The One with the Thoughts of Frans

It’s totally consuming my bandwith all of a sudden, disabled comments except for registered users for the time being. O_o

As an anti-spam measure, the forced comment preview in combination with Akishmet anti-spam helped to single out virtually any spam comment I received. But the forced comment preview started to annoy me personally, so I decided to switch to Challenge in combination with Akishmet instead. I trust it is a lot easier than those stupid image validation mechanisms, but just as troublesome for spambots. And even if it’s not, Akishmet will still stop them anyway.

I will blend it in a little better with my layout later.

If you register and login when registered, you won’t have to fill out any challenge.

Apperently multiple people searched for funny tree frans in Google, which resulted in their arrival on this weblog. Sadly I did not offer a funny picture of me with a tree yet, so they probably left shortly. However, I have one and it’s requested according to the big G, so here it is.

Am I funny under that tree or what? 😛

I hope they realized that they should have been searching for happy tree friends; or at least that’s what I think they were trying to reach.

The quick quote I basically copied (as an idea) from the MyOpera community forums wasn’t really using its full potential. After trying a while I gave up and used a workaround to point to the comment it quoted from. I decided to check out how they had done it over at Opera. Turns out they did the same. Ah well, at least it works reassuring to my own skills. 😛

Further I had implemented the sidenotes already, but the stylesheet lacked a bit (basically one position:relative).

Last, but not least, I removed a bug from the blockquote source-link script which linked to null if not right. It’s not perfect yet though, as I do want it to show if it’s not a link, but I’ll get to that later. I’ll also extend it to the Q element.

Tell me what you think about the image hover effects as demonstrated on my post about my music collection. I don’t really like it, but I’m not sure what else to do. I’ll probably write a behaviour which removes the CSS hover effect and inserts a clickable source link below the downsized image, leaving the CSS hover for people without Javascript. People with Opera, Javascript disabled and drag=255 will probably be annoyed though. You can’t have everything. 😉

I also added a line to my stylesheet for code as displayed in the user stylesheet I posted recently. I think it’s fine, but feel free to drop suggestions (smaller font perhaps) if you please. This is nothing new, I just forgot to add it to my “final” version of the stylesheet before.

I just updated to the latest WordPress version. The uploading took a while, despite multiple threads and my fast connection. Perhaps I should simply have put it to 50 simultaneous connections or so for this operation. Luckily not much has changed so that my custom Atom file (for 1.0 rather than 0.3) still functions fine. I noticed that the (in my eyes useless) TinyMCE editor took up most of the time however. I just thought deleting the files involved from my planned uploads would be harder than to wait a little longer while doing other things.

I thought I’d inform people who don’t know me a little better about the fact that I use valid HTML (and CSS etcetera). When I had done that I thought it would actually be much more important to give credit to a few people. Thanks Ethan and Tom, you’re mentioned on my about page now.

I just decided to check my stats and apperently people coming from American-based IP’s take up nearly 70% of my traffic. Not that I specifically aim for any kind of traffic, but it’s still quite a surprise. Assuming that Ethan doesn’t refresh this page all the time of course. 😛

Geek Philosopher is a resource for royalty-free imagery. As you can see I brought a bit of life into the header by cutting pieces an image from the Outdoor Photos and Backgrounds category. Grass by Sidewalk is the full image for those interested.

I took a look around the various categories and most of them are pretty good pictures. I am not sure about the exact copyrights on any of them, as I couldn’t find any pictures labeled with any of the descriptions which are on the about page of the site. I suppose I’ll take a new fresh look tomorrow at that aspect of the site tomorrow after a good night’s sleep.

Luckily as far as the design is concerned I haven’t yet managed to break anything in IE (although the gravatars are a pixel off). I might go with alpha-transparant PNG’s though for some of the transparancy effects, as that would certainly make a much smaller image load and it would make things look somewhat less prettier in IE. After all, I do want people to switch to Firefox, Opera, Safari or whatever else isn’t so annoying to anyone who wants to do a little bit more with CSS.

If you take a look around in my CSS file you’ll notice that I’m trying something new. Over the past half year I switched from full CSS to very compact CSS, but that’s not really a difference. The thing I’m experimenting with here is to indent those properties which are basically a sort of subproperties of a certain thing to increase readability. I must say it’s already working out quite well.

So drop your suggestions now, as this is the layout I plan to extend on in the close future.

Actually the release of WordPress 2.0 and this new weblog have no connection at all, it just so happened that Ethan gave me this as a Christmas present at the same time WordPress 2.0 was released. I knew for sure that I wanted to try something other than WordPress 1.5 and what can be better for that than WordPress 2.0, the tool which already served me well for almost six months?

So far I only set up a few basic things. It should be noted that a few setting related things, most particularly the permalinks, are even smoother than they already were. The usage of AJAX in the entry management is nice (it makes deleting so much smoother), but that doesn’t make me hate the (in my view) abuse of the name of Ajax any less. Also it still displays replies related to a post after deleting it, which isn’t bad, but it did cause me to click delete and get a “this reply doesn’t exist” message, which certainly could confuse new users.

The rich text editor is nice and can easily be disabled, but sadly a few tiny things like inserting links don’t work on Opera. That’s more likely the fault of the incomplete Rich Text implementation on the Opera Technical Preview I use than of WordPress.

Before the end of the year, I will finally put the Calendar back online, as I’ve had many mails requesting it. Further I doubt I will post much here during the rest of the holidays.