www.nickhodge.com

Inter­net Explorer 8 beta 2 has been released. The night before a big PR thing in Mel­bourne (Premier of Vic­toria, etc) and I decided to install it on my demo laptop. Brave, yet safe move.

What about this website?

Not so good. Some­thing is broken some­where. In the week before TechEd 2008 I don’t have time to com­pletely dia­gnose and fix the word­press tem­plate. So, sort of like weld­ing it together for a few weeks until things die down — it is time for a simple fix.

How can you tell? See the “broken doc­u­ment” icon on the right of the URL: this indic­ates that the site has been designed for older browsers.

 

There are two poten­tial fixes. One is to click on the broken icon, and Inter­net Explorer will revert to Inter­net Explorer 7 mode.

A smarter fix for this web site is a one-line change to my tem­plate (in my case, header.php for this template)

<meta http-equiv=“X-UA-Compatible” con­tent=“IE=EmulateIE7” />

 

 

Refresh­ing the site, and magic­ally it renders cor­rectly, and there is no “broken” doc­u­ment icon.

Time to change themes on this site.

I have a simple request: White-space is king, single left hand nav­ig­a­tion with fluid right-hand con­tent column. Tweak­ing the typo­graphy to look bril­liant is more import­ant than whizzy graph­ics detract­ing the eye.

As @evilsue says on twit­ter: “have reskinned blog.….again.…its the poor girls sub­sti­tute for buy­ing shoes”

So, with these demands in mind — my first port of call was to put a call out to the Twit­ter­ati. Here is my list of sites, in no par­tic­u­lar order.

Let’s start the ThemeHunting:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes/Theme_List

What is a theme, and how do you cre­ate one?

At the bot­tom of the page, there is a list of Theme sites.

Very soon you head into nasty MySpace-themed sites with mega-advertisements ugliness.

http://themes.wordpress.net/

This is the uber-viewer of themes, hos­ted by Word­Press. There is a stand­ard set of con­tent you can apply to vari­ous themes.

For instance, for my next theme I would like left side­bar, 2 column, white, no header image and widget-ready.

Either the way the themes are clas­si­fied in ThemeViewer, or the viewer itself seems borked as you get a mix­ture of everything when you search.

The themes here seem to be rather plain, but it is the place to start your search.

http://www.elegantwpthemes.com/

Eleg­ant themes seem to involve lots of shad­ing, blue and images.

No magical search­ing to make life easier to find that theme.

http://www.revolutiontheme.com/

This is an uber-theme that alters the concept of Word­Press as a blog into Word­Press as a CMS.

http://www.topwpthemes.com/

Advert­ise­ments stat­ing “earn $3506 per month from blog­ging” seem to har­angue you on this site; again many pre-built images in the header.

Mega-click through blog with no smart search­ing. fail.

http://www.templateworld.com/free_templates.html

Inter­est­ing list of tem­plates, but seems to be frozen in 2007

http://www.noupe.com/design/60-unusual-wp-blog-designs.html

Now, if I was going super-trendy with lots of graph­ics and col­our — this is the site I would choose first.

There is an excel­lent list of no-frills themes too in the 45+ Must-see Themes. And I think I’ve found my first contender:

http://www.briangardner.com/themes/blue-zinfandel-wordpress-theme.htm (although in review it lacks right-fluidity)

It is also inter­est­ing to see the themes borked by com­ment form ugliness

http://www.wpthemereview.com/

Des Walsh, of Think­ing Home Busi­ness, pos­ted this link.

Here, each of the Word­Press themes earns an SEO score: how well the par­tic­u­lar theme works with search-engine optim­isa­tion. In my instance, I have some WP plu­gins doing some magic behind the scenes to ensure the search­bots get it right.

From this site, I found my second contender:

http://www.theblogstudio.com/index.php/v5/resources (Branches theme, I would howerver change the top-left image)

http://del.icio.us/popular/wordpress

Of course! fol­low the tags, son.

First to pop up in the list is http://www.wpzoom.com/

Smash­ing Magazine has an excel­lent list of plain well designed themes: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/03/25/15-more-free-first-class-wordpress-themes/

I like Bal­ance­White and Text­Back

Meta-theme Gen­er­ator: http://www.yvoschaap.com/wpthemegen/

This is fun: Word­Press theme by form. I recall try­ing this about a year ago, with epic fail. Now seems to be rather cool.

Rock­ing Themes: http://rockinthemes.com/

The current/to be replaced theme here is Ambi­ent Glo Fluid 1.5. Look­ing around on that site, I notice that there are some excel­lent min­im­al­ist designs such as http://rockinthemes.com/rockinminimalist-2-column-free-wordpress-theme/

Con­clu­sions?

Word­Press Themes are like shoes. You can shop until you drop, install them all and wear dif­fer­ent col­ours on dif­fer­ent days.

Oh, the choices!

Don’t know if stuff is broken. Installed 10 minutes after ship­ment. Just unzip, drag and drop. FTP. Upgrade. Done.

Notes from De-commissioning old Con­tent Man­age­ment Sys­tem: The Mun­gen­etEn­gine. The engine has rendered 10 mil­lion image views and 2.5 mil­lion page views from hand­coded MySQL and PHP.

1. “cod­ing” in PHP feels wrong, wrong, wrong. A little dirty. After 6 months, I feel I should be writ­ing in C#, Iron­Py­thon; at least some­thing decent. Not PHP. It’s too lose. Like Visual Basic. Sadly, this will prob­ably the last time I use PHP for a sig­ni­fic­ant amount of time as I move to CLR/DLR style lan­guages and platforms.
2. The code to com­plete the trans­ition was a mere 138 lines of PHP; ref­er­en­cing some open­source XML-RPC lib­rar­ies (to insert blog entries over the wire), and 2110 lines in the base lib­rary that acts as the old engine.
3. Turn­ing off http://twitter.com/nickhodge for a few days helped pro­ductiv­ity. Also work­ing at home dur­ing the shenanigans of APEC 2007 helped pro­ductiv­ity, too.  I also stopped being as respons­ive on email, voice­mail etc to get some good “focus” time to get this happening.
4. The code I am put­ting out to pas­ture was largely writ­ten in 2001–2. Small pieces were tweaked through 2002–7. It has sur­vived PHP 4.0.x to 5.2.x pretty unscathed. http://nickhodge.com/mn8/section/23/ details the his­tory and philo­sophy of the self-written and main­tained CMS.
5. Word­Press is not the final step. It is just a good time to move a plat­form I trans­ition to other places in the future, some­where in the cloud.
6. As Joel Pobar says, “hav­ing no policy on cache is a memory leak”. In my instance, the smart­ness of a cache for pro­duc­tion use to reduce hits on MySQL res­ul­ted in a bug that took 45 minutes to track down. Not as a memory leak, just unex­pec­ted behavior.
7. Strategy: get images from the data­base into a fixed file sys­tem under http://media.nickhodge.com/. As per the wise guid­ance of UncleMike, this future­proofs my data. A part of the strategy is to move the rss feeds to a local feed sys­tem as I am not trust­ing feed­burner and feed­jum­bler for stats right now.
8. Rendered pages: best thing to do is “wrap” what is con­tent with mark­ers, render the page via CURL, and per­sist what is wrapped into the Word­Press CMS. The how came to me in an after­noon nana nap. Con­scious brain was on hold, and the real smarts came to the fore. 
9. Reg­u­lar Expres­sions. Why-oh-why where they inven­ted to make my brain explode? Thank­fully, the intar­webs helps.
10. A shim of the Mun­gen­etEn­gine will remain in place to “301″ old URLs to new URLs. Full page ren­der­ing and image/binary ren­der­ing will be turned off. There­fore, the import mode will not be Word­Press RSS style import. Using http://www.dentedreality.com.au/bloggerapi/ to post via XML-RPC
11. Mangling dates, and doing hand-crafted fixes to my Word­Press XML-RPC (note: this is patched for 2.3, evid­ently) took some hours.
12. There are 761 blog entries prior to trans­ition.  From an earlier blog trans­ition on August 8^th 2006, the count was 371. There have been 390 entries since. Post trans­ition, there are now 940 posts.
13. Raw trans­fer com­plete at 6:50pm 5^th Septem­ber 2007.
14. To com­plete: neater clas­si­fic­a­tion of the new entries.

The blog­ging plat­form his­tory of Mungenet:

Ver­sion 1.0: self-coded User­land Fron­tier, ver­sion 2.0: Radio User­land, ver­sion 3.0: blogger.com, ver­sion 4.0: (self coded) mun­gen­eten­gine.

Today, I’ve moved onto plat­form ver­sion 5.0: Word­Press

Rather than re-coding a blog­ging engine to take into account all the Web 2.0 re/write hot­ness — mov­ing to Word­Press was a part-time pro­ject over the space of a week. Based on PHP, writ­ing a plu­gin, import mod­ule and modi­fy­ing the theme was a rel­at­ively easy pro­ject. Word­Press is like a Lego base plate (or plat­form) from which a new mun­genet may emerge.

The bulk of the con­tent on www.nickhodge.com remains in the self-coded mun­gen­eten­gine; and thanks to Apache mod_rewrite, CSS and some other small PHP smarts — Word­Press has snapped into place.