A version 2.1.5 of Simplish will be along soon that eliminates the WordPress version 2.6 compatibility code, and is compatible only with WordPress ≥2.7.

From what I can make out from systrans and Briannatrans, the author had a good day at work. Good for her, and nice work on that theme, too.

Sp has the usual suspects from Simplish, like microformats (hAtom posts and hCards for their authors), clean and terse styling that loosely imitates the design of Jeffrey Hardy’s Scribbish “theme for stuff”, wrapped in valid markup output to the browser. It’s just implemented in the leaner, more perspicuous idioms of the Habari RawPHPEngine.

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!

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)

In the end, op111′s demetris chose to apply his own styling to Scott Wallick‘s excellent Sandbox theme. I came close to doing the same thing when I went looking for a snazzy ‘default’-kinda theme for Utopian.net’s use – and for my own blog at the Labs. I decided to adopt and update Kenny/Jeffrey‘s ScribbishWP, but since I started changing and departing from both ScribbishWP (in code) and Scribbish itself (in style), the plaintxt.org themes like Sandbox and blog.txt have inspired choices for Simplish. We even copy their code: the two basic hCard producer functions used in Simplish 2.0 are derived from blog.txt source (closely enough that Scott’s copyright has joined the NOTICE.)

op111′s list has some references to the many uses folks make of the Sandbox plus some chameleon CSS – Sandbox comes out of the box looking like 1995, but can be made into anything you can tweak into and copy out of Firebug. My favorite is still Sandbox co-creator Andy Skelton’s re-implementation of WordPress’s default/kubrick theme atop Sandbox.