Social Bookmark Icons

So I have added several links to social networking bookmarking sites to each of the pages within the theme..  I really wasn’t sure which ones most folks used so I went with the 4 that I knew the most.. I’m sure I’d be better served by adding twitter, google and others.. but really I’m not sure which ones most folks use.

I had thought of using an addthis.com bookmark button but I don’t know that I want their button on my site.. it’s kind of ugly plus I don’t know that I want to link to them.  I think they do popup ads and I’m not really keen on that..

If more networks are required I’ll likely create my own button system to house them all..

SRS Solutions EOS

So while I am still working on my Windows 7 Wordpress theme, I wanted to go ahead and update off Microblue.

I scoured the internet looking for a theme that I thought looked good and went well with my style.. as well as being well written and designed such that it would be easy to upgrade and edit.

I settled on SRS Solutions EOS.  A very well written theme that has everything I wanted.   Firstly its not a CSS or design nightmare that many themes tend to be.  The colors are well planned out and everything fits together quite nicely.

I have already started to make modifications and I hope to one day get the PSD file for the LayoutBgs.jpg so that I can make minor graphical tweaks..  In a day or two I hope to send them an email asking for the PSD file so I can proceed with my ideas but I’m pretty sure they wont just give it to me.. its their business after all.. 

I just hope they understand they aren’t losing money by giving me to it, as I have no intention of paying for their help (I can do it myself) and that if I have to recreated the PSD file myself I will..   If anything it would only serve to endear me to them even more by giving it to me..   We shall see..

Either way, the folks over at SRS did a good job and I’m more than happy to give them credit where credit is due.

As I make changes I’ll update this page with a download of the whole thing… I have a few changes planned that I don’t want to go into yet but since it isn’t originally my theme I have no intention of claiming ownership..

For now you can download the official theme here:  SRS Download Site

WPOS7 Screenshot

So I have been plugging away at creating my OS7 theme.. I previously stated that IE8 sucked completely and I have to take that back.   It doesn’t suck completely.. infact, it sucks a lot less than I realized..

I found that I was using IE8 in “quirks mode” and of course it behaved quirky.  My main question is;  What the hell is the point of quirks mode?!  “Here have our browser in a mode that is completely broken.” I just don’t get it.. I guess quirks mode is basically IE6 as they seem to render similarly.. (I have IE6 on my laptop still for testing purposes..) If that’s the case it couldn’t be better named..

Apparently since I had a misspelling (or something) in my doctype it defaulted to quirksmode.. Once I found that I was in the wrong mode, found out why and fixed it, I started to test my new UI in IE7 and IE8.. It actually works!!  Ever so minor bug in IE7, but its hardly worth mentioning..   IE8 works fine, but a little slow. er.. in fact, a lot slow.. IE8 ain’t zippy at all..

I think that if Microsoft would focus on speeding up IE8 A LOT and quash the remaining bugs, they’d have a viable browser. I fear they have been slack in development because they knew they had the majority of the market share. Since supposedly soon they will be uncoupling the OS and the browser that market share will wax..

With some of the advances that other browsers are pulling, IE is gonna hurt bad!

As to my theme.. It’s still not technically a theme.. At this point I am creating the basic window manager windows object and making all the standard stuff work..  So far so good..

What REALLY amuses me is if you use my theme, with F11 poked (fullscreen).. it looks like you’re in windows 7.  heh At a glance you can’t tell the difference.. *glee*  I want to further that illusion if at all possible..

On the back end, I need to make Wordpress ajaxable in order to pull information.. Supposedly there are already some pretty good wordpress plugins for doing this, but I don’t know that I want to rely on others work..   I’ll likely test a few before making a decision but more than likely I’ll write my own ajax solution which means poking around in the guts of WordPress.. Fun!

Wordpress OS7 Theme

So I have been using Windows 7 for a while now and I really do like it.  It’s no Snow Lepoard but it’s what I have.. heh  Honestly, its not bad at all..  I also have been using wordpress for a goodly while with the same theme “Microblue” a theme I created a year ago.

I’m getting bored with Microblue so its time for a change and I thought it would be fun to combine Windows 7’s look and feel into a wordpress theme.    This lead me down the road that I had started with my jQuery Windows post and posed an important question;

Do I implement a windows manager within a webpage?    God what a pain in the ass..

I could easily just create a static theme that looks sorta like windows 7..  Or.. I could create a much bigger and deeper product which would in essence be an entire windows manager..  In a  web browser..  I’m still pondering the route I want to go..

I’m not sure wordpress can handle some of the stuff I have in mind.. It would require some back end ajax work in order to take advantage of everything I want to do and I’m not sure I want to write that part of this..

The other issue here is that I’m going to be using a LOT of PNG files in order to take advantage of the alpha channel.  So older browsers will have to be waved off..  No matter which way I go this will be true..

I would like to try some effects that I don’t think you can do yet with PNG’s.. I want a PNG to be able to blur the image below it.. but I don’t think you can do that yet..  That will require some research..

I’m going to be working on this project for a bit outside of wordpress to get the basic look working then work on adding it to wordpress.

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Saturday, Jun 20th 2009 – So I have been working on my initial run at the WPOS7 theme.   I find it painfully ironic that IE8 can’t display it.  It works perfectly in Firefox and Safari but epic fail in IE.

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Sunday, Jun 21st 2009 — Well I spent the majority of the weekend working on my OS7 theme.  I have gone the windows manager route and am using this experience to learn more about jQuery.. What’s interesting is since I’m going this route, I’ll be able to apply my knowledge to Build Forge and the new UI that we are going to be creating..

It’s coming along nicely and works perfectly in Safari and Firefox… And to be honest, its working better than I would have thought..  IE8 is still an epic fail.. I mean dear god.. what a piece of crap..   I’m going to have to write some special jQuery stuff just to get IE8 working..  Assuming that doesn’t fail completely too..

I’m also going the route of writing it such that it will activate those windows that are created by the HTML as well as instancing new ones..   My reasoning behind this is for my work.. I am considering the creation of a new UI that would sit on the existing code base..

We’ll see.. I want to make this sucker as functional as possible..

So its been several more days and I have spent quite a bit of my spare time working on this theme conversion.. I can almost say its complete, but not quite yet.

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

My colorChooser system is about 90% done in Firefox and Safari, and about 70% done in Opera and IE. I’m not at all surprised that it’s not working correctly in IE, but the fact that Opera has the same error was a little shocking. Usually Safari and Opera work in parallel when it comes to javascript. Meaning if it works in one, it works in the other and vice versa.. I’ve managed to break that paradigm with this bit of code.. hehe.. It will be interesting to see what the issue is..

At this point choosing a preset or overlay works and colors the page correctly, and choosing an input to edit works. But you can only actually change the colors in Firefox and Safari using the cursors. There is something about doing that in IE and Opera that isn’t working. I’ll get that fixed here shortly I’m sure.

Also whatever change you make isn’t saved yet.. That’s just a matter of storing cookies and what not, I just haven’t done that yet. Also I haven’t made it realize you typed in a color.. I’ll get to it =)

It’s close!! I promise! Once I get the theme working correctly I’ll begin implementing it in WPMU.. Once that’s done I’ll start implementing it in IPB, which I dread.

I have tried to make my colorChooser system versatile enough that you can apply it to any webpage. That was my intent anyway. I hope to eventually apply it to my current rsow.com theme MicroBlue. Doing so will prove that it can be done and then I’ll release it to the wild.

Once I get the colorChooser working though, I will next add to it a way to change not just colors and overlays but also the whole theme. This will take a lot of work and is a ways down the road, but it should be pretty neat once I get there. I have a lot more stuff to do in the mean time though so I’m not holding my breath on that one.

I do need to redo my FFF graphic.. the one that is on the page now is a temporary that was created quickly to give me an idea of what I was trying for.. I like it, but it needs a lot of polish.. the film cannister looks horrible and the https on the urls make them too long.. etc.. I’ll do my best to make it better, I just wished my artistic abilities were anything above the nothing that they are now.. *sigh*

I will also add alpha shadows around the colorChooser box once it’s expanded. I haven’t done that yet either.. It’s interesting, as much work as I have done — and it’s been a lot — I am still not done yet. hehe

Speaking of not done; Another feature I was kicking around was a way for users to create a color set using the colorChooser then submitting them with a name or something to me so that I can easily make them public.. I mean if you create something that looks nice others might like it too.. Not sure how I’ll do that, or if I can. But maybe.. =)

As of this posting, its the theme I’m using and I plan to release it to the wild once it’s fully working. I also will be releasing the PSD that I used to create it so you can take it one step farther if you like.

For icons I’m using either using famfamfam.com silk icons or taking those icons and modifying them in some way.

The theme uses widgets exclusively to add stuff to the various bars. I plan to make a fallback for them, but haven’t done that yet.

Update:

• I have created two custom widgets that add functionality to the theme:
  1. One allows you to use pages as tabs as in the top bar “Info, About, Resume..etc.”
  2. And the other allows you to add blog roll like functionality to the bar bars as a multi-widget and allows you to specify which parts of your links you mean to use. This one needs some polish.
• children of the current category will be displayed beyond 1 level in the left nav — I plan to make the current category icon yellow or something, but haven’t done that yet..

TODO:
1. Fix next/previous links
2. Fix “Pages” links within a single long post
3. Use JS to set the min-height of #page to either 600 or #rightmenu height !!
4. Get search working
5. Go through and tag all posts in order to make tag cloud useful
6. If not logged in make comment form display correctly
7. make child of child list items appear correctly
8. Add CSS changes for opera to fix the little stuff

More as I get to it.