WordPress redesign unleashed
(Last Updated on )
Well, it’s not ready for primetime yet, but I got tired of not blogging, so here’s my heavily-customised WordPress-powered redesign. "A redesign?!?!", I hear you exclaim. "It looks exactly the bloody same!"
Well, yes, but my design skills are not exactly renowned, and when I checked my server logs, I discovered someone’s blog entry saying "I absolutely adore the site design of brucelawson.co.uk. So clean and simple, and yet it looks gorgeous. Fantastic stuff."
With praise like that, I decided to leave it pretty much as-is, though I’ve still work to do styling the new bits and bobs (comments, extra nav, post metadata etc).
There’s loads of stuff still to do, the biggest of which is the removal of all <br /> tags that snuck into the posts when I was copying from the notepad html source of my old site into the WordPress Post entry text box.
If anyone can donate me a PHP script that can replace <br /> with "" (only in posts), I will love you forever.
I’m enormously gratetul to Matt Mullenweg for WordPress as I now have categories, archives, permalinks, comments and all the trappings of your proper blogbloke. There were a couple of minor niggles that I’ll note in case they can be noted for WordPress 2.0:
- I’d love a check box next to the Post entry field that tells WordPress to ignore line breaks. It would’ve helped me when copying all the post from my hand-rolled blogs – and I’m sure other bloggers cut and paste from emails/ other web sites etc.
- I think the check box for "Edit timestamp" is overly belt-and -braces. As I was moving old blog entries, I repeatedly changed the drop-downs to select the date that I originally wrote the post, but forgot to check the box as well, causing no end of annoyance.
- In the theme that I studied in order to customise to make this aesthetic glory, there was a lot of presentational html – the <small> tag was common, as well as presentational class names like "alignleft". It might be cutting-edgily exemplary if they were removed for the next release.
But these are minor niggles. After only a few weeks (most of that spent copying and pasting old content), I now have a lovely database-driven website.
I pondered for a long time about whether to have comments on anything other than the technical category of Accessibility/ Web Standards, and have decided to have everything open to comments. So let the comment spam commence!
12 Responses to “ WordPress redesign unleashed ”
Nicely done!
Just wondering if all your old links still work?
Nicely done!
Ah, you have RSS now too. No more checking on the off-chance.
Ah, you have RSS now too.
Oh forgot about that. Excellent!
Group ahhhhh.
If you get any problems with the rss feeds, could you note them here?
Actually, the links at the bottom of the page for the RSS feed are broken for me, they have a feed: stuck in the beginning of the URL, and Firefox nor Thunderbird seems to like it.
(P.S. is that a goatse.cx reference you have at the bottom right of your site Bruce? ;))
One problem I’ve noticed with the feed is in my reader entries I’ve already read are suddenly marked as unread. I see this occasionally on other blogs when the post is updated, but on yours it seems somewhat random. Today for example a post from way back in September appeared unread all of a sudden.
Greetings. I just came across your site and had a good ol’ laugh at your spam letters.
Do you still need to replace the <br>s? I could help you with that; email me if you want.
Nice use of WordPress! I agree with whoever said that your site is very clean and simple while still getting your personality and character across. I especially like your “ransom note” cut out letters and am glad you didn’t redesign them right off your site. I understand some of your issues with WordPress, too. I have a site that I update for a client, and it seems like I’m constantly missing a checkbox here or there. Nothing major, just things like you pointed out, such as back dating. I love the categories feature, but it’s also something very easy to forget to check, so I often end up with posts going straight to my default category (about, which isn’t very helpful). But it sounds like you have a handle on it, so hopefully you won’t be constantly editing posts like I seem to be!
Why Bruce, congratulations on your upgrade to WordPress, and the wonderful world of comment systems. If you can get onto IRC, go into #wordpress and you will find a wonderful group of folks willing to help out with PHP/WordPress problems 24/7.
I’m writing this from the Workshop on Accessibility at the www2005 in Chiba, Japan.
Congrats again on your WordPress site. BTW, check your design in Safari, there’s a horizontal scrollbar, which doesn’t appear in Firefox.
Love,
M