Blog software updated

I just upgraded the blog software and took the opportunity to also update to a new version of the wp-andreas01 theme that I have been using for my blog since day one. The new theme is more versatile, fixes some rendering bugs, draws a wider pane (1024 instead of 800 pixels) which I think is a more pleasant reading experience.

Please refresh your browser cache if you see graphical glitches. I had to rescale the banner images too, but they still look good:

Eric

21 thoughts on “Blog software updated”

The history (calendar) on the left side is not working. It always gives me a broken link

The calendar links were broken in the previous version as well.
Although the banner is wider now, the text column is the same width as before. (using opera) shouldn’t this be wider now?

@Hans

Force-refreshing the page (clearing the browser cache for the page) should make the page display correctoy – i.e. just as wide as the banner.

@Willy,Hans

I am almost certain that the 404 errors in the Calendar plugin are being caused by the fact that my blog uses permalinks without any id or date information in the URL – I use a straight “/%postname%/” as my permalink configuration.

So far I have not found a patch that fixes this 404 error (the calendar works fine for all the posts that were created in previous years by the way).

Eric

oh btw when I post a comment, it always gets posted even if I type a wrong security code. It’s always been like this since when I first posted…

One of the goals of the blog software upgrade was to do something about that annoying captcha. I have now changed to another anti-spam plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-conditional-captcha/) that will only present a captcha if it thinks your message is spam (the plugin will consult the Akismet plugin for the spam verification). Let’s see if that is more user-friendly.

About the 404 errors in the Calendar – I noticed that it has nothing to do with current year or not… the 404 errors occur whenever there is a leading zero in the month or the day! So, this will work: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/2010/10/ while this will not: http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/2010/10/09/

So far I have not been able to find a fix for that either.

Eric

What about changing the calendar to previous posts? I think it’s much easier for visitors to look for previous posting instead of scrolling way down to the bottom of the page

I’m sure most of them are looking at the last 5-10 posts.

Hi Willy

Well, the last 5 or 10 posts are already on the front page so I thought it would not make sense to have a “previous posts” in the left sidebar as well. But perhaps it adds a bit of extra navigation for people who do not visit the site often,

In any case, the “archives” widget suffers from the same issue as the calendar, because WordPress gives these “error 404” everytime it has to display something like http://alien.slackbook.org/blog/2010/10/09/ … no matter in what widget.

Eric

Hm… i see that you have changed it to recent post… it’s nicer since i don’t have to scroll down again 🙂

Yeah… having the calendar was nice because it was easy to see what days had any posts, but as long as that does not work well it is better to keep it out of the way.

Eric

Hi there,
Like the new layout. Regarding comment spam I used akismet until last year and now I switched to Disqus. I like the fact that it gives me uniform users across blogs.

Regards,
Silviu

I never noticed the recent post link on the left side. Is it new? Anyway, I tought it was pretty useful. Just works like the rss feed.

I really like your banner images. They’re beautiful.

Hi Alex

I took the first during a camping holiday in Brittany, France (standing on the edge of a cliff near our tent), while the second picture was taken in the midst of the harbour area of Hamburg, Germany while I was staying at the Greenpeace warehouse. The masts of their ship Beluga II are just visible.

I used the Gimp to colorize the two cut-outs (the original photos are a lot bigger) so that they fit with the blog’s general color scheme.

Eric