What to remember when making a WP theme April 29, 2008

Some categories: Uncategorized. Some tags: . And exactly 4 rambling responses.

I’ve created many many WordPress themes during my times on the internet. I create them because I have old unused templates, and sometimes specifically to gain popularity (like everyone else I claim it’s “for the community” though). However, I always miss something. In particular, there are three things I missed on this blog. Anyway, here’s a list I threw together:

  1. Archives pages & category pages. It’s just too easy to create an index.php to fit all of these, but customized pages make a theme more developed and interesting, experimenting with layout on each page always helps too - this is one of the things I missed here, and still haven’t finished (working on it)
  2. Comments. So easy to forget or neglect. I completely forgot to add them here, linked to the comments, but with no way to add a comment ><. It’s one of the things which most themers will leave till last, and possibly forget. And not only should you include them, they have to be nicely styled too (mine aren’t - yet)
  3. Feed link. As you can see in my navigation, the feed ling is simply text. This is because I forgot to add it until today, oops! The benefits of having a feed are numerous, and not allowing visitors to view your feed is simply stupid. Personally, I don’t use feeds, and I’m sure quite a few people don’t, but that link is oh-so important. A real image link shall be arriving here soon.
  4. Archives themselves. Every blog needs an actual archives page, again, something I forgot to add here. In a rush to finish, I didn’t bother, and this lazy attitude has meant I still haven’t bothered. Much like the feed link, an archives page is taken for granted, and it’s a requirement.

I hope the list is helpful, and I’m sorry about the lack of updates, I fried my Windows machine and I’m stuck on a laptop, and all my precious internet time is taken planning a new dos rig.

p.s: Pointless Ramblings now works in IE7 and Firefox, for all those who care…

I give up on gmail April 23, 2008

Some categories: ranting & raving. Some tags: , , , . And exactly no rambling responses.

I’ve had enough of gmail. Sure, the interface is nice, and sure, it’s (almost) guaranteed to be online for my email. Although, since I route a lot of mail through the server, that doesn’t really have an effect (although I use pointlessrambler@gmail.com for emergancies). Anyway, why give up gmail!? Well, I’ll explain:

  1. Slow, gmail got really slow recently; and, although the speed has picked up a bit, it’s still pretty slow at times
  2. SPAM, the filter used to be my blessing, it always used to catch everything, thousands of messages a day. And it’s still doing it, but not enough. For some reason, google have failed to block out the clever backscatter method of spam. So now, I’m getting about a hundred (give or take) spam emails a day, how annoying
  3. Reliable (but then again, so is our server)

OK, so what do I plan to move to and how would I go about doing it? Well, hopefully within the next week (probably this weekend), I’m going to set gmail to forward all mail to nick at kerplunc dot com, but also keep its own copy (security & such), then, instead of having the server route mail to my gmail account (in which case it would just sit being emailed all around the accounts), I will store mail on our server. Take control of my own mail and it’s storage. All I need to do is install the wonderful RoundCube on cPanel so it’s our default webmail client. Lastly I will need to go through the latest gmail and finish tasks etc… Advantages?

  1. Mail is stored in two places, google and this server. What happens if our hard drive fails? Google has millions of drives, what would happen if one of those failed, and it happened to be our emails? But with the mail in two places, it makes a crash so very unlikely
  2. I take control, the main email control is within our server, I choose everything
  3. It’s a whole load faster than gmail :)

So there we have it, why I’ve given up on good ol’ gmail.

CSS galleries don’t = popularity April 20, 2008

Some categories: ranting & raving. Some tags: , , , , . And exactly 2 rambling responses.

Of course, like any deisgner happy with their work, I submitted this new design to a long list of galleries. What happens? Well, the same as always, loads of hits on the first few days, then almost halving daily until a return to the same old low hits this blog recieves (~10-30 unique/day). Still, I don’t care, the aim of this blog isn’t to have a huge visitor base regularly commenting on articles, it’s to express all the pointless rubbish I think off :)

Why del.icio.us sucks April 16, 2008

Some categories: ranting & raving. Some tags: , , . And exactly no rambling responses.

Yup, time for a nice little rant on something thats been annoying me a whole lot for a long time. So, del.icio.us, that wonderful service where we can all dump our links in a huge list for us to share and access anywhere on the web. Hold on, did I say access? I think I may have got my words mixed up there. What I really mean is we can look at our links, in a totally non-accessable way.

A huge list of links in no apparent order is not useful or productive. Neither are tags. When I save a link, I want to stick it in a lovely folder or category, only one. Then I want to look at a page where links are separated by category, not in a great big splurge. The option of the splurge would be nice when I’m feeling like just going through random links, but normally I don’t have time for that. I want to look at a list of folders/categories, pick the target one and find my link, simple and effective.

Not only is the organization a mess, the whole social thing too, whats up with that? Stumbleupon and Digg are for that. Linkrolls too. Now, this is where del.icio.us is useful. It’s not so much a bookmarking tool as it is a linkroll tool.

Perhaps I am the problem, and I’m using del.icio.us for the wrong thing? I want a service to store my bookmarks everywhere, and if it lists everything in one long line as an option, thats very nice, but less important. I actually did a quick mockup of a design which might suit the category/folder layout, view it here. Ignore the top bar about a ‘Kerplunc’ service, because it’s not… yet. It’s really a personal project, but I’m going to tie it in with Kerplunc’s new application framework, just in case anyone else wants something similar. If you really like it or want to make a suggestion, go ahead and comment :)

I’m a bad blogger April 14, 2008

Some categories: news. Some tags: . And exactly no rambling responses.

I really am quite terrible, where are the posts & updates?! I guess I could moan about being busy, but thats pathetic. Normal rambling rubbish shall return soon!