Wordpress | h4x3d.com

The darkest is before dawn (I am not dead)

By: jez

07-09-2008

1 comment

Dear everyone,
sorry for the lack of updates and little activity. As you might have read I moved to London two weeks ago.
As I am working full-time now (not in design) I have had little opportunity to sort out the updated version of h4x3d.com and the new concept.
Be assured, I have things noted down and sketches are almost final, however I do not like to release “alpha” as you know from my themesy.
I am a Leo and think in black or white – either change at once or not at all.

To tease you, here an excerpt of the top left header of the new blog.

I have also had a logo made by a professional logo and brand developer (on basis of a four pages creative brief). You might wonder why I did not do it myself: time for once is a reason, but also it is just as a matter of fact that sometimes you are blind when it comes to your own “design”.

Looking forward to receiving your feedback – changed should be up and implemented within three weeks from now-on.

WordPress Themeviewer opened again

By: jez

19-07-2008

Wordpress

2 comments

Hooray for WordPress to sort out the Theme misery after almost one and a half years -
finally developers and users have one place to exchange their files again!
Now I need to make my themes compliant to the new wordpress theme regulations -

Most of my themes are solid, but the automated checker reports:
The stylesheet has no tags. Add a Tags: line to your style.css file and upload the zip file again

So what you have to do is add tags describing your theme, e.g. “widget ready, blue, white”, etc.

WordPress 2.6 released – not upgrading for now?

By: jez

15-07-2008

Wordpress

0 comments

Hello everyone,
WordPress 2.6 has been released last night to public, now again many blog owners are facing the decision whether to upgrade instantly or not.

If you are using a bunch of plugins on your site you may want to wait a few days for plugin authors to catch-up with the development. While most plugins won’t be affected you can never be 100% sure whether you will run into trouble or not; and if you do, it is usually to late and you are really “missing that one plugin you always need”.

The most striking features in WordPress 2.6 that are interesting for this page are the updated “Blog this” – presslet (quickpost basically), the ability to use captions by default (quite sure this can be used in a variety of themes in a more “sexy” way than the default), and the ability to select and deselect posts by clicking shift (and hold it).

Below is a quick video illustrating the new features of WordPress 2.6

Technorati once more

By: jez

12-06-2008

Wordpress

5 comments

edit: back to 72/100 again; that’s the 72nd most popular blog worldwide

Grr – Technorati changed their algorithm again – former rank 70 (out of ten thousands of blogs?) h4x3d.com declined to rank 600 somewhat, even though my “authority” (technorati buzz word) remains still amazingly high at over 3800 (which is more than some of the top 100 blogs) -
can 57,313 blog reactions be wrong? obviously many caused due to “theme use” of my wordpress themes, but still, legit reactions. Technorati however says they do actively filter the top 100 list, so no surprise I am not listed under the Technorati Top 100 blogs…

… more to come after exams? (oh and I am on Malta for a week, hope the server does not break).

Alexa rating system has changed

By: jez

18-04-2008

Wordpress

2 comments

Just today I saw that Alexa has changed their rating system – their official news announcement says that NOW more sources will be used to come to a rating, also they claim to be using NEW algorithms that will determine the rating even better. Also the traffic from different countries is now taken into account. Hooray – I moved up to Alexa 25,000 (before change: 38,000), which is quite nice for a private blog with some 10,000 visitors daily.

A quick comparison of the famous wpdesigner.com site and my h4x3d.com:

Edit: heavy fcking decline due to university inactivity, damn…

WordPress 2.5 and chibby 404

By: jez

09-04-2008

Wordpress

2 comments

I have just upgraded to WordPress 2.5 and run a plugin update check. Most of the plugins work, which is amazing! Some plugins (two out of 31) were outdated and the automatic update procedure (either through the plugin central “plugin” or built-in wordpress, I dont know) worked out of the box, too. I just had to input my ftp credentials. Upgrading wordpress to 2.5 went without any major troubles as I used subversion. Again I had to use the sw command instead of the up command.
(see when-svn-up-does-not-work-wordpress-subversion for more and replace 2.3.3 by 2.5, else you downgrade by chance). Weird. Akismet was kind of “crapped out”, so was was form-advanced.php. I deleted them through putty and run an svn update again which fixed it.

Also I did the monthly sql optimization and junked out 9mb of crap. phpMyAdmin’s “optimize” sql works a charm!

What I need to do-
- contact alinks author-
- http://www.alinks.org/ as it is broken in version 1.0rc1
- fix the ela archive: Could not open cache file ’2008-4.dat’
-restore my fancy 404 page which I seem to have lost. anyone got it?
404 chibby page where are you!
- fix search (looks crap)
- update some of my themes?

There are a bunch of new plugins I want to test, but that has to wait till I have my term paper done (sigh)

Technorati love (apparently)

WordPress Plugin Developers get little credit

By: jez

06-04-2008

Wordpress

2 comments

Scott Reilly of coffee2code set out to try a 14 days of Plugins Challenge. In the past he has released various (great) wordpress plugins for free which he now tries to update to WordPress 2.5. as part of the set goal to come up with 14 wordpress plugins in the next 14 days.

WordPress Plugin Designers such as Scott Reilly or Lester Chan get less media coverage than theme designers for the reason (I assume) that their work is not that visible. Their work is amazing and really improves WordPress by a lot.

As a WordPress Theme Designer I think it is time to say thanks and return some favours, show some karma and link-love. Keep it up Plugin People!

Lester “Gamerz” Chan’s WordPress Plugins
Scott Reilly’s WordPress Plugins

The ones I love from Lester Chan are: Postviews (does not work here though due to complex loops), Post ratings, Print (allows you to print, right?).

The ones I love from Scott Reilly are: Author images (allows you to show an picture of you below a post or in your template – well you could hard and hand code this, but still this is a neat plugin!), Auto-Hyperlink URLs (autolinks links, as the name suggests), custom comment listing (will incorporate this once again soon, because the current comment section annoys me), Top recent commenters (similar to the one mentioned before) and wpuntexturize (changes annoying curly quote marks (quotation marks) into simple lovely ones). Lorrele’s article on “how to use the post-listings plugin” might be a good place to look at when you have trouble with Scott Reilly’s plugin

Rainbow Feather in Japanese

By: jez

20-03-2008

Wordpress

2 comments

I have fixed a bug in the English theme today (and all other themes) and also finished the Japanese theme version.

You can try the demo on my themeviewer or check out some sample excerpts below.
Resources as usual at http://www.h4x3d.com/themes/feather/rainbow-feather-resources/

Note: In case you are trying the theme and see plenty of ??? instead of the text you will need to install the east-asian language pack for your OS. Since this is a localized version of my Rainbow Feather theme the target group will be able to display the theme just fine. See below screenshots

download rainbow feather in japanese

Japanese translation of rainbow feather

By: jez

05-03-2008

Wordpress

0 comments

I finished the pictures for the Japanese Translation of Rainbow Feather today -
unfortunately I cannot put the translation into the plaintext UTF-8 encoded PHP-Files.
Update, if you have the language pack for Eastern Languages installed you can enjoy the whole beauty!

Does anyone know a walk-around for this problem?

Credits for the translation (I do not speak Japanese I must admit) go out to Yujin Takayanagi , thank you mate!

Got Rainbow Feather javascript error?

By: jez

20-02-2008

code

0 comments

first of all, get rid of the following two things in the header.php:



window.onload = function() {
new SmoothScroll({duration:2000});
}

because if you use lightbox (with prototype it does not play along that well.)
if you want to use lightbox with moo,
you should use slimbox

the file (feather.zip) comes with different headers:
one for slimbox and moo.tools (smallest) default install
one for lightbox (no moo.tools) bigger

also, see the manual.

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The darkest is before dawn (I am not dead)

WordPress Themeviewer opened again

WordPress 2.6 released – not upgrading for now?

Technorati once more

Alexa rating system has changed

WordPress 2.5 and chibby 404

WordPress Plugin Developers get little credit

Rainbow Feather in Japanese

Japanese translation of rainbow feather

Got Rainbow Feather javascript error?

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