Seph Lietz

I have nearly finished my first WordPress theme, A Novus Vita, and have decided to go ahead an apply it to this site while the finishing touches are being made. I should be completely done tweaking it (yeah right) within the next week or so. I am trying not to use any plugins, or at least as few as possible, so that might slow things down a bit. I would still like to add some JavaScript fanciness here and there and the CSS isn’t completely done yet.

Technically, this is my second theme, but the first one heavily borrowed from the default WordPress theme. Really it was more of a hack job on the original theme. This time, however, I started completely from scratch with nothing but an empty directory and the loop to guide me.

Here is a screen capture for future reference.

It is really a pretty basic theme and very clean I think, with not a lot of overwhelming color, or annoying borders to get in the way of reading. I tried to use blank space as the separator between text. Overall, the process has been a pretty enjoyable experience and I have learned some valuable lessons too.

Structure First, Style Second

The best thing was that for the first time I completely built the XHTML template before adding any CSS. Without question, it was worth it. I will never look back and do it the other way again, intermingling the structure and style stages, flipping back and forth, back and forth.

Coding to standards is easy, catering to browsers is not

I completely ignored that fact that all browsers are not created equal with this theme. I use Firefox most of the time, and since I am my number one user, that is what I built for. Actually, it is more accurate to say that I designed the theme for compatibility with web standards, and Firefox just happens to agree with that approach. The theme is slightly crippled in Internet Explorer 7 and is severely mangled in anything before that. Actually, in Internet Explorer 6, this text is flat out unreadable. The point is that this is a conscious decision on my part to not fix it.

It’s not quite on par with Upstate New York’s recent snow amounts, but here in Central Illinois we are officially snowed in. No classes today or tomorrow as the University of Illinois has been shut down for due to blizzard conditions, which is rare to say the least.

The Weather Channel is reporting about 12 inches here in Champaign-Urbana. They obviously didn’t take that measurement outside my front door.

That’s not going to be fun to shovel tomorrow.

Murphy’s Law has been shown true time after time this basketball season for the Illini. That is, except for last night. The Illini finally got some breaks and thus their first win against a ranked opponent of this season by beating Indiana 51-43 at the Assembly Hall in Champaign. It wasn’t pretty, but it was enjoyable.

Bruce Weber 1, Kelvin Sampson 0 (excluding the signing/stealing of Eric Gordon )

And I for one welcome our new social bookmarking service overlords.

There’s a nice WordPress Plugin out there being developed by Alex King (original WordPress contributor) called Share This.

The Plugin is itself part of a larger goal which is detailed on the Share Icon Project page. Long story short, the Share Icon Project aims to replace (at least) 30-some social bookmarking icons with one unifying icon, and in turn do its part to alleviate “icon overload”, as it has been termed. As Mr. King himself puts it, the goal is

An icon to represent the generic action of sharing a web page. This could mean adding the page to a social bookmarking site or memetracker, e-mailing the page to someone, etc.

The current icon follows the design theme of the popular RSS and OPML icons.

You can see version 1.3 of Share This in action on this site. Click on the Share This link at the bottom of any post to do just that. Check out Share Icon Project to find out how you can contribute.

My ISP is notoriously slow to fix almost every outage, with down-times ranging from a few hours to a couple of days. It’s not as though I live in the middle of nowhere, thus I have a hard time understanding why it takes so long to get fixed. Sigh.

So, I decided to write a little application that would automatically track my down-time, since I’m never exactly sure when I lose and gain access. I’m still in the early stages, but I’ve got a working version.

It’s really simple to use. Just open it up in a web browser (IE and FF work, at least) and let it sit there. Every five minutes your browser will, effectively, ping my server, requesting the server’s current time and your IP address.

A little bit of JavaScript and PHP run the thing, and it’s very lightweight, so it shouldn’t effect performance much even if left running all the time, which I intend to do. I want some evidence next time my connection goes down. Not that it will matter, but at least I’ll feel better about it.

Here is how its done, as of now at least.

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