Paul McAlenan » wordpress

Blog Design Tweaks

paul-oid — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 08:09:00 +0000

I’ve made some minor modifications to the blog design by making the layout more consistent with the ‘main’ site. The blog layout differs in that it has a fixed header and now a fixed footer so that when the content is scrolled the header & footer stay where they are.

I’ve also added Matt’s Random Image Script via weblogtools to insert a random background image to the ‘welcome’ post on the blog front page.

Thickbox Validation Error

paul-oid — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 14:18:42 +0000

WordPress ships with the Thickbox webpage UI dialog widget which I used in a recent post to showcase a website design. When I validated the blog I got errors for markup & CSS. When this kind of thing happens it’s both irritating & interestingly challenging at the same time.

There are some fixes that I came across but they either didn’t initially work or required me to install a WordPress plugin.

The markup was failing on:

?keepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=400&width=600

in an href attribute on the end of the URL.

The WordPress Manage Theme page in the admin panel uses ThickBox to preview themes. I validated that page and it passed. Examining the code I saw that instead of the ampersand a semi-colon was used. After making the change in my code the blog passed the markup validator.

The CSS was failing in two areas. The Thickbox CSS file contains IE6 specific CSS hacks and valid -moz rules that are CSS3 (W3C only validates CSS2.1). I put the IE6 specific CSS into a separate stylesheet and decided to leave in the -moz rules.

For the time being I’ve removed the W3C CSS validator link at the bottom of my website to avoid any possible confusion as I do like to create websites that have valid markup and CSS.

WordPress 2.8.4: Security Release

paul-oid — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 21:14:24 +0000

There has been a lot of chatter about the latest WordPress security fix version 2.8.4 released last month.

A worm is making the rounds that sets itself up as a blog administrator; it’s able to hide itself from the blog’s admin panel and it inserts spam and malware into posts.

As this site is powered by WordPress I guess it’s my duty to mention this just in case someone passing by finds it useful to know!