100th entry
Feb 16th, 2008 by lavonardo
Well, with this entry, it’s been 100 entries with the new blog engine, and it’s time for some low-key analysis.
All in all Wordpress has worked well, and been a pleasant tool to play around with.
The initial installation issues were pretty much the web hotel’s fault (and routed around with minimal effort).
The only real bug seems to be the inability to show more than 15 drafts on a single page (and even more perplexingly, the total inability to show any of the extra drafts at all). Fixing would probably mean touching php-code, and I’m not brave enough to resort to that. At least yet.
Haven’t yet found a truly great theme for the blog. Mistylook works well enough, but has some niggling issues that have required .css surgery. Again, nothing major, just some itches to scratch.
What next? Inevitably an update to 2.5 when it surfaces in march. Use of an image randomizer for the header is not built in Mistylook, but will probably serve as a nice introduction to figuring how to get things done within a theme. And it’s definitely high time to add some extra widgets into the sidebar.
At least my solution for image randomizer was to change url for header image (in MistyLook theme) to point into cgi script. This cgi script knows that all the files in directory xyz are good candidates for the banner, so it randomly picks on, reads it in and prints it out.
Before you do that, you probably want to lock down the dimensions of your website (regarding width). Once you’ve cropped 30+ banners, which size is 888×222 pixles (just randomly picked figures), you really don’t want to realize, that all those banners should have been 30-50 pixels wider…
On my blog, I changed the content area so that I can add 720 pixels wide into my posts, but kept the default sidebar (unfortunate accident …). If I could do it all over again, I would also increase sidebars width so that I would be able to add 200×200 ads in there.
Yeah, figured that some small piece of code would be needed. Might do a cgi-script, might attempt to do it within the php itself.
Increasing the width might be a good thing to consider, since the current form is rather anorectic and elongated, leading to long entries flowing off the screen. Which is not the way things should be.