i summon one kim

I’ve been taking it easy today just practically invisibly improving the code on this website. The hAtom microformat was brought up recently on one of the WordPress mailing lists, so I thought I’d see about adding support for it here. It was actually rather straightforward: I didn’t even have to rename any of my CSS classes.

The only remaining issue (which is not really an issue at all) is that the post author is not showing up in the the microformat parser I’ve been using to test. According to the hAtom spec the default should come from the XHTML author, which according to my undestanding is specified using the <meta name="author"> tag. I’ve specifically added such a tag, as I don’t display the author in each post, since I feel it would be silly to repeat my name throughout the page.

Since the recommended author data format was hCard I added general support for it on all my pages, too.

As a side effect of all these changes I’ve also fixed a couple of the spots that used to render irritatingly poorly with the Lynx web browser. CSS with its display property was highly useful in keeping up appearances on the other browsers. “Extra” elements added for Lynx can easily be hidden with display: none;. As another example, while <p> is quite useful in adding some extra spacing in Lynx, it is often desirable to undo the effect on other browsers using display: inline;.

The recent Microsot Internet Explorer (IE) problem was bothering me, because it meant the pages were not usable with IE. I wouldn’t mind a cosmetic problem as much (even though they tend to get to me, too) but links not working and pictures not being visible is just too annoying.

I was playing with the CSS, experimenting with the “floating dt” that I had avoided in the last workaround due to it “disappearing” on IE. When I made the dd element floating as well, I saw that IE was rendering the contents below and outside the white box (#envelope) that holds the main content on each page. In the past this has been a giveaway for IE miscalculating the size of the containing element, and sure enough — the “fix” was an added width: 100% property for the misbehaving container.

The “invisible images” were restored to visibility with the same fix on the appropriate container. I’m glad it didn’t need another couple of hours of CSS tweaking in the dark.

It’s nice to have the site working again, but I’d rather not spend my free time on something stupid like inventing workarounds for a buggy browser. (Not that I expect Microsoft to pick up any hints from here.)

Enjoy!

My brother just told me that this site is broken (again) in Microsoft Internet Explorer: the links in the “asides” entries are not clickable and pictures in posts are not visible (but the layout still has their space reserved). This is especially frustrating since there haven’t been any changes to the site code (XHTML or CSS) since September 11th, and everything definitely worked then in both Firefox and IE. Of course, there have been a number of “IE updates” since through Windows Update…

I’d like to fix this right away, but I’m far too busy with other things at the moment. I did try a couple of CSS changes, but didn’t land on the solution yet.

In the mean time: Get Firefox already. :-)

WordPress 1.5.2 on pääasiassa tietoturvapäivitys. Päivittäminen on helppoa: kopioi vaan uudet tiedostot vanhan asennuksen tiedostojen päälle. Suomenkielisen paketin voi nyt ladata tutusta paikasta:

http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/wordpress-fi/

Jos törmäät ongelmiin, voit kysellä apua suomenkielisen version postilistalla.

I was having trouble with ½ and ¾ in an article I was trying to publish on another WordPress-powered site. First I thought my browser was acting up, but soon became doubtful and realized I should look at the source of the page generated by WordPress. To my surprise I saw that the entity codes had been deliberately mangled.

I tracked down the source of the problem in the WordPress code. This patch fixes the problem.

Call me an Internet addict (it might be accurate, actually), but I’m very used to having broadband Internet access always. I consider having available on-demand (some might say “constant”) access to my Internet-connected servers the norm. I read my mail on-line (in plain text, no less). My RSS aggregator is on-line on the web. I contact my friends on-line on IRC.

Yet there are times when I’m not online. Most commonly this used to be while commuting to and from work. I’d be on the train for about an hour each way. My favorite pastime for the commute was reading. But sometimes I would have liked to write down some thoughts, either for the blog or maybe for an email reply.

I knew about offline blogging tools but I had never really looked into them. I had experimented with Windows Notepad and the Blackberry memo application. Both are fine for writing the bulk of the text, but the “cleanup” tended to be too tedious: there are a number of fields you still have to fill in before a blog entry can be published or an email sent out.

I recently went through the weblog clients listed in the WordPress Codex to see what my options were. I chose to install w.bloggar on my laptop. With just a little bit of configuration (and a couple of tweaks on my non-standard WordPress installation to accommodate language selection) I had successfully published a test entry. Quite painless so far.

With w.bloggar I can set all the common post attributes (title, tags, timestamp) without any of the tedious cut-and-paste that would be necessary without a dedicated offline blogging tool. Once I’m connected to the Internet I can easily open each saved post and publish it. (That statement will be validated by the fact of this post appearing on my site…)

WordPress 1.5.1.1 korjaa RSS-virtoihin, paluuviitteisiin ja päivitysilmoituksiin liittyneitä ongelmia. Joskus minuutit tuntuvat olevan kortilla, mutta sainpas tänä iltana paketoitua suomenkielisen version:

http://kimmo.suominen.com/sw/wordpress-fi/

Postilistojen hiljaisuuden ja oman käyttöni perusteella tämä versio vaikuttaisi olevan ongelmaton. Jos törmäät ongelmiin, voit kirjoittaa niistä suomenkielisen version postilistalle (tai minulle — mutta tällä hetkellä olen aika kiireinen muiden asioiden parissa).