Month: September 2008

Simplish version 2.1.1

Posted by Josh – September 22, 2008

We focused on cleaner, more orderly CSS and some code factoring in this release. Visual changes are minor, but post metadata display is tighter, while line heights have been widened ever-so-slightly for easier readability in long text passages.

  • Fix spacing below Tag Cloud sidebar widget above certain elements (thanks op111.net).
  • Rename hCard generator functions more rationally.
  • Uncompress line heights.
  • Remove explicit permalink from entry meta display; entry title now serves uniformly.
  • Remove the Meta label from entry meta section; unnecessary.
  • Add per-comment permalink on comment date.
  • Style more basic elements: table and dl styles improved/added (adopted bits of Blueprint CSS).
  • Removed remaining uses of visual alignright/alignleft convenience classes in favor of more-semantic class names in the template markup.
  • Add entry meta display to image attachment template.
  • Improve fall-back fonts in CSS (thanks op111.net).
  • Split entry title/byline and meta into include files that produce the main hAtom microformatting.

Download Simplish version 2.1.1 here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.

Erlang Info @ spawn_link

Posted by Josh – September 16, 2008

Now that Mitchell Hashimoto has started up his outstanding Erlang notes and links blog spawn_link, I’ve already learned more about Erlang and how she is wrote than I ever knew – and we’ve been running ejabberd for remote developer chat for almost a year.

Of course I found spawn_link because it’s running Simplish – but I was subscribed to the feed before I left. Mitchell’s post about grouping program parts together into single-management-point units with Erlang’s application module was enlightening, and like a lot I learn about Erlang, describes runtime features that certainly evoke, if not replace, those of the operating system.

Anyway, this isn’t a post about Erlang, but about a cool site running the theme, so I’ll just say: Vive le CSP!

Simplish Chromed

Posted by Josh – September 3, 2008

In Chrome like a Harley

Like everyone else, I wanted to check out Google’s latest. So today I grabbed the Chrome beta on a Vista virtual machine (still trying to get that taste out of my mouth) and flipped quickly through the pages of Simplish. Even on the beastly Vista, the multi-process-style Chrome has a light snappy feel. All things being relative in big, GUI apps, I’m not sure if it’s Chrome that’s fast, or just that my recent browser, Firefox, is so very slow.

Everything in the theme looked normal in Chrome’s WebKit to my (fairly distracted) eye, and that brings our tested browsers list to:

FreeBSD and Linux

Firefox 2, 3 (on various lunix); Konqueror… (on Kubuntu 8.0.4, which is KDE 3.5.x I think.)

Macintosh

Firefox 2, 3; Camino 1.6.x; Safari 3.1.x (all on Mac OS X v. 10.4.11)

Plan 9

Simplish degrades rather nicely in the basic Abaco native browser, and in the peripatetically cross-platform Inferno‘s Charon. I have posted simple test posts from Abaco, as well (though that’s nothing to do with the theme). ;-)

Windows

Internet Explorer 6 (Windows 2000), 7 (XP & Vista); Firefox 2, 3 (Vista); Safari 3 (Vista)

Simplish version 2.1

Posted by Josh – September 1, 2008

What began as a couple patches for a minor 2.0.1 bump grew into more extensive 2.1 improvements:

  • Trackback URI and Comments: combine display into a single element.
  • Don’t display Category in post meta box for Uncategorized posts.
  • Fix empty li element by displaying nothing on posts without tags. (Thanks Tim Hamilton.)
  • Display dates on posts and comments now honor date format settings in wp-admin -> Settings -> General. (Thanks demetris from op111.net.)
  • Remove header_shadow.gif. Alignment changes by a few pixels; the blog title underline is now a CSS border, not an image.
  • Fix bug in sp_vallery() gallery shortcode override to handle links and HTML in gallery image captions.
  • Fix bug in sp_vallery() that created extra empty gallery div. (See this issue in upstream Sandbox code.)
  • Standardize and simplify use of text symbols:
    • [ ] (logged-in user UI elements)
    • | (element separation)
    • - (title element separation)
    • « » (chronological traversal)
  • Adopt rel=home in header and footer links to blog’s home page.
  • Replace all remaining comments_popup_link() calls with comments_link()/comments_number().
  • Don’t show post counts in default sidebar’s Archives and Categories lists.
  • A little more prep for gettext internationalization.
  • CSS cleanups and simplifications for some double-definitions. (Thanks threesomehour.com.)
  • PHP code cleanups.
  • (Continued) Re-verification of posts and page templates for hAtom/hCard and XHMTL/CSS validity.

Download 2.1 right here, or see it soon in the WordPress themes directory.