Hal MacLean

Well, this has got to be good… Here I am using my iPhone once again to send information to my blog. This time it is a short note to describe adding a ‘Stumble Upon’ button to your Wordpress themes.

I noticed that last week the hits rose quite dramatically on a particular item t do with iPhones and on further investigation it turned out that a visitor had added my site to StumbleUpon and thus the sudden influx. It was enough to encourage me to make it even easier for that to happen in future.

A quick visit to Stumbleupon.com and I had the code I needed to enter into the theme files I am using, but it needed some editing. Adding the ‘title’ attribute from Wordpress code endured that the specific page or post gets tagged.

I’ll monitor traffic over the next couple of weeks to see what happens, but I am not expecting much.

Just to finish by saying I rote this entry using my iPhone, and as you can see, it has arrived safely on the site. I am a fan of the wordpress app for iPhone now… but have been a fan of Stumble Upon for years!

I have been an avid letterboxer for many years but recently I haven’t been able to get down to Devon. However, I was pleased to see a Facebook community for letterboxing and joined up… but it’s moving slowly.

I found a new letterboxing enthusiast over at http://www.Saynotopontins.co.uk

The title is a bit odd, but you need to read the content to understand why it’s called what it is. I’ll give you a clue… it’s about Pontins and a bad experience or two that folk have had!

Why not head over there and see what’s being said about letterboxing, too?

At last, I seem to have found a decent set of forum tools that plugs directly into wordpress! I have been looking for something that gives me some of the functionality of PHPbb but uses the Wordpress user table in the database. Following a link to YellowSwordfish I happened across ’sf-forum’.

I have since installed it on this blog, and you can get to it by following the ‘Forum’ links in the menu bar. It allows me to establish forum groups visible only to specific users or set up different ones open to public access. Currently, if you visit the page you will be able to see three forums related to the work I do as part of Cleveratom Limited. However, if you sign up to the site you’ll also see (as a subscriber) another forum dedicated to DVD technologies. Now, none of these are particularly high profile things for me to broadcast, but they do illustrate the power of the simple forum plug in.

The only caveat I would suggest is that to get the forum to appear you need to be sure that your page names match your database names - it took a few minutes for this to sink in and at first I was thinking I had not managed to get a decent forum… but hold fast! Get those names right and it appears beautifully.

Many thanks to Andy (I think) at yellow swordfish - a brilliant little plug in with lots of versatility.

OK - this has got to be blogged. I saw this on a recent tube journey and not for the first time wondered who agreed that it was a good sign to put up in a tube train. I mean, if you saw the stuff going on and left the train to call for help, the train would have gone by the time you got back from the phone… and who has a mobile that works in the tunnels? I mean, for goodness sake - they might as well ask you to post a letter about it for the good it would do…

So let’s say it *is* an emergency. Have you ever tried ringing 999 from the underground?

So, here I am using Wordpress instead of Drupal - and I’ve been busy making sure the old Drupal blog moved successfully to this and on a new server as well. There were all sorts of considerations, including how to keep the ‘googlejuice’ so that I didn’t disappear completely off the search engines.

However, the most important thing after the technical work is to get it looking right, right?

So I began trawling through the various themes available for Wordpress. After several goes I settled on ‘Ocean Mist’ by Ed Merritt - a lovely theme and some nice touches to it. I particularly like the clean lines and the page listing in the sidebar. The use of a drop down menu for the archives is genius, too. However, it still wasn’t quite what I wanted - the ‘edit’ and ‘reply’ blocks seemed too, well… blocky. I also felt that there were some cleaner themes out there that weren’t quite so busy to look at. There were also a couple of bugs in the code that meant if you were not logged in and tried to leave a comment the sidebar would shift down below the main body content area - easily fixed once you have tracked down the offending <div> container in the comments.php file (It’s the last closing tag that needs to go down one line…)
I settled on another called ‘Freshy’. This one has some seriously cool features, including a dashboard configuration tab allowing you to set the look and feel to a number of different parameters - change the header image, change the nav bar colour scheme and so on. I also prefer the additional white space and the way tags like <pre> are dealt with… nice table listings which is important if you are copying out lines of code, for example.

Ocean Mist has been updated to version 1.1 and I ought to give that a go as well - I did try, but there were some problems getting it to run. I couldn’t face working my way through the code again, but I may look at doing so in the near future.

Ocean Mist certainly has some very good qualities, but needs a few finishing touches. Ed Merritt seems to have a winning theme there, and I’d love to see it further developed.