Over the last weeks I spent some time to get the blog work­ing again, after I screwed it up.  I started by mak­ing a child theme of the pop­u­lar iNove theme by NeoEase. A few days later I had to apply some fixes for Inter­net Explorer users. When­ever I had some spare time I changed a few set­tings and tried oth­ers. For instance, Opera users would see strange sym­bols some­where in the text. That’s because wp-Typography has an option named “Enable wrap­ping after hard hyphens” which adds zero-width spaces after hard hyphens. Opera evi­dently doesn’t like this, so I turned if off for the time being.

I deleted a few plug-ins and tried a few oth­ers. I now have a new con­tact form (Con­tact Form 7) and I’m quite happy with Anti­spam Bee which does an excel­lent job. In addi­tion, I edited the Embed­ded Video plug-in to enable embed­ding videos from a few more sites and changed a few para­me­ters. On the other hand, I cleaned up the Socia­ble plug-in and changed a few things in my CSS file to make the site more pleas­ant to look at. Right now, I’m plan­ning to change my theme but I’d have to take a closer look at pos­si­ble can­di­dates first, so that may take me a while.

Now that these issues are out of the way I can return to blog­ging once again. Stay tuned for more posts!

A few weeks ago, I totally screwed up my theme and I had to cre­ate it from scratch. Of course, since I use the iNove theme by NeoEase – what’s the big deal? Back when I first installed this theme I didn’t know about child themes in Word­Press so I altered the orig­i­nal theme. When I updated iNove nearly a month ago I undid all my changes with one click. I fixed most of it within the hour by mak­ing use of child themes. Unfor­tu­nately, I didn’t use Inter­net Explorer so I didn’t see how screwed up the blog looked. I’m sorry.

Today, I’ve changed all that. It should look fine with IE once again. Prob­a­bly not as good as it does with Fire­fox or Opera but you can read my posts again. Mostly, the blog was ren­dered unus­able with IE because up to ver­sion 8 Inter­net Explorer doesn’t really sup­port “:before” and “:after” pseudo-elements. Thanks to QuirksMode for the CSS con­tents and browser com­pat­i­bil­ity which pro­vides a quick overview. Any­ways, you shouldn’t encounter any weird dis­play issues with IE from now on. Enjoy!

Word­Press 3.0 – code­name Thelo­nious – is now avail­able for down­load or auto­matic upgrade respec­tively. The 13th major release includes a new default theme called Twenty Ten, intro­duces new APIs, and merges MU and Word­Press. Even bet­ter, the devel­op­ers man­aged to cre­ate a lighter inter­face and stuff in 1,217 bug fixes and fea­ture enhance­ments. What I like most so far is the new bulk update for plu­g­ins. A com­pre­hen­sive list of the improve­ments is avail­able on 3.0′s Codex page. Go get it from the offi­cial site.

Over the last few days I spent a lit­tle time on Word­Press, inter­est­ing plug-ins, and some set­tings. First of all, I improved your abil­ity to com­ment on my ram­blings. Now you have the power to con­ve­niently for­mat your text. In addi­tion, there’s a new option to keep you up to speed, if you decide to pro­duce some text. This option is dis­abled by default but you can turn it on by acti­vat­ing the check­box titled “Notify me of fol­lowup com­ments via e-mail”, which is located right under the text editor.

Next, I finally cus­tomized my 404 error page. The default page may be nice but I didn’t like it all that much. This isn’t a final ver­sion but it’s def­i­nitely bet­ter than its pre­de­ces­sor. In addi­tion, I fixed a few things which were bro­ken in IE. Nat­u­rally, this site is opti­mized for Fire­fox but the lay­out should now be the same on IE as well. If the site looks really messed up you can always fall back on Firefox.

Of course, I installed a few addi­tional plug-ins and opti­mized a few lines of code, even though PHP isn’t a script­ing lan­guage I’m very famil­iar with. Let’s just say that I removed a few unnec­es­sary PHP/MySQL calls by hard­cod­ing a few things as out­lined in this excel­lent arti­cle over at Dig­ging into Word­Press. Any­way, the site loads a tad faster and surely is a bit more con­ve­nient to use than it was before. Finally, thanks to Reg­is­ter Plus you can reg­is­ter more eas­ily now. Read more…

How to exclude an image from your gallery? That’s the ques­tion I’ve been ask­ing myself a few days ago. Obvi­ously, Word­Press doesn’t pro­vide a solu­tion for this action out of the box so I had to get some help. As usual, Google wasn’t shy and came up with a lot of sug­ges­tions. First, I tried to hack my functions.php accord­ing to this awe­some post from the devel­op­ment team at Code Greene. Yes, it worked out quite well but I didn’t like all the has­sle … and I kinda fried my functions.php because the pro­vided code was full of HTML enti­ties (you know, & instead of & and the like).

So, I had to look fur­ther and I stum­bled over a nice lit­tle plug-in called Cleaner Gallery. This plug-in mainly takes care of the invalid XHTML that Word­Press pro­duces when using the gallery short­code. Addi­tion­ally, it pro­vides the user with a few more fea­tures not the least of it the abil­ity to exclude or include any images from your gallery. Just install it, take a look at the pro­vided readme.html and there you go. Nice work!

… and I find myself doing what I should’ve done quite a while ago: updat­ing the blog. I recently upgraded to the lat­est Word­Press build and I took the time to change the theme as well. I’m not yet done cus­tomiz­ing the theme to its fullest extent, how­ever, it works and that’s what counts. There will be more posts in the future as I find myself hav­ing a lit­tle more spare time than usual. The header needs some work and I’m not yet sure about the side­bar. Well, let’s see how much time I’m will­ing to spend on that.