In addition, my apologies for the lack of posts lately. Amongst other things I’ve really not been well, a recent bout with kidney stones has laid me low but I feel it’s time now to get back on top… so to speak. I have new toys too (laptop and phone), time I did something with them! Soon as I get Ubuntu set up of course. It spent last night defragging that pesky NTFS partition so today I can resize and free some hard drive space. I’m biting my nails when it comes to graphics support (I’ve always used nvidia in the past, this laptop has a Radeon 3450) but I’m sure it will handle things immaculately.

One thing this HP Laptop has impressed me with so far (I only got it yesterday) is being able to run Bloodbowl at it’s native resolution of 1440 x 900. But not just run – run smoothly with some effects and filters turned on – I’m very impressed! Note to anybody reading this who has a copy of the game – get in touch. I’d love to test the online multiplayer on this game.

That’s all for now, you should see this site return to it’s former state over the next few days. In the mean time I apologise for missing links – sorry!

EDIT

Ok, so I’ve finished moving bendavis.me to my new domain manager and host so the site is back! All I need to do is change the theme. It’s not autumn any more… time for a new look. Expect my style’s to be in flux for a while as I jangle about in the back (metaphorically) trying to plug the Christmas lights in.

I’m still not sure about a few things, and feel the theme needs more to tie it together. Is the header font right, does it fit?

What do people think?

I invite all criticism, but please be nice

Because I love Wallace and Gromit too!

Looking through the Divine Project website and reading more about it seems to uncover a few pertinant points.

The site itself answers my initial question in its F.A.Q

What is Divine plug-in?

Divine is the program developed for those who know a bit about Photoshop and sites creation but don’t want to waste their time making up a valid website on basis of popular CMS manually. Using this program you are able to easily make up a professional website and upload it promptly to the server through the embedded FTP-client.

Waste time making a valid website? Are they insinuating that valid code is unimportant? Can’t say I agree with that if that is what they mean. The plugin goes so far as to manage the entire themes’ upload and management as well.

I can see this being a very tempting short-cut for a lot of wordpress users.. but not the die-hards. Although in essence the first release of it is beta I still see its shortcomings as pretty important. A full list of the current limitations of the plugin are listed here so I’ll just talk about a few of the most important ones to me.

1. Firstly there is a default layout which currently (they do plan to expand from it) you have to adhere to. Not a huge problem, most WordPress websites are arranged in a similar way. Header, content, sidebar and footer; but not all and I still believe this would curtail creativity.

2. Custom CSS (in the documentation they refer to these as useritems) is limited to a total of 5 entries. Everything else must be accomplished using only existing wordpress generated css. I think of this as being quite similar to the idea behind csszengarden.com. While that works for zengarden I don’t believe it could work for wordpress themes where more often than not a truly stand out theme will feature some clever creations of the developer.

3. This I think is huge. All images created by the plugin are gif format. That to me strikes out any hope of gaining my custom even if I had a copy of Photoshop. Are they mad? Jpg and (for me preferably) png images are where internet design can only be taken with SVG poking it’s resizeable head around the corner. Gif is a format which, for me, is defunct for all but the simplest of web designs. The formats’ only bonus is the fact you can create animations; as brilliantly used in the Retro Theatre design by Eric Rogé.

All in all I like the fact that this plugin has been made, despite my criticisms of it. Not everyone is confident with code and not everyone wants to be. This plugin gives people like that a chance to indulge their creativity and get it online. My worry is that it will be responsible for a deluge of new themes, none of which use valid code. In addition to which the creator would not necessarily have a clue how to deal with problems which might arise. How for example would designs created by this plugin deal with different browsers? The rendering properties of IE, firefox, opera, konqueror etc are problems which still plague developers to this day – has this plugin solved them all? I somehow think not.

Never-the-less I will follow this plugins progress and see what users of it have to say – one of whom is my brother so I shall be getting his feedback too – it may even appear on his site!

But this is all just one man’s opinion – I’d love to know what my other fellow wordpress users think about it?

This site is simple and does exactly what it says in the header.

While I’m putting together my final review of Moon OS I thought I’d talk a little about a plugin I use a lot these days. Xmarks started initially as foxmarks, a Firefox plugin for backing up your bookmarks and actually syncing them each time you add/remove links. Adding a plugin to firefox is such an easy and, importantly, quick procedure that it meant you could share your bookmarks between two places effortlessly.

That functionality continues today with Xmarks but has been improved and expanded to include other browsers.

To date these are Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. The beta release for Google’s chrome is out and seems stable thus far. Also added since foxmarks is an ability to back up usernames and passwords as well as bookmarks. Possibly very useful indeed.

The main use I have found is while programming websites. I have quite a carefully built collection of bookmarks to reference pages for php/html/javascript; whatever it might be, without which I would spend a lot more time scratching my head trying to remember rules and snippets. Without acknowledging browser differences your site could be rendered in some very different ways. As a result, I seldom find myself using only one browser at a time.

I don’t own a Mac and irrespective of my feelings on them I need to know how they and webkit will render a design. The only way I have of doing that is to boot into Windows and run Safari. Working mainly in Linux and with Firefox this means I loose access to all my carefully organised bookmarks. Not so with Xmarks. Now I can access them anywhere. Even from within a Linux Live CD.

There are far more uses for this than the ones I cite above, they’re just from my experience but I genuinely recommend this plugin. If having a safe, back up of all your bookmarks wasn’t enough, you can access them through the most popular browsers on any operating system quickly and easily. For free.

Job done.

The code behind it is a hugely modified version of the Writers Blog theme by Eric Crooks. I loved his simple yet elegant theme and knew it would be a great starting point. However; there are a few things now I need to do with the theme to finish it that require a rewrite of the basics to accomplish.

I don’t like monolithic programming structures. That is Microsoft’s biggest mistake in my opinion; and the reason Windows gets so slow after even a short period of use. But what I have here is a combination of so many little css hacks and alterations that reviewing my code makes my eyes water.

Bad Benjy.

So, it’s time to stop it and tidy up (fantastic cartoon when I was growing up – anyone else remember it?) With all this colour and panache I’ve lost what I hold dearest in web design: semantic markup + clear and concise CSS = ease of use/adaptation for all.

Once I’m happy with it I can get on with uploading some of the other wordpress themes I’ve been working on.. and everything else I tinker with when I’ve half the chance.

After a little discussion and some information about how wordpress.com functions from mesanna I’ve quite quickly made the first demo version of a generated button. And here it is.

So far it’s really just proof of concept, and its code is a little limited but could very easily and quickly be improved, depending on what information you actually wanted to share. The reason I’ve put the date in for now is because it’s the simplest way to show the principle involved here. The date comes from the php function of the same name in this case I used:

date("D jS M - G:i");

What I’m trying to show here is that information available on the server side: databases, xml feeds, _POST and _GET requests, anything; can quite easily be transposed into a graphic without the need for java or anything that is blocked on wordpress.com. The sky is the limit!

The image src (if you look at the code) is actually:

<img src="http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php" alt="Linux Mint Button" width="181" height="60" ⁄>

If you visit ../button.php you will see the png. For now I’ve also added basic functionality to change the statement (the “Taste Mint” bit) to whatever you want. Just bear in mind the picture’s only 181px across and the logo takes up 50px or so of that.

So, if you add “?alt=Your Text” to the end of the above link, the button will change accordingly. Note just for clarity the entire url will then look like:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Your Text

So, if you were type something like this into your browser:

http://bendavis.me/mintpromo/button.php?alt=Minty%20Linux

You’d get a modified graphic just so.

Obviously, no programmer worth his salt would allow the user so much scope for editing your scripts in a working public version of this, it’s just to illustrate my point.

To further polish this, I’d use my .htaccess file to make an actual img url, something like promo-button.png so it appeared to the casual user that it really was just an image. The next step I think.

Thanks to facade47 on the forums for the font and reverend_nerd for his great button.

What do you think?

All I will say is that I’ve been a gmail user for years now and love the way they handled emails, adding coherency to your mail, linking threads and similar conversations. Wave seems like a logical move from there.

I will be watching the development of this product very closely though. Looks like google are onto a winner. Plus I love the fact that it’s html5. Most browsers are moving towards this, apart from IE which edges forward then has to double back to fix errors. Tsk tsk.

Google Wave – Read More

Basically, with this theme I wanted something really personal, the kind of theme you’re unlikely to find anywhere else. I also wanted to make its palette slightly ubuntuesque with oranges and browns. I think it’s coming along pretty well.

Damn it looks good in firefox

One thing though, it’s highly firefox/webkit optimized. It will always look better in firefox or any browser supporting the border-radius css3 property (currently just safari for the mac). Sorry IE and Opera users but my site just won’t look as good in your browsers. Perhaps a while down the road (when these incompatible browsers have done a little catch up. Apparently IE9 will include support for border-radius as well as native SVG support… but that’s thought for another day.

For now, the screenshot comes proudly from firefox… 3.0.10 and I think it’s looking great!