Archive for April, 2009

WordPress, first impressions, slight problems

Saturday, April 11th, 2009

I wanted to try WordPress on my host out of curiosity, thought it would be couple of hours, but in the end I ended up tinkering it for a day and I’m totally unsatisfied with the results. Why?

  • the admin interface (compared to blogger) is quite simple; there are many things I couldn’t finetune, except in the template code. It would’ve been nice to include those things at least in a config file (php associative arrays would be totally okay) – so that I don’t end up digging php or looking at the api page…
  • the default new template is, well, not so nice: I find the content:before/after solution for the bulletpoint butt ugly, especially that in IE7 it did not default to the normal for me. I also find the solution for the sidebar annoying, just like the fully uncut header image to mention a few.
  • the default blogger importer totally died on the remote host (no error message, it just ended with one post – and no, this was not an ssl error), while on my local machine it worked. I ended up importing my dumped sql via phpMyAdmin.
  • wp stores some of the paths (with full blown protocol sign) in the db and then renders it into the html code (so instead of “/wp/” we have “http://whatever.com/wp/” which did give me some headaches.
  • the clean_pre builtin formatter function removes all the line break html tags from the preformatted text (formatting.php line 94), which indeed was annoying. Btw html tags inside pre may be uncommon, but are totally valid and I used them in many posts.
  • Wherever I look, maybe it’s just me, but I see php+html+js all mixed together; at least the non-admin “templates” should be nice.

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Horizontal TweenMenu with jQuery

Wednesday, April 8th, 2009

The menu can be accessed here, it’s nice and shiny. Since this is a sandbox post, this is not a component, just an experiment how agile development with jQuery is (concerning flash-like functionality). My opinion:

  • Working with jQuery is pretty fast and intuitive, but it requires some attention when it comes to effect stacking and locks, timeouts.
  • Html is what it is: easy to modify, very flexible, yet browser quirks make our lives much harder:
  • On webkit (I tested with Safari and Chrome) the initial left (position().left) and width (.width()) detection doesn’t work. It’s not “my” fault, but clientLeft/offsetLeft gives back useless garbage (also tried with PPK’s workaround).
    A possible solution would be getting all items’ width (which is roughly okay on the link childNode) and then use these values for left, which would make my life harder :) A dirty workround is using setTimeout with a “safe” timeout value…
  • Movement can be laggy on FF2 and IE6 (nothing new, move along).
  • Since I’m using a single item buffer (not a stack) for storing the previous item some items may remain active if the mouse movement is slow enough. Adding a lock and a queue would probably help, but again, it’s an overkill for such an experiment.   

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My very own dedicated host: www.rosamez.com

Tuesday, April 7th, 2009

I decided to get a dedicated host at HostGator, so that I can host assorted crap – nothing really serious, but I do need something more flexible than Google Pages. So, that’s it, so far I’m pretty happy with their offer and I finished making a simple landing page which (including the 3d modelled cup and the icons) took only a couple of hours. And the domain name? It’s after one of my favourite books, Rozsamez, once again, no big secrets here.

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