Where’s Lou

I mentioned earlier I was going to be trying out a new product from Microsoft I stumbled upon named Microsoft Expression Web. I did and it’s not at all bad. In fact I have to say it’s pretty darn good.

Here’s another more thorough review of the product if you’re looking for more.

It starts with the idea of opening a web site based on it’s folder. That’s different than opening a web application project by it’s csproj file like Visual Studio starts with. I’m assuming that although this editor can be used to work on all of the design assets of a web project that it’s not really intended to integrate directly with Visual Studio, or to do code changes and rebuilding of the source behind a dotnet web application. But that’s okay - I haven’t been very impressed with the vs ability to edit web content and a clean separation of concerns may be exactly what the situation calls for.

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Earlier I was reading an article Where Our Standards Went Wrong at A List Apart about the value of standards based web development. You know, about having a strong bias towards valid xhtml and css and what the business case for that bias would be.

None of this changes the here and now. To be honest, the pragmatists are right: that for the most part, validation and commercial web design are polar opposites. But the tools are evolving to the point where we can begin moving beyond validation as a roadblock, and CMSes like WordPress and Slashcode are dedicated to producing standards-compliant code; visual editors such as Dreamweaver and (more recently) Microsoft Expression Web almost stubbornly refuse to produce invalid markup. So where do we go from here?

Now I’m thinking Hey! This is a nice impartial site with great design and wonderful advice and they have just mentioned Dreamweaver and a Microsoft product in the same breath. So I just had to click it and I see a site that’s so subtle and attractive the first thing I did was double-check I was in fact at microsoft.com. The root for the area is http://microsoft.com/design and I checked: the source is totally valid xhtml 1.1 and the css is pretty darn good also. And this is coming from an aspx driven site!

So. Yeah! I think Microsoft got it. Standards based compatibility. Beauty of design. Pure layout-free html. Very nice.

There are some really interesting tricks in there too. Like check out the Microsoft Expression page - those boxes on the bottom are each a single <a> tag that contains two <span> and one <img>. And that’s so cool because the entire block acts a nice simple link - the entire square is clickable and with the href shows up in the status bar when you point at it. The way the box changes when you’re pointing at it is because all of the style on the classes changes. Like there’s an “a:hover .product-status” rule that underlines and brightens one of the spans when you point anywhere at the entire <a> square.

So I’m going to download the Expression thing and give it a try. I’ll blog about it afterwards.

This weekend Alex was asking me to help him with his site. He plays World of Warcraft MMO now, and also plays the Warcraft RTS game. Edits maps, unit skins, and the unit’s 3d models even. (It’s spooky, really.) So he wanted a forum and downloads area for him and his friends to go with his blog.

And thus the Weasel Boy Forum was born. Note also the new weaselboy.net url has replaced weaselboy.dejardin.org. Have to maintain our web-cred after all. :)

So I looked around a bit for leads and located the Simple Machine Forum (smf) - another LAMP open source application.

It didn’t take long before it was up and running. Well, okay it took hours. But that’s not bad and you know hours fly past like minutes when you’re in the zone. Brenda actually commented on that once - on one of the fairly rare occasions when she was working on something heads-down on the computer she was shocked that whenever she looked up from the machine another two hours had passed.

Just this morning I showed him his new, stock forum and helped him get a Warcraft theme uploaded and activated and he took over. Sounded pretty excited.

Earlier today a friend of mine asked if I was going to blog about how I went about setting up WordPress on GoDaddy. Turns out he doesn’t have a blog yet and was thinking of going that route. So that’s what this one’s all about! I promise it’ll be the last wordpress blog for a while. ;) They do have their own forums after all.

Now with any type of operation like this you’re going to want to start with two things first: tools and a plan. The plan only gets you a little ways of course because nothing ever ends up going the way you think it will in the beginning, and the tools clearly also only carry you so far because of the problems you can’t anticipate. But at the very least it helps you feel better about taking that first step - going from zero to one - on an endless timeline of tinkering.

So to start with the plan. I’m not saying it’s the best or that it’s for everyone, but I used GoDaddy and I’m happy with the results. I’m too cheap to rent a dedicated server and too lazy to maintain a home-based datacenter so their Deluxe hosting plan, at like a single-figure per month, with 100gb storage on a ready-to-go Linux server is right in my sweet spot.

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I suppose you could call this the first actual post I’m making. Many of the things that have come before this were either automatically created by experimenting with Twitter Tools integration, or simply babble.

So this post is about tagging. I had already installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin, because the K2 theme I’m using has built in support for it, but I just wasn’t feeling the love from it. So I took a chance and activated the Simple Tagging Plugin and a widget someone else had added to provide a cloud sidebar.

Which beings me to my first real experience adding a plugin to a theme that didn’t have builtin support. I had a little bit of exposure to the php already after working around a “404″ bug that WordPress 2.1.2 throws at you when you ajax. Long story short, if WP doesn’t think what you’re asking for is a valid page or permalink it’ll return html but it returns it with a “404″ status. Very wierd. It’s not a problem for Safari, but with IE and Firefox the XmlHttpRequest will punt the answer rather than hand it to the page’s jscript.

So how do you add the Simple Tagging Plugin? Turns out you hack it into the WordPress Loop. The loop is a file called “theloop.php” in your theme directory.

Wow.

Which appears to be how the entire very flexible, very powerful, blogging application works. All of the themes, all of the plugins, all of the widgets - they work together by cooperation and convention. Lots of people in the world are out there investing love and tears into this stuff. I’ll tell you what.

So here’s what I put in. I used my old favorite asp vbscript “inverted marker” technique where instead of escaping the code with <?php yadda(); ?> I’ll escape the html with the reversed tags like: ?><span class=”yadda”><?php

<?php
if (function_exists(’STP_PostTags’))
{
?><span class=”entry-tags”><?php
STP_PostTags();
?></span><?php
}
?>

See what I mean? Two reasons: I want to be able to read the code, and I want to chop all the accidental whitespace I can. This way the spans shouldn’t have any wierd linefeeds and stuff put out with them.

But it worked pretty well in the end. The plugin docs were pretty good and I guessed the correct place to shove it on the first try. K2 already had the UTW tags in there right where the simple tags needed to go, so that also had the example of what span class has the little tag on it.

Fun fun.

I just activated ultimate tag warrior. Sort of wondering now what it does.

So that’s pretty much what this page is for. You can ignore it most likely.

Okay - I think that’s enough work to call the blog open for business.

Which means Wordpress 2.1.2 with Gallery 2.x embedded via WPG2. All hosted on godaddy.com for a crazy small amount of $$. The worst part was figuring out how to bulk upload these php apps (a billion loose files) via ftp in less than 5 hours.

And yes, it’s the LAMP stack. Godaddy gives you mysql and php with the lynux package. So since I’d decided to run Wordpress I figured why fight it.

This is the K2 theme that has been optimized for WPG2, and I forget the name of the Gallery theme but it was one of the few that embedded with very clean lines. Also added sidebar widgets with twitter and delicious integration. The K2 theme includes some Ajax, but a known bug is stopping it at the moment from working seamlessly. I think it was built on Safari, because that’s where it works the best.

Yes the theme is visually very spartan. After the nuts and bolts are in place I’ll try to give it the Pretty.

Amazed by what six bucks buys you with godaddy so far. Mysql and wordpress 2.1.2 up and running in just hours.

Made corned beef and cabbage for st pats. Tasty.

Out for local live music. Brian Just - watch for him.