Aug
17
2008
at 10:06am
Well, it’s finally here. After months of work my new design is ready for showtime. I don’t have time to say much about it right now. As with the A Padded Cell/the Webmaster Forums design this was a joint effort between Liam and myself.
I also upgraded my photo gallery from Gallery 2 to Zenphoto. Liam ended up having to write a complicated sql statement to convert it, but I’m much, much happier with the new system. I’ve been using zen for a work project and find it to be much easier to work with than Gallery 2.
If you notice anything that doesn’t look right please do let me know. I haven’t tested the new design much in IE 7 and I know it doesn’t work right in 6 (too bad).
Posted in Design, Wordpress
Jul
11
2008
at 9:11am
Have you ever wanted an easier way to install Wordpress themes and pugins? If you have ssh access to your website you can install them directly on the sever with a few simple commands. No more downloading to your computer, extracting the zip file, and uploading again. This also works really well with Drupal Modules or any other script you need to download from another site.
(Unfortunately, most shared hosting accounts don’t have ssh access, but hopefully this will be useful for anyone on virtual hosts or dedicated servers who don’t already know how to do this!)
- SSH into your website. Don’t know how? Try this:
- open a terminal
- type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
- agree to any host authenticity messages
- enter your password at the prompt
- Navigate to your wp-content directory. Depending on your hosting setup the command will look something like this:
cd httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/ or cd httpdocs/wp-content/themes/
- Get the URL for the plugin or theme you want to download. The full url to the zip file. (This makes it really annoying when plugin developers hide the full url!)
- Type in
wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
- Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
- Unzip the file by entering
unzip theplugin.zip. If you have a .tar.gz file use tar xfc theplugin.tar.gz.
Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.
Posted in Software, Wordpress
Jul
06
2008
at 11:55am
Most of my recent layouts have been em based. That means that they scale when the font size is adjusted. This approach seems to make more sense than simply allowing the text to resize while keeping the layout the same.
Well, browser manufacturers have caught on to this. Following in Opera’s footsteps, IE and Firefox are now implementing zoom as the default method of resizing text.
If this is the case, then do we still need to code layouts in ems or can we go back to using pixels? I’m currently coding a new layout for this site and I’ve decided to code it in pixels. It’s so much easier not to have to do grid calculation in ems and worry about what the current font size is. My grid unit is 24px. That’s it. Much better.
So, do you think it’s still worth it to code layouts in em’s? The non-zoom font resizing functions are still there. Will people prefer to use them over zooming?
Posted in Accessibility, Design
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