Very Close To Being Done
July 18th, 2008 by ComputerBob
All of the non-WordPress parts of this site are up and running with the new, fixed-width format. So is this site’s home page, which uses a phpInclude to display my latest WordPress Journal entries (posts). So you’re reading this Journal entry in WordPress right now!
The WordPress parts of this site are all working, but they don’t have this site’s header, navigation column and footer yet, so they look kind of bare. You’ll need to use your browser’s “Back” button to navigate through those parts until I create a new template file for the WordPress parts of this site.
And now anyone can leave comments on any of the Journal entries that are in WordPress. Go ahead and explore that right-column. There are now several ways to find Journal entries — you can enter search keywords, point at any gray-background calendar date to see the names of that day’s posts, click on any gray-background calendar date to read all of the posts for that day, click on any of the tags in the Tag Cloud to see all posts that contain those tags, or click on the archive links to see entire months worth of posts.
Again, if you’re thinking of using WordPress, I can’t stress enough how great it is to use it as a blogging tool, compared to the past ten years that I had to hand-code every single page of this web site.
But I also can’t stress enough how much trouble it is to try to make WordPress “fit into” an existing web site that’s as big and complicated as this one is. I’ve spent the past 4 weeks doing almost nothing except hunting down and killing a few hundred CSS conflicts, caused by the fact that this web site already had a very long CSS stylesheet, and WordPress and its plugins each add their own. With hundreds of exising Web pages and hundreds of CSS definitions that are spread out over 5 or 6 separate stylesheets, the chances for conflicts and problems multiply exponentially.
Again, these things would not be a problem at all for someone who’s just starting out with WordPress, or for someone who has a small or simple existing Web site.
This morning, I finished changing the entire non-WordPress part of this site to a fixed-width layout. Then I spent at least 5 hours testing various web pages, hunting and killing additional CSS conflicts that hadn’t surfaced during my behind-the-scenes testing. If you spent any time here this morning, I’m sure you saw some pretty weird looking formatting and layout as I worked on this site, “live.”
Now I’m going to take some sort of break for a little while before I continue working. I’m really, really tired, but there’s no way I’d be able to take a nap right now. I feel like going for a 10-mile walk, to burn off some off the adrenalin that I’ve been generating since early this morning. The problem with taking a long walk is that I’d probably think of just exactly what I want to do next — but I’d be several miles from home when I thought of it.
Maybe I’ll just walk some laps around the neighborhood for awhile, so I’ll be relatively close whenever I want to continue working. It’s sunny and about 90 degrees outside, so it wouldn’t be safe for Mini and Max to go with me.
Permalink:
http://www.computerbob.com/wp/very-close-to-being-done.php
Tags:
Coding, Internet, Personal, Pets, Software, Web Development
July 18th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
The new look is interesting - a lot more info in the right column. Here’s something to take a look at. When you hold down the control key and scroll the mouse wheel using Firefox, the header doesn’t play nice with the main body of the page. It works great in IE - go figure.
July 18th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Hey, Rob! Thanks for being the first person to leave a comment on my site in my “live” WordPress installation!
Are you using Firefox 2.x?
I just checked on what you wrote, and I can display bigger/smaller text (and navcolumn and header, etc.) by doing both of the following:
Hold down the CTRL key and press the + or - key.
Hold down the CTRL key and scroll my wheel mouse.
The header, footer, navcolumn, etc. are all playing well with each other on my PC.
I’m using Iceweasel (Firefox) 3.0~RC2-2 in Debian Lenny. I was going to wait to upgrade to the final version of FF/IW 3.0, but my FF/IW 2.x started giving me intermittent lockups a couple of weeks ago, so I jumped to v3 as soon as it showed up in the Debian Lenny repositories. I’ve been using it for several days, and I haven’t had any problems with it at all.
July 21st, 2008 at 1:37 pm
Yes, I’m using Firefox 2.0 on a XP box. Looks like the main body jumps off to the right when the “Making Geek-Speak Chic” gets larger than the sky background box. I often check because I know someone who gets his nose within an inch of the monitor and squints to make out the text. He doesn’t like the MS magnifier tool.
I’m glad to hear you’ve accomplished your goal on getting Wordpress working within your site. Now, you’ll have to make a few contraversial statements to others to start posting.
July 21st, 2008 at 2:25 pm
I just finished changing this site’s header, so that instead of using a CB graphic with regular text next to it, it now uses a graphic that contains both the CB logo and the text. I think that will solve the problem that you reported.
Please try resizing it now and see what you think.