Feb122010
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PNG me?
Originally, I wanted the images I used in posts to blend smoothly with the background. GIFs give a simple level of transparency but it’s an on/off deal – hardly what I was looking for. PNGs are the other option but when the format first appeared they were barely supported and even when they became more widespread, a few dopey hold-outs still handled them badly. So I created images with the background colour blended into them. Looked good, nice small file… but an absolute pain in the chuff to re-do any time you moved to a theme with a different background colour. Hopefully, these days, browsers have come a little further and the chance of encountering some backward, hill-billy software that can’t handle a simple PNG image correctly should be pretty slim. By converting images on the site over time to PNGs, I at least remove that stumbling block for when I do have some time for a proper shuffle. The images will be bigger, unfortunately, but that’s okay, right? You’re all on beefy bandwidth connections, yeah? No? Oh well, sucks to be you. Tags / pc / redesign / wordpress / |
I mentioned updating my theme in my
Jan202009
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Bleaurgh… IEPretty much just a follow-up to one of my earlier posts (‘Skoardy v3.0‘) where I unveiled/announced my revamp of the Skoardy.com theme. I was pretty happy with the results as I’d almost managed to achieve everything I set out to with the new look and also added some elements I’d overlooked the first time I switched everything over to WordPress. Of course, I have little-to-no faith in my skills with CSS, hence the comments about not coughing. It’s a rickety set of stairs, the outer shell of Skoardy.com, and give it too much of a hammering and it’s likely to fall apart. But, it looked okay and everything was where it should be… or so I thought. In comes Microsoft’s Internet Explorer with it’s size 9 clod-hoppers and its own unique take on what things should look like. Normally, I use Firefox as my default browser. It’s small, fast and best of all, with the right add-ons, you’ll never need to see another advert again. It looked fine on that. I even tried the site with Google’s Chrome – the new kid of the block that’s also small/fast. Also, looked fine. And with IE? Yeah…um, well, it was borked on IE. I don’t usually like booting IE up. These days it seems there’s always some kind of new exploit being reported and death from within for anyone foolish enough to take it for a spin on the intahwebs. Eventually, I worked up the nerve to have a look. Things were misplaced, oddly positioned and some bizarre gaps were appearing. One by one, I managed correct the flaws, writing in more specific code so that even IE couldn’t get creative with my instructions. Everything was fixed, except for some gaps in the sidebar. I know IE users take up the market share of web tourists (seriously guys, switch to a new browser already!) so I wanted to fix it but nothing I tried could get rid. So every few days I’d get a new idea and try it out with the hope that it’d fix the problem without breaking the site for other browsers. Every time, same result. Nada. Tonight, however, the new fix worked and everything fell into place. Better still, it’s something that other browsers appear to care little about. Of course, this is just with version 7 of IE. If it’s broken on older versions, screw you. Upgrade… or better still, switch to a new browser already! Tags / firefox / google / microsoft / mozilla / pc / redesign / wordpress / |
Dec222008
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Skoardy v3.0Don’t make a sound! Don’t cough. For heaven’s sake don’t sneeze, whatever you do! I’ve just rebuilt the website’s theme and the slightest jostle could bring it crashing down around your ears. I thought it was about time for a change and doing so has allowed me to fix a couple of oversights I made when I first put the Wordpress website together. The first thing that got sorted was being able to show more than one category at the same time. While I could define my posts as have multiple categories, my first theme couldn’t display them (it’d only show the first one). That’s sorted now. I can go category buck-wild… er… not that I plan to. But I could! Second was a better integration of the tags. I’ve been adding them to the posts and had that chubby tag cloud in the old footer so it seemed daft not to list them in the posts. Well, there they are. The tag cloud itself has gone, replaced with a list of the top 30 tags over in the side bar. I’ve binned the comments. They weren’t getting used – though I never really expected them to. No, scratch that. They were getting used but there’s only so many hours in the day you can devote to marking bot-seeded porn site advert comments as spam. And what have we learnt from doing another theme? Mostly that creating images for pretty much every post and blending them to the theme’s background colour is going to bite you in the ass somewhere down the line. Yeah, recreating all those was a mind-numbing excercise in tedium fun. Anyway, enjoy. Mind what you touch, though. The paint is still wet in a few places. Tags / redesign / wordpress / |
Mar12008
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Good to be back…Ignoring the whole “You were gone?” and “Who are you, again?” issues for a moment, let me just say that it’s nice to have a site I can talk at again. I’ve missed it. That is to say, it’s been over a year since I last posted anything to Skoardy.com which really is quite inexcusable when you think about it. But don’t think about it because you’ll probably arrive at the same conclusion I did and that is that it doesn’t really matter, given no-one was reading what I wrote. As conclusions go, that one kinda sucks. But hey, new site and everything! It’s actually a little leaner than the old one while still looking at lot like it. I’ve jumped on the old WordPress bandwagon and I suppose I can finally come to terms with it… I’m a blogger. *sigh* I also resolve to post a whole lot more than I did previously. Not hard, you might think but when you’re catering to as many imaginary readers as I am, the task just seems too daunting at times. I believe I may have a solution to the problem though – Imaginary Staff! They can do all the grunt work behind the scenes and I’ll bask in the limelight, accepting the adoration for being the public face of Skoardy.com! It all evens out in the end. Anyhoo, the last time we spoke I promised to talk about World of Warcraft’s first expansion, The Burning Crusade (it’s top fun) and the Nintendo Wii (it also rocks hard, with ‘Super Mario Galaxy‘ being insanely brilliant). There you go. There are a few ‘broken’ people who are rather down on WoW and the Wii (naming no names, they know who they are) but we ignore them. Tags / Gaming / nintendo / redesign / super mario galaxy / wii / wordpress / world of warcraft / |