A manual update

Seems my hosting provider doesn’t support WordPress doing automatic updates :-(. Luckily they have quite clear instructions for doing a manual update, but for some reason I almost managed to bork it about 3 times in a row. Either copy doesn’t work quite the same in the hosting service or doing it late at night after a strong cider and some mind bending studying is not a good idea.

In either case it is updated and everything still works.

A theme

Just patched the theme I use here. I can’t say it is a particularly pretty theme, but it is all mine. And now that I have this site set up again it is time to start actually getting things in order.

By the way, the theme is at GitHub.

A go at WordPress

I had a slightly aborted attempt at migrating this site to a WordPress installation a few months ago.

A theme was done and I tried doing an import of the contents, but somewhere along the way got sidetracked. I guess it is time to start again.

It took a little work, but I have recreated a local testing WordPress setup again and actually documented this time what I should do when setting up the real server. Basically it should be ready to go, if not exactly pretty. But in any case I think I’ll try doing an attempt at migration before installing anything to the real server.

Something else to consider is how to keep regular backups of the WordPress contents and database now that they will actually live on the server and not my local machine. WordPress does have a bit of a reputation for not surviving long on the net…

Another fix

Another fix for the fix.

Turns out that supporting the new AJAX based next/previous was too much of a pain to get working in old browers. So easiest thing is to have graceful fallback. New browsers get the AJAX with history updating. The old ones get just normal hyperlinks.

Forgot to mention that I have a GitHub account now too.

Fixed

IE10 is fixed correctly now.

I did a quick hack the other day that worked, but now the library I was using is fixed as well, so I can get rid of the hack.

I’m not happy with how the images rotate once the article becomes visible, but if I apply the rotation before the image is part of the page it doesn’t seem to stick. Either some jQuery weirdness or the browser allows the CSS to override the style attribute. I can’t imagine that is the case though. Either that or I don’t understand something important…

 

Green no more :-(

Seems I have been neglecting this site for a while and things broke. Well, actually the W3C now started validating meta tags and this CMS produces one that isn’t listed. Not a big problem in the scope of things I guess.

Anyway that started me thinking that I should probably migrate this whole thing to something like WordPress. Probably I will once I get my hosting upgraded and double check that they actually support it.

In the mean time I started playing with this site again. First thing was to fix up the JavaScript a bit. I also added the ability to go to next/previous articles inside one section. Done with a little AJAX magic and some history altering. Unfortunately it seems the wrapper library for history doesn’t actually work with IE10, so if you have upgraded already I apologize :-(. It isn’t actually needed at all in IE10 anyway since it natively supports HTML5 history. I’ll have to let the developer know…

Playing again

Changes are afoot.

You might notice things look a bit different around here. I did warn this would happen, it just took longer than I thought. I do suggest that you upgrade your browser to something modern though. The latest Google Chrome, Firefox4 Beta, or IE9 Beta improve things quite a lot.

Moving to HTML5

Since this site is partly to give me practice with web development I have updated the entire site to HTML5.

HTML5 is still a draft specification, but most browsers work with what I need and those that don’t (i.e. IE) can be fooled into doing so. That trickery does depend on JavaScript though, so if you have the combination of IE and disabled JavaScript you are probably screwed.

Anyway, some of the improvements to HTML5, apart from the most famous video and audio tags, are the semantic tags that give structure to a document. This structure allows computers in particular to identify parts of the page with greater precision and determine the relationships of content. If you want to learn more about this you should read the excellent Dive into HTML by Mark Pilgrim. In particular the chapter on the semantic changes was very useful.

There are probably a few broken styles here and there, but now that the structural conversion is done I will probably start modifying the look of the site. So don’t be surprised if it looks totally different next time.