The Geekorium

A new theme for a new year - only one week early.

I loved my last theme (actually, my last two themes - but the C64 one was a throwaway), but every time I make a new theme I learn something, and I wanted to incorporate some of my new skills into a new theme.

Screenshot of my latest theme - Claim

Inspired by my most loyal reader (hello dad!) I’ve created “Claim”, a theme to help me stake my claim to my peice of the web, that’s easier and clearer to read. It’s inspired by many, but fettered by nunn.

The Claim theme includes built-in support for these plug-ins:

• Creative Commons Configurator - creates a licence that can be included at the base of your individual posts.
• Link Summarizer - provides a list of the included links at the base of each post. Configured for printed pages only.
• Ping/Track/Comment Count - Counts the comments seperately from the pings. Recommended for correct function of this theme
• ShareThis - places a button for sharing the post in various social networks or via email at the base of each post.
• Wavatars - an awesome plugin that creates a unique avatar for each commenter, or uses their gravatar if they have one.

Please bear with me as I tweak things around here, and if there’s anything you think I can fix, please let me know. As usual, I haven’t tested it on IE7 or earlier, so you might notice some wackyness using those browsers. I’ll sort that when I can.

Credits

Jon Tan(Jon Tan(gerine), designer and typographer) has an excellent site on design etc that you should visit (actually, his site is awesome and you shouldn’t visit ‘cause it’ll make me look bad). His site has a left margin for asides and captions which inspired mine. Hopefully he won’t mind me pinching his idea.

Tomorrows Laundry provided the blank theme that I styled and chopped up using TextMate(Top-notch text editing for the mac) and CSSEdit 2(Excellent CSS editing for the mac).

The Yahoo YUI library(link to Yahoo YUI) created the base CSS that this site is built on.

Update: 2008-01-05 Version 2.0 The “Claim” theme was not validating properly due to the Yahoo Reset, so in version 2.0 I’ve switched to Blueprint(Blueprint, a CSS framework).

Blueprint is a CSS framework, which aims to cut down on your CSS development time. It gives you a solid CSS foundation to build your project on top of, with an easy-to-use grid, sensible typography, and even a stylesheet for printing.

– Blueprint CSS (Blueprint, a CSS framework) at Google Code

Today’s update also includes the Blueprint print stylesheet and some extra jiggerypokery thanks to Footnote Links(Build fancy footnotes for printed pages) created by Aaron Gustafson(Original A List Apart article by Aaron Gustafson on Footnote Links).

Update: 2008-01-09 Version 2.1 finally fixes the issues with the left margin caption/cite/metadata positioning. Now if the post markup is correct the page will render perfectly on every browser I’ve tested.

Update: 2008-04-13 Version 2.6 Introduces:

• A tag page with tag cloud
• Category page title and tag title integrated into page heading
• Removed a hard coded reference to this site
• Changed class “updatedate” to “date”
• Improved the category/archive pages
• Fixed a couple of img placement problems
• Better compatibility for linux (fixed fonts)
• Styled the RSS feed widget to match theme
• Nicer sidebar styles
• Tag links added to pages

Update: 2008-04-21 Version 2.7 Introduces:

• A hard-coded about section, independant on widgets. The About section displays the Biographical Info found on your profile page on most pages, but on category pages, it displays info about the category. I may expand this later to include post excerpts.
• Built-in support for the Link Summarizer(Plugin page for the Link Summarizer plugin) plugin. This produces a list of all the links in the post, and replaces “Footnote Links” that left numbers everywhere when styles were turned off. The list will only display on printed pages.

I loved my old Commodore 64. It had fantastically playable games, neat 16 colour graphics, and that awesome SID chip for the charmingly wonky C=64 sound. You could program on it, play on it, wait for things to load on it…

It had cartridges, it had a tape drive, it had a clunky disk drive that worked marginally faster than the tape drive. Really, it was shit compared to what we have today, but man-oh-man it still outstrips every one of the computers any true geek has ever owned since.

On Monday, the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, will celebrate the C64’s 25th anniversary. CNN article on Commodore 64 anniversary

In August 2007, the Commodore 64 made it to 25 years old. And in honour of the Computer History Museum’s celebrations, I have created a Commodore 64 Wordpress theme to add to my website. If you’ve come to this page wondering why my site is all big and blue and chunky - it’s to pay respect to a truly wonderful computer.

If you’ve come here looking to get the theme yourself - let me know and I’ll see if I can make it available to download. It’s still a work-in-progress, so expect to see some changes before things finally settle and I haven’t tested it on any versions of IE. It’s a little harder to navigate, so I’ve made a menu link up there in the top right corner, so you don’t get completely lost.

I’ve made the comment areas blue too, so you can relive the joys of typing LOAD “*”,8,1 yourself, so go on and leave me a comment. And everyone, please be patient for the next two weeks and join me in remembering one of the best computers I’ve ever owned.

LOAD “*”,8,1

A month and a half ago I was contacted by a Martin Vrabel, who sent me this:

email from Martin Vrabel of Taskee.comHi Joshua,

I found out you are writing about webdesign on your blog. I though you may be interested in writing about the new URL related task management tool for web designers - Taskee.

Taskee is a hosted website task management tool for small and medium size webdesign companies. Taskee simplifies website task management communication process and makes it easier and cheaper to collaborate during website testing process.

You can find more info and demo at www.taskee.com [website no longer working]

Sorry for this email if its not worth your attention or was interrupting you.

Kind Regards,

Martin Vrabel

This was my first ever request for comment about any product, so I dutifully starred it in Gmail and promised myself I’d look at it when I could. Well, the wait is over. I thought I’d set it up today and give it a go. This post is part review, but mostly feedback at the moment as the product is only at version 0.3 and not ready for prime time.

First up, I’ll just explain what I think Taskee is, having used it a tiny bit and finding Martin’s marketing speech a little overcomplicated. Taskee is a simple way for people to leave notes (or to-dos) about specific webpages with the people who are actually making the website. I might make a website for a client, and as they browse the site and pick up changes that need to be made, they can put them straight into Taskee instead of writing them down or emailing them to me. For sites with a lot of collaborators (or even just two) it could be enormously helpful.

Taskee is really quite easy to use. You sign up and paste a tiny bit of code into your website. The next time you load a page, you’re greeted with a big blue ‘Open’ button that helpfully stays put, even when you scroll around the page. Clicking the big blue button allows you to log in, and you can start to ‘Taskee’. The button is actually quite large (maybe a little too large). Taskee was designed I think with pre-production sites in mind. With a less obtrusive button it might be just as useful for live sites.

The software takes note of what page you are on automatically, and you can start leaving notes about changes that need to be made, information that needs to be included and ideas you’d like to explore. What makes Taskee helpful here is that you can set up multiple users and assign your message to specific people. John can tell Tony to fix the fonts, and tell Sue to spruce up the copy. Then when Tony visits the page, he can check the tasks he has to do. And it’s all done from your own site.

There is also a neat feature to set a version of Taskee for visitor feedback. Instead of the ‘Open’ button, visitors are greeted with an unobtrusive (although colour options might be useful in future releases) ‘Feedback’ button that pops up a box where people can tell you stuff like “There’s spam on this page” or “Change your colour scheme for heavens sake!”.

It’s such a simple concept that it almost doesn’t need review - either you’ll find it useful or you won’t. It’ll fit into your way of doing things or it won’t. This version does demand some feedback though, so I’ll share my initial reactions. Please don’t think it’s a comment on the idea - only on the current stage of execution.

I had a few buggy problems. The control panel gives you an option to move the ‘Open’ button somewhere else (on NunnOne it gets in the way of my title). It doesn’t seem to want to move without a cache/cookie clearout though, which could cause some confusion.

Turning on the Feedback option and clearing my cache/cookies had the adverse affect of removing my ‘Open’ button completely. If I hadn’t turned on Feedback I might still be able to see the ‘Open’ button, but I can’t find any documentation on their site that can tell me how to get it back.

Unfortunately I did this before going much further, or having the buttons for longer than a day, so I can’t really even tell you yet how useful it has been long-term. I’m sure they can tell me how to get it back, or make it easier to find out, but you might want to know that these two bugs alone have made just setting it all up a little more complicated than necessary.

There are also a few options that aren’t clearly explained (in my opinion). I just can’t get back into the admin panel to tell you what they are. I can’t even really show you any proper screenshots.

The only real non-bug downside is a bi-product of its simplicity - all the data you create gets stored at taskee.com. Perhaps a future version will have a local installation option.

Currently Taskee is in beta - everything is subject to change before the product is finished - so take my opinions with a grain of salt. Their latest blog post also seems to say that they will have both free and paid options and a new interface very soon, so it could be very different next version.

Update: 2007-11-20 The blog post on the Taskee site that first mentions the Feedback feature mentions how to get the ‘Open’ button back. It should be clearer though.

Thanks for your interest in my theme, joshnunn 0.1. joshnunn is a simple two column theme with static header, footer and sidebar. My biggest achievement with it was making it entirely with ‘em’s for maximum resizable-ness!

I’ve not put any licence on it because I’ve not made it transportable to other Wordpress setups - it requires a number of plugins to work properly, and I’ve made no effort to make it customisable with other logos/icons etc. One day I may make it available, but frankly - do you want it? Really?

Feel free to take it/modify it/make it your own, but please mention me (and this site) somewhere.

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