Journal of Tormod Haugen

That’s me. REALLY bad at blogging. Well, at least it didn’t go a year since last post.

It is official; I cannot name things or version products.

I hereby declare version oh-won (0.1) of Simpla 2 released. The only change is that it now supports nested comments and other fun comment related stuff from WP 2.7.

Please feel free to rework, criticize and moan loudly. Responses are cherished!

(the theme is still under CC-Attribution Share-Alike license. The good bits are by Phu Ly, and the bad parts and minor WP 2.7 related changes are by yours truly).

Simpla 2 is now released. I removed the display of categories and tags for pages, and that’s it. If you add widgets for Pages, Categories and Blogroll, it should look just about the same way as the original theme by Phu Ly.

It is not the one I’m using here - currently this differs in font size and placement of the sidebar.

Please speak up if you have comments and/or questions.

It is now over two weeks since I said I would focus on my blog and theme. And I haven’t blogged the last week. Good start? Yes, I think so.

I haven’t done as much as I wanted to, but I wouldn’t say that much time has been lost to me switching focus. The lack of updates the last week is unfortunate, though, and I should focus on getting blog posts out even if my focused project isn’t going forth. I’ve been spending time on other things than the blog lately, but most of that is on stuff that is more important than a project; friends, family etc.

I’ll drum together a package with the changes I’ve done to Simpla, and make it available. It is CC licensed, so it is alright. I might do more later, but the next blog/theme related project is to hack together a new look, as I have mumbled about earlier. This is not my next project.

I’ll blog my next focus later today, and I’ll also try and keep my updates ticking in a few times a week, at least.

As you might have noticed; I’ve got a tag cloud in my sidebar. And there were no tags under the entries, and none on the single post page. That is because, as with the widgets, this is an old theme - from when the dinosaurs roamed the earth and whatnot. And tagging wasn’t in Wordpress core.

I’ve quickly added the tags as a new line below the post’s category, setting a class to the span for markup, wrapping it in a div for that new line business. The change is to insert the three last lines below into index.php (lines 21 through 23). This fixes both the index page and the single post view, as there’s no specific markup code for single posts, pages or archives. I’ll add some beautifying code for this later, and individual templates for my own theme modification.

17
18
19
20
21
22
23

                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="postedby">Posted by <?php the_author() ?></span>
                        <span class="filedto">Filed in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?></span>
                </div>
                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="tagged">Tagged <?php the_tags('', ', ') ?></span>
                </div>

In addition, we need to add some css to style up the tags listing with an icon as the other post info. I chose the page_component.gif image from the same icon series as Simpla uses; the Minis from Famfamfam. Put it in the /images/ folder in your theme’s folder and add the following code to styles.css:

121
122
123
124
125

.tagged{
        background:#fff url(./images/page_component.gif) no-repeat;
        padding:3px;
        padding-left:20px;
}

You can probably see that the style information of the last couple of entries in styles.css are very much alike? Just the file names are different. I get an urge to extract the redundant information as a separate style class, like below, and let each line with an icon get marked with two classes. This makes the file look like this from line 106:

106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121

.icon{  
        padding:3px;
        padding-left:20px;
}
.postedby{
        background:#fff url(./images/user.gif) no-repeat;
}
.filedto{
        background:#fff url(./images/post.gif) no-repeat;
}
.commentslink{
        background:#fff url(./images/packaged.gif) no-repeat;
}
.tagged{
        background:#fff url(./images/page_component.gif) no-repeat;
}

I must now change each line with one of the above class descriptions and add icon. This is easy, as they are collected together in the index.php file. And if nothing else; it saves a tiny bit on bandwidth. Not that it is optimized for it. The programmer in me like to pull out shared information.

From my last change this will now look like this:

16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

                <div class="entrymeta">
                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="icon postedby">Posted by <?php the_author() ?></span>
                        <span class="icon filedto">Filed in <?php the_category(', ') ?> <?php edit_post_link('Edit', ' | ', ''); ?></span>
                </div>
                <div class="postinfo">
                        <span class="icon tagged">Tagged <?php the_tags('', ', ') ?></span>
                </div>
                <?php comments_popup_link('No Comments &#187;', '1 Comment &#187;', '% Comments &#187;', 'icon commentslink'); ?>
                </div>

Find all four icon additions? The last is at the end of the comments_popup_link thingey. Great! I also downloaded page_package.gif, page_tick.gif and page_cross.gif for marking of todo lists as I was picking out the tags icon. That is something not directly connected to upgrading Simpla - and perhaps I should find or make a plugin for it. But it’s for another post.

Agree or disagree on method, markup, choice of icon or anything? Speak up, I’d love to hear.

The next step is fixing the sidebar. As this is a pretty old theme, the sidebar is rather statically set up. It links your pages, categories and links. Nowadays these Widgets are all the rage - and it isn’t hard to set up support for them in an old theme either.

First we’ll make the sidebar accept widgets. The easy, and right, way is to wrap the old sidebar in a condition saying it should be displayed if there is no support for widgets. Do it like this; insert line 2 and 15, making the code look like below:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16

<div id="sidebar">
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
<h2>Pages</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
</ul>
<h2>Categories</h2>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
</ul>
<ul>
<?php get_links_list(); ?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>
</div>

Here we could have made the container around sidebar into an unordered list (ul), but that would mean we’d have to have a look at the css to get things to display correctly. So instead we must do a small fix in functions.php. Instead of using register_sidebars we’ll use register_sidebar (plural vs. singular) with some parameters.

Since the functions.php to register dynamic sidebars in doesn’t exist, we’ll have to create it. Put it in the theme’s folder, and make it contain the following code. Be careful; no space or newlines before or after the lines of code:

1
2
3
4

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
    register_sidebar(array('before_widget' => '<div id="%1$s" class="widget %2$s">', 'after_widget' => '</div>'));
?>

The before and after_widget parameters wraps each widget in a div. This wouldn’t be necessary if the dynamic sidebar call was issued from inside an unordered list (ul), as the default values produces list elements (li).

Now the only task left is to go into the widget page (in the blog administration) and add what you want. I suggest Pages, Categories and Links if you want to keep the feel of Simpla, as it were. Keep tuned for more.

Anything you want to add, ask or tell? Feel free.

I’ve begun making some small changes to the Simpla Theme, in order to get something looking *just* like I want. I’ll share my changes, and also the code if somebody asks for it. For now this is filed as work in progress. And there will be progress.

Here are the things I did to change the theme as it looks now (2009-01-04T20:59:12+01:00). Increase / change font size and screen real estate. Flip the sidebar to the left. Fix logout from near comment field. I’d love to hear if you like / dislike the changes.

Change font size

First order of business is to increase the text size, because I’ve seen what it helps on some devices. The code changes are from:

13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23

body{   
        background:#fff url(./images/bg.png) repeat-x;
        border-top:5px solid #333;
        color:#555;
        font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
        font-size:62.5%;
        line-height:1.5;
        margin:0;
        padding:0;
        text-align:center;
}

Change relevant line to the following:

18

        font-size:12pt;

Then remove lines 30 and 36 from the following block:

24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40

#wrap{  
        margin:0 auto;
        text-align:left;
        width:76em;
}
content{
        font-size:1.2em;
        float:left;
        padding:1em;
        width:40em;
}
#sidebar{
        font-size:1.1em;
        float:right;
        padding-top:2em;
        width:20em;
}

That is, these line should be removed:

30

        font-size:1.2em;

36

        font-size:1.1em;

These font-size changes means that we have to redistribute a bit of space in the content area. Change line 24, 33 and 39 from above to the following:

24

        max-width:80em;

33

        width:70%;

39

        width:25%;

Flip sidebar to the left hand side

Next step is to flip the sidebar to the left hand side, just because I can. Change line 30 (or 31 if you didn’t change the font-size like above from the first block of code) to the next line:

29
30
31
32
33

#content{
        float:left;
        padding:1em;
        width:70%;
}

30

        float:right;

Minor fixes needed for Wordpress 2.7

Logout link in comment.php needed updating because of the new security measures in Wordpress. If this isn’t done, you won’t be able to log out from the link beside the comment field. Find and replace first block of code with the second block of code:

76

<p>Logged in as <a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-admin/profile.php"><?php echo $user_identity; ?></a>. <a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-login.php?action=logout" title="Log out of this account">Logout &raquo;</a></p>

76

<p>Logged in as <a href="<?php echo get_option('siteurl'); ?>/wp-admin/profile.php"><?php echo $user_identity; ?></a>. <a href="<?php echo wp_logout_url(get_permalink()); ?>" title="Log out of this account">Log out &raquo;</a></p>

Then there was a new year. I mentioned, at the end of last year, that I wanted to structure my personal projects a bit more, to actually get something out of the time I spent on them. And not, like usually, jump from one to the next without getting anything done.

In that respect I plan on getting this blog re-themed. I’m jumping to the Simpla theme, and I will be documenting my changes through the process of making it my own. I’ll try and preserve some of the touches of my current theme, inspired by Hemingway for Wordpress. This will be my focus for the next two weeks. No other major project will be worked on during that period.

Two other announcements are; My two month goal is to get the blog up and running nicely again, with at least three posts each week. I need this practise in writing, and I also see that in it’s current state this blog leave much to be desired in terms of content. I’ll try and get something good going here, and would love feedback in the time ahead - if nothing more than a quick comment or a word on twitter.

The other minor thing is that my goal for 2009 is to get better at languages. I’ll try and get from a skill level of nothing and up to awful in Japanese. Why that one? I have a few reasons, the most important is that I like its sound. Or rather, acquaintances of mine has rekindled my interest. I was looking for evening classes, but they sadly fall in on the same days and time that my SO is attending choir practise this spring. I’ll go for the cd/workbook courses, and hope to report on my progress as I improve. Don’t expect anything the next two weeks, though - I’m working on my blog…

It is soon 2009, and time keeps rushing by. I’ve already resolved to look forward in small steps, in order to keep from breaking down due to too many promises. To myself and others. In order to get set for this, I’ll try and blog a bit more regularly. Like multiple times a week. Perhaps even every weekday.

Now, forward isn’t the only direction to look in all the time, you should also keep in mind what has gone before. I’ve met up with friends and family this christmas. Not only those that I don’t see too often - but also those that I see all the time. In a shelving section in my parents’ house I found some tapes with games for my old Commodore 64. These gems kept me occupied for a while a long time ago, for example Spitfire and Saboteur II.

Saboteur II was kind of innovative; it contained platform game features - a 700 screen big level with multiple entrances. You played a female ninja - weak, and low on power. Ammo was found as wrenches, ninja stars and other miscellanea. Your best weapon was your brain, learning where to enter the level, noting where you could go safely, and where you needed weapons to enter. Failure meant just that. Try again, armed only with what you learned the last time around.

Now, to be honest, games like that exist today. They sometimes are high profile games too, though that seems to be more and more seldom. One game that reminded me of this style, somehow, was Portal. Not that it is alike, but the way you play a female protagonist. Unarmed and weak, with the power to move around - armed only with what is lying around. Not in boxes, but just the boxes. Learning all the way. Missteps means death - try again, armed with what knowledge you gained the last time around.

I’m not sure how much I like Christmas season. Other than a time of relaxation and reflection. For it works well like that. Sitting down and reflecting. For me this is a bit of how things should be, perhaps. Less stress, if you let it. More family, if you want it. I’ve kind of relaxed on my projects. I still sit here at the computer a bit. Thinking. But it doesn’t count. Does it?

I’m starting anew in a bit. I’m formatting a harddrive for backup purposes. I’ll clean out my computer. Reinstall, refresh, switch it out, perhaps? But formatting a 500 GB disk with NTFS is … slow. I should have thought about it before I stared. But it gives me time to reflect. And write this post.

I sure can use the practice…

This last six months I have focused a bit more on managing my spare time. It started out well, with me doing a bit more work on Wikka Wiki, maintaining a monthly (board) gaming evening and getting a bit more out of my evenings. Then it started to slip out again, as usual. Too many projects started, none ended - not even to a milestone or one measly todo-list item.

I suck at organizing myself outside of work, and I know it. What it usually boils down to, is my phasing creativity and motivation. It helps having people working on the same thing, or at least inquiring into my work. I guess this is one of the reasons I get things done at work. That and coffee, guilt and integrity.

So, I’ve decided I need to get to burning bridges aga… things done again. I have Getting Things Done standing unfinished in my bookshelf, I know how to do agile methods in projects, reviews and stuff. I just don’t apply it outside of work. Something must change.

I’ve been reading David Seah’s blog for a while, and at least one of his good ideas have registered over time; his Groundhog Day resolutions. I first thought I’d try something like that, but as I am trying to fix up my spare time, I wanted a bit more time on my resolutions. Quarterly or something like it. That being an awful lot of time, I thought to have some sub-goals sprinkled in between - monthly or some such. Right. Back at the start.

Last week I read Corvus Elrod’s Hats in the New Year, and decided that; yes - it is time to get something done around here. After a brief chat about one of his projects I managed to derail the conversation in on keeping focus on one project at a time, and he suggested taking an agile approach. As that actually makes sense, I’ll try it out. Quarterly (fuzzy) goals filled with two week sprints. This, with accountability from blogging, should keep me focused on a (few) projects at a time. If not, the problem probably is the wetware aprox. ten inches from the screen…

As it is in the middle of the holidays right now, I won’t commit just yet. Though I’ll say this; there is an overwhelming chance that my first goals will be related to me getting into blogging regularly. I need that.

Have a nice time.