Leslie Franke

Smart Box Design’s Triples 2.0 (formally known as Nine Men’s Morris) is one of the world’s oldest strategy games. Introduced during the time of Roman Empire, the game is a two player board game in the same vein of chess or checkers. Each player has nine pieces to move along the board’s twenty-four intersecting places. The object of the game is to place your pieces in ‘mills’ (three pieces in a row, horizontally or vertically) which then allow you to capture one of your opponent’s pieces. To win you must leave the opposing player with only two pieces or no legal moves.

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With the new design of this site I have gotten a few reports from Mozilla Firefox users of an annoying black or gray 1px thin horizontal line(s) that displays on the screen after the page has been scrolled up or down (Two examples of this behavior appear at the bottom of this post). These lines appear to occur where the bottom line of a div or iframe is. The problem is that they are not showing up for me and thus I am having a hard time figuring out what the issue is. I believe that this is a bug with Firefox that has been mentioned several times including here.
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The Firefox 3 status meeting minutes have an interesting note. One of the items discuses what extensions should be included in the final release of Firefox 3 as part of the core browser. The list includes numerous extensions such as Firebug, TableTools, and Searchbar Autosizer (note that the full list of nominated extensions is at the end of this post).

I am not a heavy add-on user as I believe that, by default, Firefox provides almost everything needed to browse the web with. Outside of a few extensions, such as the BlueOrganizer and Scrapbook extensions, most of the extensions I use are small add-ons that provide for an increase in browsing efficiency and speed. This is the type of extensions that should be folded into Firefox. Those extensions that have little impact on users who choose not to use them but which provide increased productivity for those who do.

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After finding some WordPress themes for inspiration I set about creating the look and feel of my new site. As different developers will take different approaches to designing a site layout there are several ways to go about doing this. I believe that a solid theme will always start with well coded HTML. As a result, the very first thing is to create a homepage with no dynamic data, just a plain HTML page with code for the layout and dummy text as content. Then the look and feel can be applied to the site with CSS files, colors, and images being plugged into the static page.

The rational behind completing the site design/coding and layout first is to make sure that all of the code blocks are in the right place and semantically laid out. In addition, this is a good time to validate the site, checking for errors like an improperly closed div tag that could mess up the site layout. Once the layout code has been added to the WordPress template, errors of this kind are much more difficult to diagnose and fix. This approach provides a chance to nail down the styles that will be used for layout and text without having to worry about any WordPress tags or PHP code getting it the way.

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Rarely does this website wander away from its technology based focus. The following entry is one of those times. This past week I made a trip to the theater to see the movie Amazing Grace. The movie is about the life story of William Wilberforce, a gifted young legislator in Britain who dedicated his life to two purposes: the abolition of slavery in the British Empire and the raising of Britain’s moral tone. Besides the obvious message that all men deserve to be free, a few powerful messages resonated in the movie.
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Fundamentally there are a couple of ways to go about creating a WordPress theme. One way is to adapt another theme to meet your needs or alternatively to create a new theme from scratch. My initial thinking was that I was going to end up designing the theme from scratch but having no real previous experience with designing WordPress themes and being far from a PHP wizard I began looking for a WordPress theme that I could use as a basis for the site redesign. I took the approach of looking for a theme that matched the general layout I wanted for my site, colors and images were not that important as they could easily be changed later.

The first place I visited was the WordPress theme viewer. Thankfully, I could use the site’s filtering capabilities to look at only 2 column, liquid layout (most themes have a fixed width), widget-ready themes. Not finding a theme there that met all of my needs I decided to search Google using terms like “best wordpress themes” and came up with a few more potential candidates. Eventually I came up with the K2 theme (lot of code to learn from but not the type of layout I wanted) plus a list of seven other themes that could be considered potential candidates to use as a starting point. (more…)

Recently I undertook the task of redesigning this site with the intention of using WordPress as a content management system (CMS) to not only manage my blog but to also manage the site’s static pages. My goal was to create a site that was clean, liquid, and uncluttered while adding a little bit more of color and spice than existed in this site’s previous incarnation. Additionally, I wanted a design that was not your traditional two-column fixed width blog like theme. I decided to continue using WordPress as it can easily be tweaked to meet my requirements and a large amount of WordPress documentation is available that I could utilize when needed.

Before beginning the design and development of my new theme I set up a local WordPress installation using the latest version of WordPress. This would allow me to easily test the new site design and layout. There are a multitude of different ways to do this but one of the easiest ways to I have found is to download and run XAMPP Lite from either your hard drive or a jump drive (instructions on how to do this can be found here).

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