Asides

  • May 5 - Words of Wisdom

    Without getting into the whys and hows this statement came about, I find it very simple, yet poignant and applicable to many of life's situations.

    We're still learning to walk, and we're going to trip every now and then and sometimes when we run, we're going to fall on our faces. But as long as we get up, try again, and learn something from the experience, in the end, skinned knees and all, it'll be worth it.

    Thanks Sean.

    edit - might I add, I'm in a new-ish romantic relationship, which very recently hit a bump, and perhaps this analogy hit home there more than anywhere.

  • May 1 - Mac SVN Monitoring Widget

    SVN Notifiier is a handy little Mac Dashboard widget that, using Growl, will notify you when a local working copy is out of date. I've not quite gotten the "sticky" notice to work, but I just might need to edit the actual Growl settings.

    Still, it's nice to be able at a glance check your dashboard, or see a little growl notice pop up.

  • April 26 - Apple Drivers in VMware Fusion

    I think with the help of a google search and Scott Gruby", I've figured out how to use my bluetooth keyboard in VM.

    Finally, I found a reference to inserting the Leopard DVD while in Windows. I tried this and when I did, the BootCamp driver installer came up and installed my drivers. Perfect; why couldn’t VMWare say something about this on their website?

    Thanks Scott and I agree, why isn't this documented somewhere.

    Edit 8/1/08Seems you also have to disconnect the USB Bluetooth Host Controller to get it to work. Something about only one OS can control the device at a time, so the machine gets confused when the two are both connected. Disconnecting the controller, shutting down the XP install, then restarting VMware Fusion finally got it working.

Leaving the Nest

April 30

This past week it was proposed and not shot down in flames that my first foray into a Habari theme, mzingi , intended as a simple, image free theme to be used as a foundation for building proper themes, should be included into the core download of Habari.

I was humbled and honored to say the least, and so from here on out, all development for this project will be maintained by the community.

Thanks to all who've helped, and shared their appreciation for it's intended purpose, and I trust the community will continue to use it for creating full fledged themes. Feels a little odd, but satisfying at the same time.

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Quick Update on Themes

April 28

I recently updated my themes, and since that time a change has been made in trunk in how pagination is handled. All 3 three themes have been updated for this change. I will be leaving download links for the previous versions up as well, as I believe those versions should work with 0.4.1. If you experience any problems with either version, please set me know.

Downloads and more info on each theme available on their original post.

Also, I have a demo site up and running to check them out. I still need to tweak the themeswitcher plugin so you can only select certain themes from your theme directories, so note that only my 3 themes have the switcher code.

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Updated Themes

April 24

I've been quite lazy (or busy, you decide) lately, and have been meaning to update the 3 themes I've released to work with the latest trunk. Previously, I kept decent todos and a svn repo for mzingi, but this time I simply bore down in some late night frenzy and got everything up-to-date. I've got a new svn repo to work with, and will check them in at some point in the next few days, and hopefully will be able to better outline any changes.

Basically the changes to mzingi were minor, just a few code changes for things like atom links, and updating the YUI fonts and style sheet. I also added some styling for draft posts.

As far as swanky and Harvest Field, they have more extensive changes, most evident in the sidebar content. Harvest Field now only uses built in code for the footer content – the about, recent comments and more posts links. The sidebar in Harvest Field is entirely plugin reliant now, sans the search and subscribe link. It supports by default the Twitter, linkoid (for aside like posts - which is also excluded from the more posts offset) and the very nifty blogroll plugin. All three have their own templates in the theme. I also added support for the credits due plugin, with a built in page template, and conditional code in the footer. Also, I borrowed the watermark for draft posts from michaeltwofish's connections theme, and a little more emphasis on comments in moderation styling.

Swanky was also updated to use the current Twitter plugin/template, as well as added support for the blogroll plugin. If these plugins are not active, nothing will show, nothing will break. Recommended plugins are listed on the themes page. As with Harvest Field, the draft watermark and comments in moderation were addressed.

As usual, if you find a bug, or would like to see something added/need help, please leave a comment either on this post or the original post for the theme in question.

So without further ado :

Also, I'm putting the finishing touches on a demo site, which I'll be adding links to the aforementioned theme posts. Just need to decide how I want to add the theme switcher code (I'm trying to decide between adding a new fixed element at the top of each theme, or simply adding the dropdown to each sidebar).

As always, much thanks go to the community for the help and assistance in putting these together.

Edit Twitter, linkoid, blogroll, and credit due plugins can be downloaded from Habari extras

Second Edit To clarify the "Credits" feature is accomplished by 1)activating the creditsdue plugin from extras 2)create a page with the slug "credits", you can add additional content to the page if you want 3) there is no three (I've always wanted to say that!).

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Swanky Theme

March 1

screenshotThis week an open source design came across my feed reader, and something about it caught my eye. Immediately however, I didn't think the header matched the design name, so I set about creating something a bit more "swanky". From there, I began porting it to Habari. The goal was a ready to go theme, with support for several of the popular available plugins. To that end, Swanky supports half a dozen plugins, a couple of which are recommended.

For recommended plugins, Raman Ng's Related Posts plugin and his Tag Cloud plugin will provide full intent and functionality of the theme.

The theme also supports the Credit Due plugin that is available from the Habari Extras repository. Activation of the plugin and the addition of a Credits page will automatically move the credits from the footer, and create a link to a page on your site at example.com /credits, which will contain the original design credits which are asked to be kept in place, as well as credits for all plugins and the Habari theme itself. (It will also exclude the page /credits from the top navigation) You do not need to add any content to the page, simply creating the page will suffice. If you have any other "shout outs" you'd like to add in addition to the plugins output, that will appear above the default output. Without the plugin and page, the link for the original design and theme design will be shown in the footer.

Suggested plugins include the aforementioned Credit Due, as well as the pingback plugin bundled with Habari, Gravatars (also in Habari Extras), and the Recent Comments plugin in Extras. If the Recent Comments plugin is not installed, it will default to included code in the theme. Using the Recent Comments plugin allows for user definition of some output, including adding a date, and how many recent comments to show. The default code simply displays 5 most recent, comment author and post. The theme is coded to use the unordered list if you use the plugin, changing that would require editing the sidebar.php template.

The theme also supports the Twitter plugin (also in the Extras Repo), and will show on pages that recent posts show. (see below regarding dynamic display).

One small feature of the theme is that the middle sidebar is dynamic based on certain templates being viewed. Single post views will not show the recent posts, rather the posts meta, as well as related posts (if that plugin is active). If the Twitter plugin is active and configured, pages that show recent posts will also show above them your most recent tweet, twitter icon, and a link to your twitter page.

This is considered a .1alpha release, future versions, aside from bug fixing, will support more dynamic options for plugins to output content in the 2nd sidebar, among any other suggestions.

Please direct any comments, bugs, suggestions to the comments on this post.

Download Swanky 0.2.

Users of trunk >r1574

Download Swanky 0.3.1

Current Demo

Edit I failed to mention, if you use the gravatar plugin, there is a default gravatar in the theme's images directory that you can point to that matches the header (in the plugin options you can point to the image).

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Mzingi 0.3

January 12

I've made some small changes to the mzingi theme, most notably a few code changes to work with the most current revision. (1267 at time of writing).

This includes fixing the atom feed link, addressing plugin hooks in the header and footer, and removing some extraneous code in the commentform that has been moved to the theme class.

Also, some minor styling for the date has been added, as well as a screenshot and license.

Also added is the conditional code in the header to show the title on the home page as the blog title, or the post title followed by the blog title in single post pages.

A few things I'm looking to do in the next revision is to remove the Asides code, and add a template for the linkoid plugin, so if a user doesn't want to use Asides, they don't have to edit the theme, as well as leverage the ability of the plugin to allow the user to chose their own tags to be used in the feature and excluded from the primary content.

Also planned is author comment highlighting.

Suggestions are always warmly welcomed.

You can download the file from the original post.

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