…when I decide to post an update to my website, which I have shamefully neglected for the past twelve months. Despite promising regular updates every time I do this, I never actually do it. Oh well…

However, there’s actually something to report. I added a linkroll for my Delicious bookmarks to the Links page, replacing the text that stated that I would, at some undetermined point in the future, add some actual links to the page. Tadaa! The linkroll will always display the most recent bookmarks I save to Delicious, and I might even play around with the CSS to style them properly. Might. Might not.

In other news, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. As with other fancy Web 2.0 stuff, I’m one of the first to know about it, and one of the last to adopt it. So, if you feel like following my more or less regular tweets, go to my Twitter page.

So long!

Today I spent at least five hours working on my WordPress theme. I haven’t really done much programming in XHTML/CSS in the past year, so it took quite some time to get into the code again. The stylesheet for the layout was a complete mess, and while I updated the WordPress software to 2.8.2 last saturday, some of the PHP files in my theme were “leftovers” from the old version. You get the picture.

After what I did today, the stylesheet looks much better, and major parts of the XHTML are way cleaner than before. As a result, the code validates again properly via the W3C Markup Validation Service. Now, let’s have a look at what changed for someone who visits the site.

I did a complete overhaul of the metadata for each entry (time and date of the posting, categories, tags and the link to the comment area), so the distinction between the actual post and the metadata appears clearer. The same was done for the metadata in the comment area, aka the single post page. This went along with some cleaning up of font sizes, colors, hyperlink behaviour and of course lots of wrestling with the infamous paddings and margins.

The second, big change concerns the comment area. I’ve tweaked all the forms (the input fields for name, e-mail and website, as well as the input area for the comment text), and brought the formatting of the actual comments in line with the rest of the site layout. Last but not least, I implemented support for Gravatar icons in the comments. Since WordPress supports this since version 2.5, it was only a matter of adding some PHP to the comments template. Visitors who already signed up with Gravatar and uploaded an image will now see it appear next to their comments.

After today’s programmathon, there’s not all that much more to do. I might tweak some small things here and there, but don’t expect any revolutionary changes in the near future… unless I decide to rebuilt the layout from scratch on a whim.

Since I’ve never really done much here since I built the original site, the WordPress version I was using was pretty old already. Today I finally got ’round to taking care of that, and it seems I was successful: the “news” page is now running the latest WordPress version, 2.8.2, and thanks to the new update routine, upgrading should be much easier in the future.

On the administrative side, there’s the new WordPress content management system/dashboard which makes quite a few tasks more convenient to handle for me. On the visitor’s side, there’s not much new at the first glance. However, you might notice the overhauled sidebar, which is now widget-enabled for more compatibility if I decide to add new sidebar items in the future.

I have revamped the page design (again), removing the bright red and toxic green (don’t ask if you haven’t seen it, be happy), fixed some smaller bugs and updated a little content in the “Projects”, “About” and “Contact” sections. If you like (or dislike) the site design, feel free to comment on it.

After one week of working on several drafts, I decided it was time for a release of version 0.1. I wont give this release a full version number (e.g. 1.0) yet because there is still lots of fine tuning needed.

I started off with a simple HTML layout based on CSS. Like many others (I presume) I had only worked with tables for designing layouts, so CSS was a real revelation. I’ll never go back to using tables, really. After the first few days decided I wanted a more dynamic content management system, which pure HTML can’t offer (at least not when I code it). I chose WordPress for that. I lost about a day trying to work out its structure, mainly by reverse engineering the default theme and heavily modifying it to suit my needs. I never worked with PHP before and knew nothing about it so this proved to be quite a challenge – but I’m happy with the results so far.

The graphics have gone through three major overhauls during this one week, the current version is what I finally came up with today. I might change it again though, depending on wether or not I can still bear to watch it tomorrow.

For the next update I’m gonna try to get the structure of the subcategories sorted, along with uploading some content. I’m still not perfectly happy with using HTML for those pages – it’s not very convenient to update and I’m not sure if I want to go through that every time something changes in those categories. Other fixes will involve a consistent hyperlink design, some changes in font size here and there and maybe a restructuring of the sidebar.

Thanks go out to Mr. Fukai for advising me of the possibilities inherent in CSS, to the Lavazza coffee company for helping to keep me awake, and to my sweet girlfriend for reminding me of the fact that humans need to sleep in order to keep up the creative flow.

So long!