DvorakĀ Theme

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For awhile now I’ve been wanting to redesign the “Dvorak Uncensored” blog. It’s not the bets looking website that I’ve seen and thought it could use a cleaner, simpler layout.

Back when Mr. Dvorak had the competition for a redesign of http://dvorak.org/home.html, there were some great designs submitted. I really like the winning layout and thought It would be great as a blog template, so I went ahead and created one.

This new theme would go right along with the hompage that was redesigned last year on dvorak.org

I will offer this template exclusively to Mr. Dvorak first, as most people want a unique looking website. If he declines my offer for the new theme, I will make it available for public download.

Blog Upgrades for May 17th,Ā 2009

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I made some changes to the website today and I thought I’d go through an overview.

The first thing you will probably notice when coming to the website is the TweetMeme badges that I’ve put in. I’m not exactly sure how much I like them yet. They don’t look bad or anything, and they’re nice to have on the site, but they seem to slow down the page loads waiting for javascript to load the content from tweetmeme. If you don’t know what TweetMeme is, they’re just a site that keeps track of hot stories on twitter, much like how digg tracks stories, but TweetMeme does it automattically by watching retweets.

I also added a short URL to single posts. It’s alot like using tinyurl, except that you’re not relying on another site’s database to serve the links. It’s quite simple and much safer than using tinyurl or the digg bar. The default permalink style on WordPress blogs is “http://domain.tld/p=?<post-number>”. This is much shorter than the permalink styles that most of us use. It turns out that these links still work and actually redirect to the permalink structure that is setup.

The last thing I did today was change the way the date archive links are displayed on the archives page. I liked how Matt Mullenweg was displaying his links, so i copied him a little bit. This one was a little bit harder to setup, but with some searching through the WordPress documentation, I found some functions that helped me out. Now the links are displayed as “Year: January / February / March / etc…”. I put options in the function to optionally make the years links, choose the seperator, and a class name for the years. Each year is a list-item, so I have the function call enclosed by an unordered-list.
As I was making these new changes, I realized that I have good plugins in my functions.php file right now that I should probably publish as plugins. The first one is a change that I made last week that counts the number of images in a gallery. The second one returns a gallery thumbnail even if the first image in the gallery was removed, which i was having a hard time accomplishing with my last theme. And then that one for my archives.

New ‘REtro’Ā Theme

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I just activated the new theme I’ve been working on for the past week. Even though it’s not 100% completed, I wanted to get it up so I could see how it acted live on the site. So far it seems to be working great. Here are the top 10 things I need to fix:

  1. Link Colors: The color that I picked for links is too light and needs to be a little darker on the white background.
  2. Pre-Load Navbar: There’s a delay when you mouse over the navbar right after the page loads. I need to preload the images on pageload so that they appear right away.
  3. The ‘the_tags()’ function seems to be broken on most pages. I’m not sure what’s going on with that, I’ll have to investigate.
  4. Hide overflow on #content.
  5. Put photo info in the sidebar on the individual photo pages.
  6. pre load down state of the search button
  7. display pingbacks and trackbacks
  8. make a submit button for the comments form and contact form
  9. make a “down-over” arrow for comment replies
  10. fix styling on the facebook connect button
The old theme with the new theme, side-by-side
The old theme with the new theme, side-by-side

Update: I also changed the upload sizes for gallery images, so I’m going to have to download the originals and batch contvert them to the new sizes. Should be fun!

Kevin Rose on the DiggĀ Bar

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I don’t know. It’s starting to grow on me. I mean, in terms of not knowing what URL you’re clicking on, it’s the same as tinyURL or any of the other shorteners.