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..

You can see my progress here:

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

I’ve run into some interesting javascript foibles that I have had to deal with and have also taken this opportunity to start on my own javascript toolbox.

Every artist has his favorite paintbrush or pens, every carpenter his favorite hammer, and every plumber his favorite ass crack pants.. I’m using this project to develop my own javascript toolkits. For now they are largely unfinished and designed to be used for .. well this project.. but it is a start..

With regards to the theme, I’m working specifically on getting the colorchooser to work. Right now it doesn’t choose colors, and I only got the slider/picker cursors to work today. But only on clicks, you can’t drag them yet.

I’m hoping to have it work better than the Chromatophore stuff, and so far the one thing that works better (in my opinion) is the way the chooser slides out. Firstly from a purely javascript profiling stand point I win hands down;

The Chromatophore theme makes 454 javascript calls to “slide” their colorchooser down, where as my version only makes 88 calls.. 454 man! I have no idea what they are doing of course because they obfuscate their code and I don’t feel like eval’ing it out and running tidy to figure it out..

My color chooser will also be fixed once down so you can scroll around the page and have the color chooser open to see how your changes work live on the page, instead of having a mini-preview — right now this isn’t the case but it will be.

I’m still very excited about this and working on it.. but this is taking time.

To that end I have decided to convert (or redesign) the Chromatophore Joomla theme into a combined wordpress / invision power board theme. I decided to go with this look because I very much appreciate what the folks over at RocketTheme did with the Chromatophore theme. To be honest if I were using Joomla I’d buy it, but since I’m not I must create my own.

Instead of just cutting and pasting their html, js, css, and images into an already created wordpress template I have decided to recreate the theme from what I see alone. Without looking at their source — at all.  (So far I’ve only peaked a couple times)

It’s been a challenge to be honest. One that I am up to for sure as my webdesign-foo is strong, but they have done some pretty neat kungfu hackery here that I really like. Not sure who the lead ninja was on this one, but he did a very good job. (Why do I keep referencing martial arts?) You can test my progress here;

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

As you can see I’m a long way off yet, but its coming along nicely. I have to get all the various bits working across the board and then try to apply it to the template system in wordpress .. then try to apply it to the even more convoluted template system in IPB. I have to admit the later one is gonna suck. I appreciate what the IPB folks were trying to do with template designs but they went WAY over board with cutting things up and making one’s life a living hell.

Also, most likely for the forum itself the left column of stuff will either have some form of minimize toggle or it will simple be hidden via css, I havent decided yet. I don’t want to crowd the forum. It’s had a full width layout for years now and shrinking it might annoy folks.

I really like how you can control all colors and what not in the Chromatophore theme and the same functionality will eventually exist in my theme.

It makes me think that there might be a market for folks who do nothing but convert themes from joomla to wordpress or to IPB.. Not a job I’m volunteering for as this is severly cutting into my game time.. but still a market all the same.

I’m stunned that I got botted so soon after putting it up, more over on domains that didn’t exist until yesterday.  BUT likely due to my post of yesterday which told the bots where to go — woops.  A solution was required and fast!

I did some research and found a nice plugin that should solve the problem, and help others at the same time.  The folks over at recaptcha.net are solving this problem in a new and creative way.  Recaptcha is helping solve the problem of imperfect OCR readers and helping to digitize books by sending words that cannot be ready by the computer to the web in the form of captcha’s to be solved by humans.   This is all kinds of clever. 

Each new word that cannot be read correctly by OCR is given to a user in conjunction with another word for which the answer is already known.  The user is then asked to read both words.  if they solve the one for which the answer is known, the system assumes their answer is correct for the new one.  the system then gives the new image to a number of other people to determine, with higher confidence, whether the original answer was correct.

By adding this spam blocker, we are helping the greater community.. I like that.

The amusing thing is BlaenkDenum JUST created this reCaptcha WPMU plug-in a couple of days ago.. lucky for me!  

• http://blog.fanfilmsforum.com
• http://blogs.fanfilmsforum.com
• http://blog.amateurfilmsforum.com
• http://blogs.amateurfilmsforum.com
• http://filmsblog.org
• http://filmsblog.net

Only the first one works 100% correctly right now.  My virtual hosts file and dns aren’t quite syncing up correctly — should be fixed eventually.

By that, you should take this as a very serious effort on my part.  I want this to be a success.  The next thing I must do is figure out how to correctly style the MU entry page such that it’s a self explainitory advertisement of what it does, and such that it incorporates content from the various other blogs.

I’m looking at other free blog portals to get some idea of how they do it.

Theme wise I’ll need to come up with something that will work both as a blog portal, a login page for the users blog, and as a forum theme for invision power board — no small task.

Once I get the main page design working, I’ll create a post that allows users to request new themes, and try to explain to them that I’m but one person so it takes a bit of time.

Each theme will need to have a way to tie into the forum and vice versa.  The whole point of this is to tie these two components together.    This will be the part that comes last as it will take the longest — likely coming after release.

The main blog will have many categories that replace the functionality of the former wiki.. Tutorials, instructions, ideas and the like will each live on the new blog.

I hope to make the main blog a virtual classroom on all things film making in order to bring folks in, as such a very thorough tagging system will need to be implemented and used.  (Lucky for me WP has a great tagging system.)

I also hope to make it so that any tag-cloud feature and any search feature will search across all blogs.  I think this shall be easy, and may already be done.. not sure.

Note to self:  wp-signup and home.php will need to be the same design unless I can get the dns virtual host thing to settle down..

Over the years I have started and stopped several projects for the forum. Most of them looked good on paper, or even half way through production but just didn’t pan out for one reason or another. The latest attempt was at making a film repository and voting system that was similar to IMDB but specifically for amateur/fan films. As of right now that project is on hold – likely forever.

For many years the forum in and of itself has done very well with out much additions. But it’s not a blockbuster domain and traffic is moderate to be sure. At this point we only get about 45k hits a month which really isn’t very good, but just fine for a small community like ours.

I have been noticing a slight decline in the visitation of the site over the course of the last year. The odd thing is, my Unique hits per month is actually going up, a lot. That’s good. That means new folks are showing up, but the over all total is going down, which means a general lack of repeat visitors. It’s an odd situation to be honest.

What this implies to me is that it’s lacking in content or atleast a reason for people to come back more than a couple times a month. The issue is, I don’t have the time to create the kind of content required to keep folks rolling in and enlisting people on the forum to do that job for me, especially for free, doesn’t really seem a good idea because they have lives and don’t have the time to do it either.

I need a way to bring more traffic to the site, and do it in a “work free” way. I think I have an idea that solves that nicely.

First of all it’s coming up on time for a new theme for the board. It’s starting to look dated and needs a new look. With that new look I’m pondering giving forum users their own blogs.

What I’m thinking of doing is encorporating a MultiUser version of WordPress such that any user that wants it, can create his own blog about his film project and experiences. They’d have complete control over the blog, it’s content, what it looks like, how it behaves, the files associated with it, etc..

It would most likely live at http://blog.fanfilmsforum.com/{users blog name}/ .. These would be free individual blogs — Since the traffic to the site is primarily associated with fan films, most likely these blogs would be about peoples films. However I wouldn’t enforce that.. if you want it about something else that’s fine.

I would need to figure out a way to tie in the forum, some link that ties directly back to the forum or maybe my ads on the page or something.. Something minor and unobtrusive that doesn’t piss folks off..

This would give the site a new outlet for content that is user created. This means people like myself wouldn’t have to dig for new content on a daily basis and I wouldn’t have to beg my users to do it for me. Instead users who actually wanted to do this would do it of their own accord. Plus it’s a way to give back to the community and give those folks who want it a free outlet for their own creative juices.

This is still very much in the idea and planning phase. Thoughts and opinions are very much welcome.

Additional Information:

• Main blog will be at http://blog.fanfilmsforum.com/  Anyone with a forum account and of a certain rank will be allowed to post.
• Anyone can have a blog and the address will be http://blog.fanfilmsforum.com/{users blog name}
• The main blog will pull blog entries from the user blogs
• With this, redesign the forum to show a blog feed like a widget on a side bar or something

Hard parts:

The only thing that seems remotely challenging is making wordpress and IPB play nice with one another. I don’t think it will be hard, but it will be time consuming as I’m not 100% sure about some of IPB’s DB calls.

Lets be completely honest here, the hardware upgrades aren’t that great though. I mean its an improvement, but its not a super vast improvement.. The 2 major things the new hardware brings to the table are 3G networking, and GPS. Both of which for me mean very little.

My current iPhone’s 2G networking works great for me. I mean so what if it takes 60 seconds to load a webpage instead of 30 seconds.. (Or 59 to 23 or whatever it was.. ) I just don’t mind waiting that couple extra seconds.. its not that big of a deal.

The GPS sounds like a fun little toy, but to be honest once again, I don’t see the value of GPS in a phone. I have no need of that tool. The location system now is ample — maybe I would change my story once I got to play with one that was fully GPS enabled, but right now it seems like an extra battery drainer that has no real value. If you were out in the woods, and needed a GPS antenna, you’d likely get a REAL GPS device that gives true coordinates.. etc..

Now having said that, they are lowing the price of the hardware to $199.. Wow… just.. Wow.. okay that’s awesome.. in fact that’s not awesome, that’s nuts! Clearly they are taking a loss on this device.. they must be! I’d be interested it knowing what the cost to Apple is for a single iPhone. I bet its pretty high.

Some folks are saying that its a complete slap in the face of those folks who have already purchased an iphone at the much higher price, but I don’t see it that way. I mean if you go buy a car, computer or any other kit of hardware you KNOW its going to be worth less the instant you get it. You should expect it. Maybe having it thrust in your face as harshly as this is the issue, but I just don’t see it that way.

The $400 for our iphones probably went a long way towards making the $200 iphone even possible. Had the $400 iphone been a flop, you wouldn’t see the cheaper version today.

What I’m really looking forward to is the software upgrades.. The application store looks fantastic beyond all reason. I love it! I really want to not only download software, but create software that others can use.. In Apples most recent keynote speech they had a demo of some software by typePad — a competitor to WordPress — that allows users to create blog entries on the fly. It looked great and I’d love to try to make one for WP!

They are also adding a lot of enterprise support which to me makes it pretty clear that Steve Jobs and Apple are extremely keen on cutting the legs out from under Research in Motion and their blackberry. Smart.

There is a lot of money there, and I think they can do it. The iphone is the latest cool wizbang hotness that I think could easily be on top in a year.

More over, with the price point of $200 I bet you’re going to see a lot of customers using the iphone as a computer for devices. Think about robots, car computers, or just fun tech toys. Here you have an extremely small BSD device with phone, wi-fi, bluetooth, camera, gps..etc.. I mean its the perfect device for .. uh.. anything.

The next year for the iphone should be damn fun to watch!

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.