KJToo

It’s the third annual CSS Naked Day, so I’ve disabled all stylesheets for the blog. This is what the site would look like every day if not for the magic of Cascading Style Sheets: functional, but not very pretty.

CSS Naked Day is the brainchild of User Interface Engineer Dustin Diaz. It is intended to “to promote Web Standards with layered semantic markup, and a clear separation between content, and presentation to enhance accessibility.”

This year, more than a thousand websites have signed up for the event, signifying their intent to strip away the pretty CSS and show the world what’s underneath.

EDIT: Bloginatrix Lorelle van Fossen has an excellent explanation of why we’re observing CSS Naked Day on her meta-blog, Lorelle on WordPress.

WordPress is the finely-tuned mechanism that keeps this site ticking and—like a wristwatch—it does so whether anyone is looking or not. On the surface, things appear to be quite simple: the big hand and the little hand do their little circular dance hour after hour and usually we don’t think about the tiny cogs and gears and springs all precisely meshed together…until something goes horribly wrong. Then we’ve got to flip the thing around and take the bezel off. If we’re lucky, popping in a new battery does the trick (but totally throws the whole spring-loaded movement analogy out the window); if we’re not, someone’s going to have work to do.

Upgrading WordPress is typically like changing a watch battery: if you know what you’re doing it takes about five minutes and you’ve just got to make a minor adjustment or two to get everything synced up again.

Now imagine that you change the battery in your watch, pop the bezel back on and flip it over to discover that the stem has been moved to the opposite side. It’s a little inconvenient, but you manage to reset the time anyway. And in doing so, you notice a nifty new dial that keeps track of the phases of the moon, but it doesn’t seem to work properly. In fact, the entire face of the watch has been rearranged, the numbers all squished to one side and set in the opposite order, probably to accommodate for the fact that the hands now seem to be moving backwards.

That’s a bit like what upgrading to WordPress 2.5 was like.

Okay that’s a bit of an exaggeration. WordPress isn’t running backwards. It still works. Sort of. I mean, I’m blogging, aren’t I?

At first, before the “gee whiz, this is shiny and new” wore off, I thought, “gee whiz, this is shiny and new!” I fiddled around with the redesigned administrative interface, figuring out where everything was, spotting a few new things here and there. Then I started to use the new interface, probably in the worst possible way one could choose to test drive it: I recategorized 500+ blog entries.

Let me explain why this is bad. First, let’s have a look at the old WordPress interface. This is what the write/edit post screen used to look like:

Recategorizing a post was simple: click “Edit”, select the new categories on the right, de-select the old ones, click “Save”. Done! This is how I did the first hundred or so posts, before I upgraded to WordPress 2.5.

Now here’s the same screen after the upgrade:

Okay, so we’ve got a smaller editor, a column of white (or negative) space occupying the right fifth of the screen, and where did those categories go? Well, they’re below the editor. But not right below the editor; that’s where the Tags section is. But below the Tags is the Categories section, so it’s not too far away.

Unless you’re recategorizing several hundred blog entries. Now you’ve got to scroll down to select the categories. Every single post. Edit. Scroll. Select categories. Save.

Making the whole process even more tedious (as if that were possible), is the fact that there’s no more “Save and Continue Editing” button. This is because the “Save” button is now the “Save and Continue Editing” button. Which means clicking “Save” after editing a post doesn’t return me to the screen on which I selected the post to edit, it saves the post and reloads it, just in case I want to keep editing. Which, in this case, I most certainly don’t. And so now my process is: Edit. Scroll. Select categories. Save. Wait for page to refresh. Click “Go Back”.

Four. Hundred. Times.

Now, this might seem like a pretty minor gripe, but it’s not. It’s huge. Because the simplest of blog posts on this site has just four elements: title, content, category and tags.1 Prior to WordPress 2.5, all four of those were above the scroll. Everything was right there in front of me and unless I wanted to add an image (more on that in a bit), no scrolling was necessary. Now, not only do I need to scroll to select a category, but thanks to the clutter above the editor I’ve got to scroll to enter tags, as well.

It’s only a matter of time before someone publishes a plugin that will overlay the default WordPress 2.5 administrative interface with something that resembles the interface from the previous version. When that happens, I’ll be first in line to install it.

But what about adding those images?

Sweet Elyse, mother of Alex P., if there is a feature of WordPress 2.5 that makes me want to gouge my eyes out, it’s the new media functions. The simple upload interface has been replaced with a Flash and JavaScript monstrosity that looks like the bastard child of Lightbox. Don’t get me wrong, Lightbox is great for displaying images and slideshows—clicking the screen shots in this very post will demonstrate how it works—but it’s absolutely horrid for file management, even if those files are photos and screen shots. Dropping the blogging interface into shadow when you want to insert an image is unsettling; there’s no way to verify that you’ve got your insertion point set correctly, because clicking outside the “lit” portion of the window causes the media library to close.

The previous version of WordPress, on the other hand, used much more straightforward interface, with the image selection and insertion all handled without fancy JavaScript popups and with the editor available on the same screen so inserting at just the right spot was a breeze.

Simplicity has been replaced with glitter and the end result is clunky at best (and just plain doesn’t work on some PCs I use). Again, as soon as someone creates a plugin to do away with the new “media library” features, I’ll install it. Hell, if I had the programming chops, I’d just whip up the plugins myself. Alas, I’m too busy bitching about free software to learn the necessary skills to solve the problems I perceive.

But that’s the great thing about WordPress, after all: the community of developers who pour their time and talent into putting out new versions, new plugins and new themes. And that’s why I’m not going to let a couple of speed bumps turn me away from the blogging platform that I’ve come to love and rely on since I switched over from Moveable Type way back in January of 2005.

But seriously, someone get to work on those plugins. Pronto.

1. Technically, only the category is required. Posts can be published without a title, content or tags, but WordPress will set a default category if one isn’t selected. Which makes putting the Categories section below Tags all the more baffling. [back]

Back in the spring of 1977, a couple of guys named Steve were changing the world of computers, a guy named George was changing the face of science fiction cinema, and a man named Jimmy was flexing his newfound Presidential muscle. That very same spring1, I created a Feedburner feed for KJToo.com.

Though I’m not obsessed with site statistics and number of subscribers to my RSS feed(s), I will admit that I was a little curious, plus Feedburner offered a couple of clever options for making the feed more friendly to various feed readers. Plus, there didn’t seem to be any downside to redirecting my existing feeds.

Fast-forward to a couple of months ago: In upgrading to WordPress 2.3.x and trying my hand at theme design, I run into problems with a couple of the plug-ins I’ve installed. After upgrading all the plugins I’m using and getting rid of a few I’m not, everything appears to be fine.

Fast-forward to a couple of hours ago: some random whim inspires me to check my Feedburner stats for the first time since George, one of the Steves and another George who has nothing to do with science fiction or personal computers went eight different kinds of crazy. Immediately, it is clear that something has gone horribly awry. Three subscribers? Just three? I’m responsible for at least two subscriptions to the main feed; surely I’ve got enough geek cred to warrant at least a handful of subscriptions from savvy Intarwebbians.

Of course I am, though my geek cred may be in some jeopardy as the twisted tale approaches its climax. It seems that in my virtual house-cleaning I had managed to deactivate and delete a very important WordPress plugin, one called Feedburner Feedsmith that handles the redirection of my default RSS feeds to Feedburner.

The upshot of all this, unless I’ve missed something, is that, for the past couple of months, Feedburner has only been counting subscribers who subscribed to the feeds generated by Feedburner (e.g., http://feeds.feedburner.com/kjtoo), because the feed published by Wordpress (http://kjtoo.com/feed/) has not been properly redirected.2

Oops.

So now I’ve reinstalled the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin and this is the first new post since doing so. If all goes well, I should see the number of subscribers jump back up pretty quickly.

Either that or I suddenly became very unpopular in early September.

1. Plus or minus thirty years. [back]
2. This is a nice, warm, fuzzy explanation, because it means that people are subscribed to the feed and reading the blog but Feedburner isn’t counting them. [back]

I spent a good deal of time this weekend fiddling around with the Sandbox theme from plaintxt.org. Plaintxt.org is the brainchild of Scott Wallick, and he describes it as “[m]inimalism in blogging: an experiment out of control”. In the two and a half years since I installed WordPress, I’ve used at least three of Scott’s plaintxt.org themes: Barthelme, plaintxtBlog and now Sandbox.

Where Barthelme and plaintxtBlog are both fully developed from a visual standpoint, Sandbox is more like a blank slate upon which a design can be built; think of it as an unfrosted cake ready for anything your imagination (and your skill with a tube of colored frosting) can throw at it.

If you’re familiar with the old look of the site, it might appear that all I’ve done is shift the left sidebar over to the right, and there’s good reason for that: my goal was to, in essence, recreate the basic look of Brian Gardner’s Blue Zinfandel theme, but with two right-hand sidebars instead of one on either side of the main column. Ultimately, the changes to the design will be significant enough to fully distinguish it from Brian’s1, but I thought it would be interesting to see if I could mimic at least part of his crisp, clean look using Sandbox as a base.

I’m pretty pleased with the outcome so far. There are areas that still need work (the far right sidebar has a tendency to drop out of place when viewing a single post with Internet Explorer, for example), but the basic look is coming together nicely. I’ve had one person tell me they’re not a fan of the dual sidebars on the right-hand side, but I don’t think that’s going away anytime soon.

As always, I encourage anyone with an opinion on the design to share it with me in the comments. I know that the archives and library pages are a mess right now, and I’ll post an update when I’ve fixed them, but if you see anything else that seems out of place, needs improvement, or is just plain ugly, let me know.

1. I’ll start by designing my own post-separator graphic. [back]

One of the most memorable quotes from Tim Burton’s Batman is Jack Nicholson as the Joker declaring “This town needs an enema!” Though the Clown Prince of Crime certainly had sinister designs on Gotham, he had a point: the city was a mess and needed a thorough cleansing. His choice of words may not have appealed to those of a delicate and genteel nature (who would likely have preferred “facelift” or “makeover” to the vulgar colonic), but the idea has always resonated with me and it springs to mind anytime I see something that is clearly in need of change.

I’ve often felt that the phrase applies to this very website, both in terms of content and design.

Content-wise, I’d like updates to be more consistent, preferably at least one new post every weekday and perhaps a single post over the weekend. Of course, there’s more to blogging than just establishing a posting schedule, because no one is going to care that I’m posting regularly if I’m not posting anything interesting; which begs the question: what do the people who read this blog find interesting?

As an example of something potentially uninteresting, I offer up this very post. I like to keep the meta-blogging (or “blogging about blogging”) to a minimum here and leave it to folks like Lorelle VanFossen, who meta-blog far better than I ever could (or would want to). My meta-blog posts tend to center around whatever issues I’m currently experiencing with WordPress and such; I don’t do advice. When I do dip my toe into meta-blogging, I do so with the understanding that—unless you’re a WordPress user (or a huge dork)—the excursion isn’t going to be terribly interesting, but I also do it knowing that the process of writing helps keep the gears turning in my head and there are a few people reading who do blog with (or without) WordPress and muck around with CSS and web design, and they’re likely to provide some very insightful feedback.

Content is far more important than design and aesthetics, but over the past few days I’ve been very focused on the look and feel of this site. I upgraded to WordPress 2.3, which had some unintended consequences, specifically in the areas of commenting and post tags, but I think I’ve taken care of those. Digging through the site, however, made me realize that I’d like to spruce things up a bit (the Library page is in dire need of an overhaul, for instance, and the Now Reading section in the right-hand sidebar could be cleand up), take care of some browser-dependent design quirks, organize things a bit better and maybe cut some of the extraneous bits.

I spent an absolutely stupid amount of time last night going through old blog entries (I’m about a third of the way done) and making sure that the markup for images and footnotes was consistent (and adding images to some movie review posts that didn’t have them); the idea is to create a consistent look across the entire site, but also to make switching to a new theme easier, should I ever decide to stop using Brian Gardner’s Blue Zinfandel.

Unfortunately, despite a lot of CSS tweaking and web searches, I was unable resolve a browser-specific rendering problem: Internet Explorer versions 6 and 7 both have issues with floating images. The IE screen shot below illustrates the problem: the text immediately beneath the Transformers movie poster image (which is “floating” on the left of the center column) should be to the right of the image and wrap around as it flows beyond it. Firefox renders it properly but neither version of Internet Explorer does.

The problem is very likely something to do with floating images within floating sections or visible overflow or something, but I haven’t been able to nail it down yet and it’s pretty annoying; especially since I’m almost positive that it was working properly in the past.

Finally, there’s the new “Currently Playing” and “Recently Watched” sections on the left-hand sidebar. The former was blatantly stolen from Greg Howley (though Rob Miller deserves some credit, too, as his Now Reading plug-in set me on the “media I’m consuming” path in the first place) and the latter was an obvious extension of the idea. Neither of them are plug-ins (though that could change), and they originally featured just cover images and titles. However, converting them to Amazon links has removed some of the hassle of maintaining them: I don’t have to hand-write the HTML or host the images myself. I’ve been embedding my Amazon Associates ID in DVD, book and video game links for over a year now, but this is the first time I’ve used the Buy Now button, something I’ve been avoiding because I don’t want the site to feel like an ad (don’t worry, I don’t plan to start using Google AdSense anytime in the foreseeable future).

So there you have it: I’m feeling a little restless about the current state of KJToo.com and I want to shake things up a bit. I welcome your suggestions and feedback and appreciate your patience if I somehow manage to break the site while I’m fiddling.