Daniel's corner of the web
Web Stuff
Sydney Lindy Exchange Website
Dec 7th
Well it has been a while. I’ve actually been quite busy the past few months.
Outside of work a fair chunk of my time has been devoted to a rewrite of the core code of the Sydney Lindy Exchange website. I’ve been it’s Web Admin for 5 years now. What started as a few HTML pages the first year with a simple form mailer for registration has now progressed to an (almost) full CMS.
The rewrite allowed me to break the code in to easier to manage chunks/modules of code. I didn’t achieve everything I wanted to this year as I just ran out of time. Early on whilst re-coding the site, I wanted it to be developed around a ‘Form builder and manager’ interface, as the main purpose of the site is registration for the event which is a form.
I did make quite a bit of headway with the form builder, however it was starting to get clunky and the deadline approached faster than I realised, so I ended up rehashing the rest of the code.
I did also remove all tables out of the layout this year thanks to css, however realised after the event when I was showing the site off to a collegue that the site didn’t display correct in IE6 thanks to it’s wierd and wonderful way of processing CSS :-S.
The other big challenge I had with this site was a mailing list. In the past I had a script which bulk sent all the email messages at once. This worked the first year, however second year not all recipients got the messages. I found out after the event had ended the reason for this was that a limitation of the host was 200 email messages (or more recipients) per hour. So this year I wrote a script which a cron job runs every 5 minutes to send a number of emails. I need to do more work on this so all email from the site (registrations etc) need to be run through the mail queue, plus better management of that to ensure that 200 emails per hour is not met.
I still have all the code for the Form Builder, so in the new year I hope to look at that again.
(And yes this post did take a month to write :-S)
Another Wordpress theme….
Sep 5th
This time for my father’s website… bluesnoopy.com I had downloaded a theme which I used on my website when I first started to blog called ‘Simply-Blue’ (I can’t find a link to the authors home page as it wasn’t listed in the original template). My father really liked the look of it, however, for some reason it wouldn’t support the NextGEN Gallery lightbox effect that he wanted so much.
So about a month ago I found this great barebone template called ‘Starkers‘ which is basically the wordpress default theme with ALL css div elements removed from it, which give you a great base platform for developing themes from. You just need to grab the latest version of the comments.php from the default themes so it will support gravitars which was implemented after Starkers was created.
I migrated the Simply Blue theme in to it and it looks great and now his Next Gen Gallery works and IMHO looks even better in this theme than the old theme which he was using.
Been Busy…..
Jul 7th
First post in a while… have been quite busy at work and home.
Have been helping out my wife by designing a WordPress Theme for her, which you can check out here. The reason I’ve been helping my wife with her theme is that she is starting a new business providing hand dyed yarns and rovings and other knitting accessories. So with a fresh layout (and soon to be very similar looking store), she will be on her way.
I have also been working on a theme for my site as well.. going for a ’50’s diner’ style, which is something I’ve been wanting to do for AGES! At this point in time I’ve still got a fair bit of work to do on it, cleaning up the code as much as I can. It actually started out as the default WordPress theme and I customised the HELL out of it 
It was a great theme to start with, however as I plan on using it a slightly different way, can clean up the css file a fair bit.
Oh… note.. IE is very sensitive to CSS. I had the layout working in FireFox, however it wasn’t displaying in Internet Explorer. The problem had to do with one space!
background: url(images/nav_top.jpg)top left no-repeat;
background: url(images/nav_top.jpg) top left no-repeat;
The top one didn’t display the image in IE, the bottom one did!!!!!! Even the w3c validator didn’t pick this up as an error.
Aside from websites, we went to the allergy clinic last week for my son. Confirmed he is allergic to Egg’s, Nut’s and Dust. He is also intolerant to a number of foods… which is one of the contributing causes to the eczema on his face, hands and feet. We are changing his diet to get him to a controllable level, meaning he’s currently eating a lot of bland foods, which means he is no longer eating Vegemite (which he loved), reducing his banana intake (he used to eat 1-2 a day, he’s now on 1-2 a week). So once he’s at a controllable level we will introduce different foods for a week and see how he reacts to them.
I haven’t written any complete songs in the last couple of months. I did hear about a songwriting competition put on by the NAB (link). I’ve been playing around with a couple of ideas which I hope to enter one in to the competition with. Will post the demo up here when it’s done.
So that’s about it… will try and type more in the next few months..