Shin
Dec
30

WordPress theme pondering

I’m currently switching back and forth between a lot of previous wordpress themes and new ones, trying to figure out what I want. My wishlist for content and bits of pieces I want to display on the front page is quite large, and I still haven’t found one that satisfies me 100%.
I want Hemingway blocks, widgets, latest posts from the forum, latest pics from the gallery, latest entries from the other blogs, the latest entry (a la popurls.com) from a couple of sites I always read, some site stats, albumcovers of stuff I’m listening to at any given moment (using data from last.fm), books I’m reading and other bits and pieces.

And of course, it has to look good. Easy on the eyes, minimalistic yet glossy, and the hardest part given the amount of stuff I want to shove onto the page; it shouldn’t look crowded. Which is extra tricky because a lot of you are still using low resolutions, 1024×768 or less. So to some degree the design has to be fluid or scale properly, seeing as I also want to make good use of screen estate for those of us with higher resolutions. Personally my screens use 1680×1050 and I’m sick and tired of all the layouts that are still fixed to 800×600. That’s half the screen empty.

Oh oh, AND I want to fiddle with loops to break up the monotony. Most themes still have columns going straight down, so there’s one column going down with all the blog entries, one or two columns with nothing but widgets… boring. So I’ll have to fiddle with the loop code to break it up a little, so for example you’ll get one blog entry, then a widget/block, then another entry. I think that’ll look nice.

Dec
06

Identity crisis

No, not me. The site. Over the years there’s been so much added ad hoc that I think now that the community side of things has gone rather stale the rest of the site’s left hanging in mid-air. We have an anime/manga section that hasn’t seen much in the way of updates, Final Fantasy Music Online… r.i.p, gallery is hybernating, the blogs are only used by a handful of people and everyone else seems to have left the building.
It’s nice to see at least some of you check it out every now and again, but what for?
I’d LOVE to know, because it’ll give me at least some sense of direction where I can focus my efforts to try and bring ye olde dog back to its former glory.

Nov
09

So many assholes…

so few bullets.
This was left as a comment on my blog:

Name: Ac1d | E-mail: X111@ulmb.com | URI: http://x111.co.nr | IP: 86.135.82.165 | Date: November 9, 2006
if it wasnt for you i could have this domain u idiotic pigs!
Your all going to be h4×0r3d

Right.

Nov
06

Blogs & gallery

The last remains of b2evolution have been cleaned up & deleted today.
I’ve imported my old blog from there on this one and spent a considerable amount of time deleting & tagging old entries.
Mmmm, WordPress how I love thee. Sadly all the old comments are gone as well, but that’s life. Unfortunately a lot of spambots still love b2evolution so I saw a lot of hits on ye olde blogs dir. Therefor I dropped a .htaccess file in there with the following code:
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://X111.com/$1 [R=301,L]
That makes them get automagically redirected to the front page and keeps my apache error log from filling up with crap.

The gallery has also been updated. WinMerge saved the day by allowing me to update the templates in a fraction of the time it would normally take. We now have captcha spam protection in there and at last… RSS feeds! Something most of you will probably not care about but I love it to bits as it’s one step closer to my ultimate dream of building a newsfeed which contains all the updated bits from everywhere on the site.

Nov
05

November

and it’s cold outside. The shitty weather season has finally arrived and so does the general feeling of doom and gloom. Sorta.
The forum’s dead as a doornail and I’m guessing so is the chatroom. Which is why I left the latter a while ago for the first time since it started and why I’ll probably pull the plug on the forum when we turn the page for 2007. At some point you just have to admit defeat and move on.
Sad? Well yeah, it’s the end of an era. But what you can do… whining about it doesn’t help. Just about everyone has moved on and both CommS ‘n me are spending to bloody much time working to waste what precious spare time we have on a community that’s already left the building. That time can be better spent on other things.

To be continued…

Oct
29

WordPress 2.0.5 released

It’s upgrade time again.

Oct
22

X111.com – layout 6

Juli 2004 – May 2006, longest running layout and best received thusfar it would seem.

Oct
17

Work in progress

New theme on the frontpage, so you know what that means… time to throw everything around again.
The basis this time around is a wonderful theme by UtomBox which is a modified Hemingway theme. I love the more vibrant colours and some of the standard features. Mmm, wooshing comments.
Ofcourse I’m throwing it around a bit and tweaking it to match my taste and turns it into something which will then propagate throughout the rest of the site. So here we go again….
At the moment I have a temp menu on the right hand side so you can get to the forum or gallery or wherever you like to go next. And more temporary-ness; a sneak peek up above at my new personal sign; the phoenix.

Comments on anything and everything are welcome. Go on, you know you want to play with that comment slider.

Oct
09

Redirect 301

In case you’re one of those people still using www.x111.com you’ll now notice it automagically switches you to the non-www url. This is done because I want to ditch www, and because of a nasty side effect in search engines if you have www and non-www both working, which is the case in most shared hosting environments. Technically speaking www.x111.com and x111.com are 2 different sites as far as DNS and search engines are concerned. So both can get indexed, and as a result your PR and SERP goes down the toilet if they’re mixed.
You can get around this by using redirects, specifically the 301, which is the status code to tell the machine requesting the page that it has permanently moved to another location. You can use a .htaccess to manage the redirects but an even better way if you manage your own server is to use Apache’s httpd.conf.
The way I’ve done it is this, previously a virtual host section would look like:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.com
DocumentRoot /home/domain/www
ServerAlias www.domain.com
</VirtualHost>
Now we remove the ServerAlias and set up a new virtual host for it in which we’ll define the redirect for www.domain.com, so we’ll have 2 virtual hosts as such:
<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName domain.com
DocumentRoot /home/domain/www
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.domain.com
Redirect 301 / http://domain.com/
</VirtualHost>

Save, restart Apache and you’re done, from now on all www urls will automagically be redirected to their non-www counterpart and your rankings will correct themselves as the search engine spiders crawl your site and work their magic.

Work in progress... not home!
Trying to get all/most of the new code working before I start on the eyecandy.