;p
Oh yes, and no one should be using 800×600 anyway- my blog is now 950px in width and that’s the way it’s staying.
Posted on October 14th, 2007 @ 11:57 am
I still haven’t found a way to keep the #page div extending all the way to the footer but it’s all getting there. The tag cloud is growing nicely though, so thanks for all your kind words so far!
@Owen S: I’m after a decent archives plugin actually. There’s no rush though since the tags are proving to be such a help. I took you up on the font too, plus increasing the line height a bit to make things a bit more readable.
@Peter S: I am indeed impressed. ^_^ Great song, great album.
@Karura: Yeah, it would be a shame to mess up a new layout when you’ve only just got it all how you want it. With the amount of stuff that’s displayed on blogs these days, it’s not really a good idea to keep the width down below 800-900px unless you want everything to look squashed up. Most people seem to be on 1000×1024 these days anyway.
Posted on October 14th, 2007 @ 2:43 pm
Heh, in that case I’d recommend Extended Live Archives for all your archives needs. The fix needed for WP2.3 compatibility can be found here.
Glad to see you changed your font. There can never been enough Lucida Sans Unicode users out there. Win.
Posted on October 14th, 2007 @ 9:12 pm
@Owen: ELA does exactly what I was looking for! There’s still the occasional style hiccup here and there (that bloody footer) but nothing major wants doing now. I think I can now sit back, safe in the knowledge that the upgrade’s gone okay and take on my reviewing backlog, which is has reached a biblical scale. Phew.