Archive for April, 2007
SmartyBarebone
Saturday, April 28th, 2007What you are seeing is a super-simple theme I did a while ago. It was a learning process and simple is beautiful. It’s available for use with WP from here. Just look for download (2) Barebones Left Sidebar 0.2.
The original theme I did for WP has only 4 files, namely index, header, sidebar and footer. These are the skeleton you need to get something displayed. As I already have a Classical theme ported to Habari so making this SmartyBarebone theme workable here is easy.
I did spend little time brushing up the original Barebone theme a bit and corrected a few html tag mistakes. I feel good with this theme because it’s simple, fast, clean and long lasting. The entire theme folder has only 20.8 kb with no image.
Next step would be converting this to work with the SmartyEngine and that was why I named this ‘SmartyBarebone’.
Snap Shots
Friday, April 27th, 2007I have been using snap’s Preview Anywhere for quite a while, last talked about it here. I found the ‘bubbles’ at certain places very annoying so I have turned them off, say at the title of each post and all links under ‘about this post’.
This is quite handy in fact the FAQ here tells you how. If you already have a ‘div class’ there just add ’snap_noshots’ to it like class=’existing_class_name snap_noshots’.
Ajax and jQuery
Friday, April 27th, 2007I was playing with a dead-easy for beginners ajax script from here. I was thinking what if I could easily integrate this into the sidebar or with plugins in Habari. I like short and expendable sidebar, never liked long one that I have to scroll down to find/read things.
The GET and POST method was dead-easy to play with and integrating it in Habari was also straight forward but once I tried manipulating objects and functions of Habari I found it difficult. That proves how little I know about the core.
The Wiki of course is a good teacher and the Workflow tells me how it runs. That’s not the full story and I’m still a bit confused how pages are rendered by the browser. From the user group geeks there told me the magic about __autoload function which instantiates classes on demand.
That’s all fine but integrating it with habari core methods is still too hard to me. Owen gave me a ‘not for dummies’ quick tutorial on a way to integrate Ajax in Habari via a plugin. Further reading reveals that the best is to understand jQuery which is already in the Habari package.
There is a lot to learn which could be fun. My javascript has been rusted for years or I never knew any of it. I do have a dummies book at home which is almost new perhaps it’s about time to uncover it.