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You’ve probably noticed I’ve been putting in some work on this blog lately.

Amid all the tweaking, one fact became obvious: I was going to need to make significant changes to the TypoXP theme to get it fully compatible with post-WordPress 2.3 releases.

I thought long and hard about that. I really like TypoXP and I wanted to stick with it as long as I could. But the more I thought about it, the more I decided it made sense to move on to a more recent theme.

Once again, it came down to two choices: Barthelme and Fluid Blue. In the end, Bartheme won.

Continue reading ‘Goodbye, TypoXP; Hello, Barthelme; Welcome Back, WP-Syntax; Tag, You’re It’ »

I’ve done some more hacking of the Sociable social bookmarking plug-in for WordPress and I’d thought I’d share them with others.

I’ve added buttons for MySpace and Yahoo! Buzz. I’ve also changed the layout to put all the icons inside a fieldset tag and eliminate the rollover effects.

I’ve also cleaned up some more code, most notably making a change to the way the script creates excerpts when the user has not done so.

Let’s look at the changes.

Continue reading ‘More Sociable Hacks: Adding MySpace And Yahoo! Buzz, Changing The Look’ »

I decided recently that I wanted to use a social bookmarking plug-in* on this blog. The choice came down to one of two: Add To Any or Sociable.

After a day of fiddling with both, I finally opted for Sociable. Both plug-ins are very good, and each has things it does better than the other. The reasons I decided on Sociable vs. Add To Any:

• Add To Any uses a pop-up layer to display some top bookmarking sites, then an additional click to select all. Sociable allows you to select which bookmarking sites you want to display as 16×16-pixel icons. I figure it’s enough to show just the most popular, rather than virtually every bookmarking site.
• Sociable requires less space to accomplish the same basic tasks.
• Add To Any requires JavaScript to work; Sociable doesn’t require it for most functions.
• Sociable looks prettier on my pages. The Add To Any icon didn’t fit well on my page; it does allow you to make your own icon, but I didn’t want to bother with that, especially when, again, Sociable’s icons all work on their own, right on the page.
• Add To Any doesn’t easily allow you to rearrange icons or add / remove certain links / services; Sociable makes selecting the order of icons (and which to use) quite easy.

That said, Add To Any does have some strengths over Sociable:

• Add To Any’s code is a bit cleaner; but again, we’ll soon discuss how to fix Sociable’s faults.
• Sociable requires a knowledge of CSS to customize; Add To Any allows n00bs to easily change colors and certain display settings.
• That Add To Any allows users to select virtually any bookmarking site, rather than a list the blogger determines, may be considered a strength by others.

So even though I opted for Sociable, I had to clean up some problems, such as display problems due to my theme; the alignment of the icons; and incomplete information for certain icons.

Continue reading ‘Fixing Various Issues With The Sociable Plug-In For WordPress’ »

WordPress just keeps getting better.

Release 2.6 includes a several new features, such as wiki-style version control for posts, a toolbar-based “blog this” control, support for Google Gears (which promises to be a major breakthrough in Web development), native word counts, native image captioning, SSL support, and bubble notification when a plug-in has been upgraded. Plus a bunch of other features and bug fixes.

While I was reading the WordPress blog entry about Version 2.6, I noticed that they have a really, really cool syntax highlighting script: Not only is it clear, and not only does it do an excellent job of segmenting the various aspects of code, it included plain-text view and copy-to-clipboard links, right in the header.

So I decided to find out what it was and use it. And, simply enough, the plug-in is called “Google Syntax Highligher For WordPress” and it leverages the JavaScript-based syntaxhighligher hosted at Google Code.

Now, I had previously been using WP-Syntax, which is based on GeSHi and is based entirely server-side, and had been happy with it. But the syntaxhighlighter code looked cleaner and offered amenities, so I decided to make the change.

And in all honesty, I wish I had stuck with WP-Syntax. But once I made the change, it was way too late to go back.

Continue reading ‘The Agony And Ecstasy Of syntaxhighligher; Or, Why You Shouldn’t Fix What Ain’t Broke’ »