I hate how many WordPress plugins contains invalid code. It’s probably valid if you use the Transitional Doctype but I use Strict and therefore have to change these codes. The problem is that the plugins are written with code far more advanced than anything I can do so it can be quite a hassle to figure out what I can change and delete without messing up the entire plugin.

I’m kind of obsessed with having my entire site validate correctly but why shouldn’t I be? Valid code is like correct spelling. Sure you can read a text that’s badly spelled but it’s probably harder to understand. It’s the same with browsers. Sure they can display invalid code but often it looks kinda funny and not at all how you intended it to look.

What I hate even more than invalid code is code that’s valid but works differently in different browsers. This layout should work fine in all browsers besides maybe the most unusual ones but I think that has more to do with those browsers not being that good than my code. Still, it’s annoying. I remember back in the days when you coded for one browser and put up a disclaimer stating which browser (and resolution) your site should be viewed in. Not very user friendly, but still, easy.

It’s interesting to think about how coding has evolved in the past ten years. When I built my first web page back in 1999 I coded in HTML and didn’t use any CSS whatsoever. My first site was basically two frames. One with a text link menu and one main window for the content. The menu frame had a black and white background with tree branches (a photo I scanned) and the main frame was black. It didn’t look too bad considering what many other sites back then looked like. I’m proud to say that Whirlwind never have contained ugly clipart, dolls or annoying moving GIF images. Besides my celebrity blend phase I’ve always kept it pretty simple, not using too many colours or too much graphics.

I wish I still had my first layout saved but every layout I made up until 2001 were lost years ago. There wasn’t that many of them but still, it would have been cool to be able to look at them.

When did you start web designing and what did your first layout look like?

What happened to blogging every day? Well I’ve been busy working on this new layout but now it’s finished so here I am. What do you think? Don’t say it’s soooo great if you don’t think it is. Constructive criticism won’t kill me. Personally I’m not sure wether I like it or not. You see I’ve been staring at this layout for three days now so I’m already kinda sick of it.

This layout was tricky since I changed the entire structure of the code. It took me quite a while to get it the way I wanted it, espescially since I was working with two CSS documents. The only part of my site powered by WordPress is the blog. The rest of the site is all my own coding ran by a separate CSS file. This means I first have to make a WP theme and then a layout for the rest of the site, looking exactly like the theme. That doesn’t sound too complicated but it is since the WP code and my own code are totally different. And then it was of course this changing the entire structure thing.

Another tricky thing is that I want the site to look the same in Opera, Firefox and Explorer. One might think that if the markup is valid the site should look the same in all browsers but that’s not the case. Oh no, there are small differences which are hard to fix since well, the code is valid. This means you have to experiment until you find a code working in all three browsers. After a lot of work the only remaining problem was that the header menu was located 4px higher up in Opera than it should be. If I moved it down it ended up being 4px too low in IE and Firefox. After staring myself blind at that problem for three hours I came to the conclusion that there was no other solution than a hack for Opera. Sometimes browsers just displays things differently.

Yes, I’m a perfectionist but really, is there anything more annoying than a site not working correctly in your browser of choice? I do realize that 4px isn’t a lot but those pixels bugged me. Whenever I looked at the header I saw that the menu was off.

Anyway, let me know if you run into any errors.

IT’S DONE! WordPress is working! The hate I’ve been feeling for it for the past few weeks is fading, a bit. I mean, at least it’s WORKING now. Everything looks like I want it to look and works in both FF and IE, I can write posts, you can comment, I have categories and everything is valid XHTML. All of the discontent and annoyance isn’t gone though because I had to change a few things to be able to pass the validation. Weird really since that code is perfectly valid outside WP. But inside WP it’s not so now I no longer have a visitors counter and that sucks big time. I’ve had that counter for almost three years and now I have to get a new one and my statistics will be reset and forever gone. Of course I could stick with my old counter because nothing is visually wrong with the page when I use it but the code isn’t valid and I’m a perfectionist when it comes to that.

Sorry for not visiting any of you lovely affies lately. I blame it on trying to get my site back up running. I’ll be back on track for real in a day or two so see you later. <3

You really can’t tell right now but wordpress is going better and better. Right now you can’t see it because I’m not done with the coding so I took it offline so I could write this. Tomorrow I’ll continue the horrible progress of learning the mysteries of the blogging tool so many say so nice things about. Personally I hate it already. I conscider myself to be a good web designer with good XHTML and CSS skills but modifying the wordpress code is fucking hard! And I really hate that it’s so automatized and that the wp code is taking over an entire part of my site. I want to code everything myself! Unfortunately I have no knowledge of databases so I have to go with wp since cutenews sucks too. I liked cutenews but the spam was killing me and when I finally installed captcha and had it working for a couple of weeks I go and update my .nu-adress to a real domain et voila my domain doesn’t support cutenews captcha! The fact that all cool cutenews functions are hacks and the bad archive function didn’t really make me even want to try to fix cutenews this time. So I went wordpress and I hate it. It BETTER be REALLY good once it’s installed and working!

I miss my site, I miss my blog, I miss my affies. Sorry for being so bad at commenting but I’ll be back once I’ve got this figured out.

I’m still working on stupid wordpress and I’m stuck stuck stuck. Maybe one of you reading this could help me?

The thing is that I want my blog to be situated at my main page www.whirlwind.nu and not on www.whirlwind.nu/wp or something similar. And I want to integrate my site to wordpress by creating a theme matching my web sites css rather than integrating the feed to my site.

But if I understand it correctly I need to set up a www.whirlwind.nu/wp adress/folder for that since my index will be controlled by my regular css and wp controlled by a theme.

So the problem is that I want the blog to be the first thing you see when you enter my site, therefor I need it on www.whirlwind.nu, without that subfolder. But apparantly (?) if I want to go with the theme solution I need it to be in a subfolder.

So what do I do?

Följ min blogg med bloglovin