Archive for October, 2007
A Southern Right Whale breaching close to the coast
Continuing the aquatic theme, here’s a postcard from Hermanus, South Africa, which claims to offer the best shore-based whale watching in the world. It’s quite a relaxing hobby, whale watching. All you have to do is walk, wait, and watch. (Walking is optional.)
Nobody seems to know whether breaching (i.e. bursting out of the water, if you’re a whale) is showing off, getting some air, communicating something or having fun. After lengthy consideration, I would say it’s a combination of all of the above.
I also took a five second video.
Extra: ‘Just saying Hi’
We went to an aquarium. It was nice. Except for the smelly penguins.
Blue-throated swallows in Bas Congo
This is a test post of the new design for Extra Extra. (A sandbox to play with before importing content.)
Inspiration: Apple, Rising Voices, Tumblr, co.mments
“I walk slowly but never backwards.” Abraham Lincoln
Overall objectives:
- clean and tidy inside and out – e.g. plenty of white space, no clutter, strip out redundant bits of custom stylesheet
- latest versions of Wordpress (currently up-to-date) & K2 (upgrade to RC 4)
- minimise changes to K2 core files to make upgrades easier
- xhtml/w3c standards compliant
- snappy loading
- accessible, including for mobile/iPhone access
- should work in all browsers
Header:
- Shadowy, glowing ready-brek man, back by popular demand!
- Fix the header for IE!!!
- Header image needs cleaning/smoothing to lose grey line in Nav Bar
- Adjust spacing of navigation menu to align with title
- Header menu should indicate current page – just yellow text, no background
- Round corners of search box + enlarge box / reduce icon size
- Search box appears to change size when clicked – should ‘thicken outward’
- Search box doesn’t quite align vertically with sidebar (position feed button & search box with the stylesheet, not header.php?)
- Search entry text should be larger & dark grey e.g. 757575
- Turn off Nice Tooltips for internal links, or use it to force new title attributes for header menu (Home, Archives, About, Links)
- Fix header in Safari (displaces the title)
- Search box background doesn’t appear in IE6 (IE7 is OK)
- Search box background doesn’t clear when clicked in IE7
Sidebar:
- Sidebar should align vertically with search box and horizontally with 1st line or top of photo of 1st post
- Restore pale grey boxes/rounded corners around sidebar sections (see CSS)
- Get rid of feed icon in Recent Posts box
- IE6 chops off left edge of boxes
- Use K2 Sidebar manager if poss
- Tidy up CSS margin, padding, etc
- Sidebar headers should have same left margin as contents
- Find a way to make nice background boxes
- On hover, highlight the whole line, not just the text
Posts/entries:
- Icons (except clock) have disappeared, despite various edits of image paths in CSS
- Format blockquotes – pale grey background, smaller, etc
- Lose the clock icon: end of each post should just have the date & place (category) on the left and comments on the right (other details e.g. tags, trackback etc to appear when post permalink is clicked)
- Larger titles?
- Stop categories from being transformed to lower case
- Add co.mments thing as on current version
- Make metadata font & links more distinctive
Comments, footer, etc:
- Sort out comments CSS: lose clock ico, put date and time on same line as author, reduce space between author ID and comment, and comments should be distinct from content
- On the comments list, the edit icon overlaps the comment icon
- Format my replies differently
- Comment & contact forms should have more specific CSS id, so as not replicate search box format (border, width)
- But, as with search box, form should clear/focus when clicked
- Text when using the form should be larger and dark grey
Footer etc
- Style the footer navbar (lose the right hand bar)
- Use Related Posts and Landing Sites plugins
- And a favicon
- Add meta info to header.php
- Review colours of Nice Tooltips plugin for link titles
Pages
- Make pages – copy content across
- Subject should not be required for the Contact Form (on ‘Here’ page)
- Contact Form should have its own format – currently replicates search box
- Redesign links and archives pages?
- Make a simple Lightbox gallery page (invisible until activated) e.g.
Wordpress / K2
- Upgrade to K2 rc4
- Minimise hacking of K2 files (other than header.php) to make upgrades easier
- K2 Sidebar Manager tab doesn’t appear in admin panel
- Moblog: set up a function to autopost photos & text from a specified RSS feed (like this) – may be possible with Reblog
- Import posts, comments, pages, etc from previous version (NB sidebars may need to be copied manually)
- Complete transfer to new server with original url – check image paths and internal links