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A New Theme, A WP 3.0 Upgrade, Flickr, Tumblr – But No Actual Content

If you’ve visited my site in the last 9 months you’ll notice it looks a bit different now. I just upgraded the site to the latest version of WordPress, and have installed a WooTheme called Unite. I haven’t tried a Woo Theme before, but they’re pretty slick, well coded, I’d probably buy another one.

I also moved my photos over to Flickr from Picasa (mainly because I was too lazy to rework the Picasa integration and the theme supported Flickr out-of-the-box).

I liked Unite because it looks a bit like Tumblr, which all the cool kids seem to be getting into. I like the _idea_ of Tumblr, but have been put off by a few things they don’t support as a platform (comments being one). Plus the task of trying to migrate my blog with all it’s comments and posts to Tumblr is a non-startr.

As a side effect of buying this theme, I have two others available to me, so if you fancy a particular WooTheme, let me know, I’d share one for a good cause.

One last thing – this update will mean the IE6/7 people who visit (albeit not many of you) should now see a reasonable site. Speaking of which does anyone use IE6/7 because they want to or is it symptomatic of a lack-lustre corporate IT department?

I’d appreciate any feedback you have on the theme, particularly if you are visiting on a weird platform/browser.

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6 thoughts on “A New Theme, A WP 3.0 Upgrade, Flickr, Tumblr – But No Actual Content”

  1. Graham

    Interesting the persistent menu on the left, though not sure about it going over the photos on the left… I think this comment box is pretty cool. All imho of course!

  2. Ashley

    I’m also a bit dubious about that left menu behavior. What I really would like is for it to stay fixed only until the footer comes in to view, and then for it to position:static. Not sure how to achieve that though. I’ll have a nose around for something.

  3. Ashley

    Don’t you hate spending several hours in something that on the grand scheme of things is inconsequential… Anyway – because it bugged me too, here’s the fix:

    1) Use jQuery ‘in view’ event plugin to detect when the footer is coming in to view.

    jQuery('#footer-outer')
    .bind('inview', function (event, visible) {

    2) When it’s in view – scroll up the menu block.

    jQuery('.ribbon')
    .animate({ top: -400 });

    3) When it’s back out of view scroll it back down.

    jQuery('.ribbon')
    .animate({ top: 0 });

    4) Extra merit – I added a little down arrow ↓ that appears when the menu is scrolled away, that will manually pull it down.

    <a title="Show Menu" 
href="javascript:showMenu();">
&darr;</a>

    and

    function showMenu() {
    jQuery('.ribbon')
    .animate({ top: 0 });
    jQuery('.down-arrow')
    .animate({ top: -30 });
}

    And there you have it.

  4. J.T.

    Weird? I use openSuse and Chrome. Nice update, it seems to work fine aside from…

    1. Your avatar is a broken image icon.

    2. The grey text in this write a comment box is so light grey, I have to squint my eyes to see what I’m reading. I take no responsibility for spelling mistakes.

    3. Scratch that, I now see my typing actually appears to the left as well. That’s what you get when you are not a touch-typist and have to look at your keyboard…

    4. The meny, I see you got what you wanted as for me, it turns in a search box once the footer is threatening to come in to view.

    5. My paragraphing, using enters, doesn’t seem to be allowed. Do I need HTML?
    Yes? Yes! nl2br would be nice here.
    The pics etc. are so far down, I doubt we’d ever get to see it, which begs the question, why not move it up, or move it away?

    Anyway, slick JS features and still very usable and readable.

  5. J.T.

    Did I mention escaping a’postrophe’s? Before submitting, they are escaped, after submitting, the slash shows up. And when I hit reply on my own comment, it prepopulates the text area with that entire comment. IS that intentional?

  6. Ashley

    Thanks for the feedback J.T – I’ve raised some of these with Woo, including the fact that if you leave your website blank it puts in ‘Your URL’ – pretty dumb. I just tweaked the CSS quickly, hopefully the colors are better now.

Comments are closed.