A small WordPress hacking update: I’ve added a new plugin, MW Get Post Info, to the WordPress Plugins and Hacks page. This one could be particularly useful for those of you who are providing excerpt feeds. As usual, share and enjoy.
Although I’m now using WordPress for the “Thoughts From Eric” portion of the site, that doesn’t mean I’m using a default install. Oh no. I had to go hacking on the source of the system, even though I knowknew next to nothing about PHP (not that it seems terribly difficult to learn) and bend it to my desires. No, not those kinds of desires. The HTML it produced wasn’t suited to my needs, so I changed it. I didn’t like the limitations of some functions, so I extended them. I needed a more robust monthly calendar, so I added what I needed. I thought the administrative interface could provide better visual feedback, so I hacked on it until I could do things like highlight activated plugins in varying shades of green.
Since WordPress now supports plugins, I figured I’d share some of what I’ve created in case anyone out there is interested. Thus, I now have a WordPress Plugins and Hacks page in the Tools area of meyerweb. The three plugins currently given there are the three I wrote first, and which work the way I wanted. Each plugin has a page that documents the parameters it can accept, which is a good way to decide if a given plugin will be of any use to you or not. I have a few more plugins that are almost, but not quite, ready for public release; hopefully I’ll have them sorted out within the next couple of weeks.
So feel free to check out my WP plugins, and to use ’em if you like ’em.
I have in my hands a physical copy of the second edition of Cascading Style Sheets: The Definitive Guide, bound with a RepKover lay-flat spine and everything. So I figure it should be shipping out to folks within the next week or two. If you’ve pre-ordered, there ought not be long to wait! (And if you haven’t, then what are you waiting for?)
As I mentioned yesterday, the ‘diagnosis’ favelets I used during my SXSW04i presentation generated a lot of comment, so I now have the underlying style sheets on a “Favelets” page in my “Tools” section. For those of you who know how favelets work, just grab any or all of the style sheets you want and go for it. For those who need some assistance, I wrote a “Favelet Creator.” You plug in the URL of a style sheet you want to have applied to whatever page you’re viewing and the name of the favelet as you want it to appear in your toolbar. Then you drag the resulting link into your favorites toolbar.
All this really does is create a javascript: link that, when invoked, will dynamically write a link element into the head of whatever document you’re viewing. That link points to a style sheet, and so the styles are applied. As an example, you could point it to a style sheet that sets borders for tables and table cells. When you click on the favelet, all of the tables and table cells in the currently-viewed page become visible. Figuring out exactly how a table-based page is laid out thus becomes a snap.
So if you don’t like the styles I created, you can write your own (or modify the ones I provided) and create your own diagnostic style sheets. The favelet creator should make it even simpler. Either way, I hope these will be helpful.
The Color Blender has been updated to be one standalone file, so you can save it to your hard drive easily. I also put it under a Creative Commons license, which I should have done in the first place. Feel free to share and enjoy. Now I’m really going to try to make this my last blender-related post for a good long while. (Unless I make observations about margaritas.)
Daniel Sternberg has some interesting questions about what makes a computer science teacher. It’s a question that’s been on my mind as I try to pull together a series of outlines for four-week seminars on standards-based Web design and CSS. You can guess that this is intended for a community college because they’re willing to let me teach this stuff without a PhD in computer science. Heck, I don’t even have a CS degree of any kind, unless you count a minor in artificial intelligence, and that was focused on the philosophical aspects of it. Allow a History major to teach in a computer science department at a University? Please. I’d have about as much of a chance to be nominated head of the Congressional Black Caucus.
And yet, am I not qualified to teach students how to assemble a Web design, and about the underpinnings of today’s Web, with an eye to the future? I certainly think I am, at least from a skills point of view; whether or not I’d make a good teacher of people is another question entirely, of course. The deepest experts can be the worst teachers, something all of us probably encountered at some point in our educational experiences.
So it’s been interesting to be contacted by people from community colleges and business schools to come speak, but not hear a peep from the CS departments in my area. Not at all unexpected, obviously, but still interesting.
For some reason I decided this weekend to crawl into a hole and hack some JavaScript, so the Color Blender‘s gotten an upgrade. You can use a “waterfall” display of “web-safe” colors to input colors, or type them in as before. If you have already filled in colors and switch value formats, the colors will stay and the values will be converted in place. This can be useful if you want to, for example, find midpoints between #AA31FF and rgb(13%,23%,42%). I think the changes make the tool even more useful, and I hope you do too.
Oh, and yeah, I used a simple table to lay out the page. I toyed with positioning and floating the three “columns,” but in the end the table approach seemed the easiest, so I went with it. This was partly because I have a footer and didn’t want to mess with floating and clearing just to get it below everything else. It was also because, after a day or two of grappling with JavaScript, I got lazy. I may go back at some point and replace the table with floats. In the meantime, this works well enough.
CSS2 and the official CSS1 Test Suite both turn five years old today. I’m not sure if I bring this up in celebration or protest, but in my case, it’s definitely cause for introspection.
A couple of contributed designs have sprouted in the CSS Zen Garden, and I imagine there will be more to follow. What an incredible resource! A few weeks back, I said in my close-up* interview:
While an artist is certainly limited by his medium, it’s more often the case that the medium is limited by its artists. Until a Picasso or Serat comes along, you don’t truly appreciate what the medium can produce. As more designers come to use CSS, we’ll see more compelling CSS-driven sites.
Dave Shea and his contributors are doing exactly that: showing us more of what the medium can do, and creating a compelling site. Just moving from design to design in the Zen Garden should be ample proof that CSS is capable of more than most of us have ever thought possible—me included.
Meanwhile, David Hyatt posted to say that XBL directly addresses the point I made in Thursday’s post:
You attach XBL to an element through CSS, and XBL can generate a complete anonymous content subtree that can then be styled using a scoped stylesheet applied to those elements. You can even scatter the real content however you’d like within the anonymous content tree…. XBL is a perfect tool for implementing complex layouts at the presentational level and preserving the purity of the main source document. XBL can even execute scripts for fancy animation effects or rollovers, all without the source document being polluted at all.
Sign me up! I had no idea XBL was capable of this sort of thing; when the “XSLT vs. XBL” thread erupted on www-style a few months ago, I pretty much tuned it out after the fifth message. Obviously I should have paid a little more attention. If I can, for example, take a paragraph and use XBL to generate three block boxes and two inline boxes, styling each one independently to create given effects and applying multiple backgrounds, then it seems like the ideal solution. Except for that whole lack of cross-browser support thing, of course. Still, a similar lack didn’t exactly stop me from digging into CSS, back in mid-1996.
A redesigned Netscape DevEdge has been launched. Look, ma, no tables. Well, hardly any, and none in the basic design. I was a primary project manager for this one, and the design is a from-scratch effort. It’s nothing visually groundbreaking, and of course using positioning for a major site has been done, but we’ve gone a step further into using positioning to make the design come together. The site didn’t quite validate at launch thanks to some deeply stupid oversights on my part, but hopefully they’ll have been fixed by the time you read this entry.
As for the design approach we took… that’s a subject for another day, and also the subject of an article I wrote. I predict that we’ll draw fire for using HTML 4.01 Transitional, for not validating when we launched, for our font sizing approach, and for our dropdown menus. On the other hand, we’ll probably draw praise for making the markup accessible (once one of my stupid mistakes is fixed), for using CSS in a sophisticated manner, for pushing the envelope in reasonable ways, and for our dropdown menus. For myself, I’m very much satisfied with and proud of the result, and very grateful for all the effort and help I got from the other members of the team.
On a less important but possibly more amusing front, yesterday I hacked together a color-blending tool after Matt Haughey asked on Webdesign-L how to calculate the midpoint between two colors, and Steve Champeon explained how to do it in some detail. The JavaScript is no doubt inefficient and clumsy, the tool may not work in your browser, and for all I know it will lock up your computer. It was just a quick hack. Well, not quick, actually; I’m not very skilled at JavaScript. Enjoy it, or don’t, as you like. Just don’t expect me to fix or add anything unless you mail me the code needed to do whatever you want the tool to do.
Lucas Gonze over the O’Reilly Network mentioned a fascinating paper on “cascade attacks” and how they can be used to take down a distributed network. So the Internet can suffer cascade failure, eh? I wonder how much effort would be required to take down the Internet’s starboard power coupling. Or, worse yet, trigger a coolant leak.
It’s been revealed that the blurry, grainy image of the Space Shuttle Columbia wasn’t taken using any advanced telescopes or military systems after all, but three engineers who used some off-the-shelf parts to put together a personal experiment. CNN says: ‘Hi-tech’ shuttle pic really low-tech. Let’s think about that for a second. Three guys took an eleven-year-old Macintosh, hooked it up to a telescope that probably cost no more than a couple hundred dollars, and took a picture of an object almost 40 miles away moving 18 times the speed of sound. That’s low-tech? The fact that you can even recognize the object they imaged is astounding. Hell, the fact that they imaged anything at all is astounding. No criticism of the three men intended; I’m sure they’re brilliant guys who know what they’re doing. But think about it!
I refer to moments like this as “technological vertigo.” They’re those points where you suddenly come to a dead halt while you realize the incredible complexity of the world, and just how much we take for granted. For that one moment, you stop taking it for granted. Here’s an example: a couple of years ago, I was driving south through suburban Columbus. In the back yard of a house just off the interstate, I spotted an old satellite dish lying on its side, obviously no longer in use. Then it hit me: whoever lived there once had the ability to receive information from orbit, and decided to throw it away. Their garbage was so much more advanced than anything their parents had ever even envisioned that the gap was barely comprehensible. Any general in the Second World War would have given anything, including men’s lives, to have the kind of communication capability that now lay discarded in somebody’s back yard.
The even more remarkable thing about this trashed satellite dish is that there was nothing remarkable about it. So somebody threw out an old satellite dish—so what? They can always get another one, and one that’s a lot smaller, better, and more capable than the piece of junk they tossed, right?
And that is perhaps the most incredible part of it all.