The Naked Green

2008.5.1 Thursday

Themed Login Page Built-In

Filed under: Blog Publishing, Web Design — Mr. Green @ 4.52 pm

It looks like the excellent Themed Login plugin by James Kelly will no longer be needed (in its present form)! It essentially overwrites wp-login.php with custom php which means lots of hacking to make modifications to any login and registration functions. I’ve looked for workarounds, but have run up against the wall of having to hack the files themselves or overwrite them, which is almost as bad.

David Still (stealthdave) has come up with a solution and opened up a Trac entry on wordpress.org to add hooks to wp-login.php! As of right now, it’s scheduled to officially be added to the wordpress core files in version 2.6! I can’t wait to start testing it and here I am blogging about it already. I’m excited by strange things ’tis true!

2008.4.9 Wednesday

CSS Naked Day

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 12.00 pm

The Naked Green celebrates CSS Naked Day today by stripping this site of all style sheets! The point is that the content should be standards compliant and orderly.

2008.2.16 Saturday

Fresh View of Green

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 7.25 pm

I was just thinking recently, that I really like the design of this website: It’s simple, content focused, sized with ems (so the design grows with the text size), and it’s got a cool picture of grass.

2007.1.29 Monday

Blog, blog, blog.

Filed under: Personal, Web Design — Mr. Green @ 4.01 pm

What are you supposed to write in your blog after more than a year of inactivity?

I’ve been at my parents’ house working on harwoodcafe.com due to the lack of electrical work. I did my usual cringing check of my days work in IE and wouldn’t you know it, it was broken. You’re not surprised, are you? It seems that the good ol’ folks at “little software” decided to put out IE 7, a ridiculous attempt at mimicking Firefox. They also decided to fix some bugs while they were at it, which made my hacks not work. It wasn’t a horrible disaster because of conditional comments, but it was annoying. That, in case you’re wondering, is how I came to be staring at The Naked Green once again and had my Dad walk by and say, “Your last post was in September 2005.” Thanks for pointing that out!

There’s a lot that’s happened and lots of ideas and plans and maybe I’ll write some more in hear here to inform the awaiting masses and document the history of my interesting life, but it will have to wait.

2005.5.9 Monday

Upgrading The Green

Filed under: Blog Publishing, Web Design — Mr. Green @ 8.21 pm

I finally upgraded to Wordpress 1.5 with little trouble! It didn’t take long to get it running and move my theme over. It’s strange to see the same old blog staring at me from a whole new backend.

Wouldn’t you know it? The day I decide to upgrade, Wordpress 1.5.1 comes out! Two upgrades in one night, that’s pretty good!

I’ll need to add plugins and probably tweak the design a little, but for now I’m up and running again in style.

Update 2005.05.10: Podz has started a support forum post to help people upgrade from 1.5 to 1.5.1.

2005.4.8 Friday

Rhythmic Symphony

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 7.03 pm

It may be hard to spell, but you don’t have to worry about that as you listen to the enchanted melody. Rhythmic Symphony is a synthpop band and a brand new link on my sidebar. I helped put them on the www map to reach all those online ears with the dark and yet somehow light music. I’m sure you’ll want to check out my latest web and graphic design project to at least be able to write some sort of snide comment here.

If you don’t know what synthpop is or why someone would name a band Rhythmic Symphony or what one is supposed to sound like, there’s no clubs for you to join. No, unfortunately none of the poor souls that can relate to you have organized. Maybe they just found the answers for themselves instead of reading silly propaganda. Maybe you should go find out what Rhythmic Symphony is about…or go start a club.

Yes, there are song samples on the website.

No, I have no idea why you’re still reading my answers to questions you haven’t asked.

No, I don’t really have anything technical to say about the design. It actually went fairly smoothly, especially integrating my design with Wordpress 1.5 That’s nice for me, but doesn’t make great blog posts if you want something with <tags>.

Yes, I’m going to stop writing now and let my wife get on the computer and maybe watch Dodge Ball.

2005.3.23 Wednesday

Update from Code-Head

Filed under: Personal, Web Design, Work — Mr. Green @ 9.21 am

Only in Colorado does a geek ride his mountain bike up and down hills to get to the library only to pick up books on PHP & MySQL, take a drink from his Nalgene, ride back and actually enjoy it.

Soon, I hope to be designing database driven websites that are so simple to maintain, even the client can do it. Why I want to work myself out of a job, I don’t know. My new found knowledge will probably be used on my business website first. There is some serious learning to do before then, though, which explains why I picked up MySQL/PHP Database Applications. I hope to spend enough time with my head in the book to make some headway progress before I get busy again with two prospective jobs in April as well as some flooring.

Side note: Thanks to Simon Wheeler, creator of phpdev, who made it a breeze to get PHP MySQL and Apache running on my Win machine in minutes! I’m excited to get going and the last thing I need is to spend hours trying to configure programs.

2005.3.3 Thursday

PHP Includes and XML

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 5.54 pm

Today I realized that I could use PHP includes to make a more modular website design almost like a template. What I realized was that I could use PHP without knowing anything about it! So I went crazy adding <?php include('filename.txt'); ?> all over the place and breaking up my XHTML into smaller bite size pieces. I quickly learned that the file location is from the server root (/home/user/public_html/filename.txt) and not the URL.

A problem that came up (there has to be at least one) was with my <?xml version="1.0" encoding="iso-8859-1"?> line at the top of my document. It was causing my newly made PHP document to break. I figured it was because of it being similar to the way you begin a PHP statement. I didn’t want to get rid of it is part of W3C’s Recommendation for XHTML 1.1. I found out found the answer had to do with the short_open_tag variable….
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2005.2.26 Saturday

PNG Transparency in IE

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 10.19 pm

It’s yet another post about long hours trying to trick Internet Exploder into working. I worked on Jamie’s blog or a while today to implement a newish design and learned some tricks, too.

Thanks to LPD, I have found a new solution (if you can call it that) to the lack of PNG transparency support in IE instead of using filter: alpha(opacity=60) which ends up washing out the colors of the PNG image.

This hack uses the horrid looking, non validating filter:progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(enabled=true, sizingMethod=scale src='75p_honey.png'); to accomplish this simple feat (simple in Firefox, that is). Of course, then you must hide the actual background-image: url(/folderto/sample.png);, so we use #content[id] to hide it from IE. Simple, isn’t it? Well, that lovely hack job makes links all but useless in IE (you see them, but they don’t work). So, for some reason only old Billy knows, you have to add position: relative to all child elements (#content *). Here is a sample:
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2005.2.24 Thursday

!important Declaration

Filed under: Web Design — Mr. Green @ 10.29 am

No, I don’t have some mind-boggling, profound idea to share with you. I learned something (that may be mind-boggling) about CSS today.

I was working on some CSS for Stevish.com, I came across some strange code:


margin: 0 !important;
margin: 0 6px 0 1px;

Not knowing what it was, I promptly deleted it with no adverse effects and moved on. Then I thought better of the situation and figured I should find out what this strange “hack” is supposed to do. That was not easily done to to search engines removing the ! in !important. alltheweb was the only one I found that would keep it and even then I got plenty of importants and some hokiness. I did find what I was looking for: 6.4.2 !important rules of w3c’s CSS2 Specification:

CSS attempts to create a balance of power between author and user style sheets. By default, rules in an author’s style sheet override those in a user’s style sheet (see cascade rule 3).

However, for balance, an “!important” declaration (the keywords “!” and “important” follow the declaration) takes precedence over a normal declaration. Both author and user style sheets may contain “!important” declarations, and user “!important” rules override author “!important” rules. This CSS feature improves accessibility of documents by giving users with special requirements (large fonts, color combinations, etc.) control over presentation.

So it’s an actual CSS declaration! It didn’t seem to make sense in context, though, because there are two margin selectors in the sample code. So, I figured it was yet another “standards compliant” hack to deal with the infamous Internet Exploder. I decided it would be quicker to mess with the code myself and found that IE will override an !important declaration with a second selector (margin), while a standards compliant browser such as Firefox will not.

Here’s an example:

Using the following CSS:

style="color: green !important; color: red;"

This sentence is green in Firefox and red in IE.

There may be people searching for the “exclamation point important” hack or the “exclamation point important” declaration and with search engines not reading !important right, I thought I would help.

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