Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
It seems as though every time I open my favourite news sites or turn on a technology strand on TV, someone is talking about social network sites. They are usually declaring their evils, claiming them to be the haunts of pedophiles and criminals, or just pointing out the amount of time employees waste on them every day when they should be doing some form of paid work.
Social networking sites only seem have to have popped onto the mainstream radar over the last eighteen months or two years. Most commentators talk as though they`re entirely new things, invented with the creation of Facebook and unheard of before.
I take that claim with a pinch of salt. My first introduction to the Internet was the discovery of message boards when I was hunting for some information on a new TV show that I had just discovered, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In fact, I stumbled on the message board on the official website. It was called the Bronze (after a nightclub in the show) and it was a place for fans to meet, chat and socialise. When the show moved to a different network and the original site was shut down, the Bronze migrated to The Bronze Beta. It didn`t have all the bells and whistles of Facebook or MySpace, but the key elements (connecting people on-line through similar interests, creating a network of friends) were all there. That first trip into the Bronze was in 1999, around the same time that LiveJournal (one of the biggest and earliest social networking sites) began.
Things are more sophisticated now. The interfaces are more polished (one no longer needs to know HTML in order to post a simple message at most social networking sites, for example!) with better archiving and organisation possibilities. The back-ends are much more complicated and often more stable (although some LJ users might disagree at times). The purpose hasn`t changed, though.
The Internet is an amazing resource if you want to know something, but for me it has always been about communication and connecting with people. I check out my LiveJournal and Ravelry account most days to catch up with the friends that I have met through fandom and knitting and see what`s going on in the various communities I contribute to. I pop into Facebook a couple of times a week to see how friends from school and previous employments are doing and read their gossip. If I see a post in a community that looks interesting, I`ll click through to see what else that person has said or done and possibily find a new friend.
The mechanics are different from those early days on the Bronze, but nothing fundamental has changed. The social Internet has been around for far longer than any of those commentators will admit, the only difference is that it is now discussed on the BBC and CNN rather than whispered about in industry conventions.
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
After three hours of staring at books, installing a plug in for Firefox that allows me to render pages (screenshots only, but good for clues) as various versions of Internet Explorer and tearing out my hair, I figured out the problem. I even worked out why the layout worked a few weeks ago and doesn’t work now.
It’s the code that I was cleverly sharing. More importantly, at certain screen resolutions (i.e. anything not widescreen) that code overflows the content area because of the way that the <code> tag works. Unlike normal text, anything inside a <code> tag does not flow onto the next line. It simply continues in one long line until there is a carriage return.
Firefox, Opera, IE7 et al. cleverly decide not to do anything to the content boxes and just allow the stray lines to overflow. IE6, on the other hand, decides that this calls for changing the box sizes to accommodate the overflow, thus breaking my tried and tested three-column layout tricks.
Actually, it belongs to A List Apart, but that’s beside the point.
So I had two options. I could edit the posts below to introduce appropriate line-breaks, but leave the layout still subject to potential breakage if I ever try that again. Or I could fix the layout.
I chose option two and added the following to the overrides css file:
#main-content {
overflow: hidden;
}
And ta-da! IE6 now works exactly as it did a few weeks ago. My problems are solved.
It is moments like this that some kind of unified approach to how browsers implement standards such as CSS starts to really appeal. It’s a shame that the idea will remain just a fantasy.
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
After my triumphant declaration yesterday that I had fixed all the compatibility errors, it turns out that the blog is now broken in IE6. This would be the blog that worked perfectly in IE6 but broke in IE7, of course!
More frustratingly, when I restore the old theme (without the modifications) it is still broken in IE6. That is the part that I don’t understand because, five weeks ago, it was perfectly happy in IE6.
The only changes that I have made are to separate out the hacks that render things correctly in IE so that IE7 can read them and restore the Blogroll. I changed nothing in the old theme so, theoretically, there should be no reason for the old theme to break when it previously worked. In fact, I changed none of the CSS apart from doing the conditional comments trick to ensure that the overrides file could be read. And even more frustratingly, it’s the same styles and basic HTML layout as are used in the main site and that works perfectly in IE6 and IE7.
So it’s off to perform some Google-fu and work out why the blog has broken. I’m starting to wonder whether it’s the HTML rather than the CSS. Hmm.
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
A while ago I noticed that the Blogroll had disappeared from this blog. As with so many things during my final months at my previous job, I just didn’t have time to dig through the WordPress documentation to find out why.
Today I did some nosing around and discovered that the old WP tags to generate the blogroll had been deprecated and removed a while ago. Hence the non-working blogroll.
One of the nice things about WP is the resources out there documenting how all the nuts and bolts work. If you really wanted to, you could customise WP to run an entire, complex website and not just a simple blog like this.
I came up with the new wp_list_bookmarks tag that was needed to replace the old code. Part of me sighed at the idea of upgrading to break people’s blog templates, but another part of got a little excited about the fact that this would be much easier than my old code.
To demonstrate, here is the old code:
<?php
$link_cats = $wpdb->get_results(
"SELECT cat_id, cat_name FROM $wpdb->linkcategories");
foreach ($link_cats as $link_cat) {
?>
<li id="linkcat-<?php echo $link_cat->cat_id; ?>">
<h3><?php echo $link_cat->cat_name; ?></h3>
<ul>
<?php get_links($link_cat->cat_id, '<li>', '</li>', '',
FALSE, 'name', FALSE); ?>
</ul>
</li>
<?php } ?>
Using the new WP tag, I have one line of code:
<?php wp_list_bookmarks('title_before=<h3>&tit
It does essentially the same thing, only much less wordy. The wp_list_bookmarks tag defaults to ordering by name (something that had to be specified in the get_links tag) and retrieving all the categories. The one frustration is that it defaults to putting the category names in H2 tags, but that’s what the title_before and title_after parts of the argument do - change that behaviour to H3 tags so that I don’t have to re-jig the CSS.
WordPress has its negatives (the frequency that you have to upgrade and the time it takes to do the upgrade being the biggies) but it does have some nice features hidden under the bonnet. I’m not sure that anyone could use them if they don’t have at least a basic understanding of PHP first, though!
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
I have been intending to go in and fix Above the Fold for months. Months and months and months. Why?
When Internet Explorer 7 was released they fixed a number of the escapes that had been used to target IE with fixes where the CSS doesn’t render correctly. Sadly they didn’t fix the CSS rendering. The layout on this site uses some clever CSS to create the three-column layout without needing to resort to tables yet maintaining the liquid layout so that it scales to any screen size.
I did some research when IE7 was first released and found some references to fixes. They involve stripping the overrides out of the main CSS file, putting the overrides into a new file and then using conditional comments to link to that new file. e.g.
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”ie_overrides.css” />
<![endif]–>
The bit that I was scared about was working out exactly where those overrides were in the default layout file. There always seemed to be something else that needed to be done more urgently so it got left.
And left.
Today I dusted off that default CSS file, went through it with a fine tooth comb and discovered that the six lines of code that I needed to move (much less than I’d imagined) had all been grouped together and commented as IE hacks. It took me less than thirty minutes to sort it out - if only I’d know that months ago!
The slightly more complicated part was repeating that process for the WordPress files. In the default stylesheet for WP I’d helpfully put all the IE hacks at the end so they could easily be found. The more difficult bit was working out what link to use for the IE override stylesheet. A bit of Google-fu solved the problem and I added this to my header file:
<!--[if IE]>
<link rel=”stylesheet” type=”text/css” href=”/ie_overrides.css” />
<![endif]–>
I’m quick surprised by how much easier it was to sort out than expected. In fact, the most complicated part of today’s operation was upgrading the WordPress installation! That really isn’t my favourite job but it does have to be done for the security updates if nothing else.
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
It took a couple of weeks, but I finally have a computer and an Internet connection in my house. Canada is awesome and I’m very excited about settling in here.
My Internet connection is amazing - 15MB download speed and it’s not strangled anywhere (unlike my ISP in England strangling all Torrents). The hard bit will be remembering that I can’t abuse my new-found Internet powers!
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
Tomorrow I am off into the great unknown, more commonly referred to as Nova Scotia, Canada. Big step, but I am very excited.
Or at least I will be once I am through customs and secure in my new house!
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
I haven’t talked about this before because people from work know where this blog is and we didn’t want to announce anything too early, but next month I will be emigrating. My mother is Canadian so I’ve had Canadian citizenship for years. It’s always been a part of my long-term plan to move there eventually.
In October I will have been in my current role for three years. It is time to move on and find some new challenges. There is nothing really left to learn about my role, there are no new projects on the horizon that will test me or force me to learn something new and it isn’t good to stagnate in this business. With that in mind, I can either find a new role within the company, move on but stay within the UK or take that final step and go to Canada.
Option three seems like the sensible one. Time is marching on and I’m worried that I’ll never do it if I don’t take this opportunity.
My last day with my current employer is 25th July (I’m informed that there will be a slap-up do for me - hooray for good food!) and then I fly out on 9th August. It’s both exciting and terrifying but I know that it’s the right thing for me at this stage.
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
This blog has been cleaned up, dusted down, upgraded to the latest of everything and made properly functional again. Hooray!
On checking the status of the blog a couple of weeks ago, I noted that the posts were ordered backwards. A quick search of the forums revealed that this was a common problem when hosts had upgraded their MySQL and users had not upgraded their WP blog (guilty as charged) but unfortunately I jetted off to Canada for a few days and I have only just had the time to sit down and properly sort out the upgrades.
Never mind. I’ve dusted off with the intention of being a little better at blogging here so we’ll see how it goes this time.
Originally published at Above the Fold: The Blog. You can comment here or there.
In preperation for dusting this off and actually becoming a better blogger here, I’m just testing the system.
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