Category: Blog News

I just realised that I am avoiding my own website, because I don’t like the looks anymore.

I’m actually sick and tired of the red in the Anaconda theme I used, and heartely fed up with the whole kaboodle around to. You can’t really customise it easely, so I am going to change theme. There are some nice features in it, but it is time to move on.

The latest theme I’m trying is the Fluid theme, made by Kaushal Sheth. I think it’s much more readable now, the font seems bigger, the layout better spaced.

Some things that need improvement :

• One thing that happened is that my sidebars have switched around, so sidebar 1 shows up on the right and vice versa. No big deal.
• In FireFox, the menu bar on top is not completely visible, the pages don’t all show or only part of them… that will need to be fixed. In IE6 it shows up better, but still not correctly – the ‘second’ pages are shown, not the ‘first’ pages.
• Both in IE and Firefox the posted comments appear in a ridiculously small font that is totally unreadable. I’ve already tried editing the comments section in the style.css file, but to no avail.
• I don’t know if it’s the MCE editor or not, but paragraphes are all put together, no empty lines between them. Annoying. Switching to another solved this, so I guess it’s the theme.

Some things I’ve already changed :

1. Personal Header image
   You can put your own header image by editing the style.css file and going to the #hdr section. You can then replace the current hdrgrn.jpg with a jpg file of your own choosing.
   Remember : jpg file must be 200 pixels max in height. And if you don’t want it to repeat, on the same line change “repeat-x” to “no-repeat”. As for the background color, I changed it to black

   #hdr {
   padding: 0;
   width: 100%;
   background: url(images/personalheader.jpg) no-repeat 0 bottom #000000;
   height: 200px;
   }

I’ve just activated a new feature in Akismet 2.0 (the version that comes with WordPress 2.1) : it auto-deletes comment spam that is made to posts that are older than a month.

Where before I regularly had to clean out my akismet spam folder with a couple of hundred entries, I now only see the spam for the last month or so.

Surprisingly few spammers (for now) actually post to comments newer than one month  – perhaps because it is automated spam ?

Anyway, less spam for me to wade through… Akismet is good !

Just to let you know I upgraded to WP 2.1 late last night. Some interruptions / changes to themes might be possible in the coming days as I re-activate my plugins one by one.

The upgrade itself went very well. There are heaps of bug fixes and lots of new functionality, especially in the admin section there is supposedly more ajaxy goodness (I haven’t encountered it yet).

With the upgrade to the latest version of WordPress, I’m also thinking about going for another theme – the feedback from the team behind the anaconda theme is lackluster, their bulletin board-style forum is was riddled with spam and there is not much progress beyond them promising a new theme soon. Also, it bothers me that they want to make some money out of it, when their theme seems to be assembled from other, freely available themes that are GPL…

Besides, WP 2.1 delivers more possibilities for theme design, including a flexible header image upload. This is something I’ve wanted from the very beginning, and which I think is sorely missing in WordPress – setting up your header that differentiates your site from the other blogs should be as easy as possible.

Maybe I’ll check out this Mollio-based theme, which seems similar and comes in a variety of columns. This looks suspiciously like the anaconda theme. I wonder who borrowed from who or is this the default mollio look…

January 17 has come and gone, and Tom is now officially 5 years old. We had a very good time, Saturday we had a family party, and Sunday a kids party with children from the class from Tom.

A good time was had by all, and I am still sore from getting ‘chiropractored’ by them… but so much fun !

Gelukkige verjaardag mateken. We zien u supergraag.

This is a bit ridiculous.

The Belgian French speaking newspapers (united in CopiePresse but don’t bother clicking as the site is still under construction) are so fearfull that their content will be stolen that they have attacked first Google and now Yahoo of linking and especially caching to their content. Simply put, they want no deep links (links to articles inside the website, nor caching of the published information).

The newspapers united are dhnet.be – grenzecho.be – lacapitale.be – lalibre.be – lameuse.be – lanouvellegazette.be – laprovince.be – lecho.be – lequotidiendenamur.be – lesoir.be – pressbanking.com – votrejournal.be

The scheme they use to try and make money of course is the problem : first they publish the information for free, but if you want to access it later on, you’re required to pay up.

Of course, they can use the robot.txt file to indicate what they want the search robots to look into and what not. But that is something too simple…
So far, I have never used any newspaper archive service to look things up, mainly because it goes against my feeling of justness to pay for something that was published ‘free’ first of all.

I wonder how people are even going to know those previous articles exist on those sites if the major link and search sites are not allowed to index them.

Flemish Links : ComputerWorld The Inquirer

Listening to this music I sometimes remember what it was that drew me to music.

… I used to live alone before I knew ya…

Yeah.

Hah – found it !

When the browser window is too small, and if you moved your title around in your header, sometimes the search bar will overlap above your title or your image where you don’t want it to be – not very nice. I found out how to change it though…

Just a quick reminder to myself what I did to move the search bar below.

In the Anaconda style.css file (found in /themes/anaconda ) – go to the section called /* FORMS */ and just below that you can see the subsection /* FORMS – general classes */.
After that is the /* SEARCH */ line – below this line is the line that you need to change.

In my style.css file, this is line 675.

/* SEARCH */
.sb-search {color:#fff;font-weight:bold;position:absolute;top:60px;right:20px;left:auto;width:18em;}

By changing the values for ‘top’ and ‘right’ you can move the searchbar down and more to the left or to the right. Top was originally set to 10px and right was set to 30px.

Now if I can only find out where I need to change all the color settings… I really want to get away from the “redness” of this theme.

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from all of us to all of you !

Alex, Dolores, Tom and Sam.

xdgspr

A mate of mine has been going all over under and around New Zealand this last year. From time to time he receives visitors from Europe.

Above is a link to some of the pictures one of those visitors made…

His own flickr account shows lots more