Category: Blog

I've upgraded to the latest WordPress, which now includes drag and drop customization of the sidebar using widgets. A nice new addition to the default install is the 'Recent Comments' widget.

I had to switch to the new default theme that comes with 2.2, but after the usual mods the look of the site is back to normal.

I'm also experimenting with MiniPosts to create a side-blog, or Asides, for short comments/links.

In the future I'd like to include a tag-cloud and maybe some stats-listing in the sidebar.

I've upgraded to the latest WordPress, release 2.1

Hopefully everything works as before.

Funnily, the biggest new thing (besides 'boring' security fixes) advertized with 2.1 is a new visual editor for posts. But to my surprise I found it was not enabled by default! In the admin panel you need to go Users/Your Profile and check the "Use the visual editor when writing" tickbox to get the new and improved editor.

There's also a new spell-checker, but for me it errors out with a cryptic message "Could not execute AJAX call, server didn't return valid a XML."

For some reason I also needed to replace my <code>.htaccess</code> file for everything to work.

Update: I'm still finding it quite annoying that WordPress creates posts with no ALT tag when I insert images and don't bother to include some text in the ALT field. This results in errors when doing XHTML validation. So I've filed a WordPress bug report. Let's see what happens!

Some notes, mostly for myself, about how I chaged the header image and the way the title is displayed. I bet this will be usefull after the next WordPress update when the theme most likely gets reset back to default.

To get a header image that 'rotates' i.e. is updated with a new random picture each time the page is loaded, I used Matt Mullenweg's simple rotate script. I named it rotate.php and placed it in wp-content/header-images/

I then placed the images I want as headers into wp-content/header-images/ and modified the CSS stylesheet for my theme:

#header {

background: #73a0c5 url('http://www.anderswallin.net/wp-content/header-images/rotate.php') no-repeat  center;

}

Note that some browsers (Firefox!) are smart enough to cache the header image, so if you want to see a new header pic simply pressing the 'reload' button won't do - you need to do a full reload of the page by pressing Ctrl-F5. This is not necessary using Internet Explorer

Also, from the default layout of 4em size and centered alignment, my blog title is now a bit smaller and positioned in the top left corner (so as not to obstruct the nice header pic!):

h1 {

font-size: 3em;

position: absolute;

text-align: left;

bottom: 150px;

text-indent: 0.8em

}

Update: I've made a Photo page with all the banner images and short descriptions.