You may remember I have been dissatisfied with how the journal was designed for a while now. I wanted something cleaner, wider, more serious and less emo. Bart-Jan’s worn look is just like that with the additional perk of keeping the aged papery texture of my old clumsy design. So here’s how SeSam.hu will look from now on.
I was trying to be as faithful to the original template page as possible. However WordPress has some specialities and it needs to integrate a wider array of functions which made it necessary to move a few pixels around. (The IE bug that prevents elements from floating properly in rows is a prime example. That one took hours to fix and caused a significant headache.)
I have to admit, building a template for WordPress is not an easy job. Unlike when I was just designing for myself a proper distributable template needs to be a lot more flexible and adapt to all the different blogs out there. The design must be prepared to handle a plethora of data structures. It remains to be seen how well I did to achieve that.
Not all the features I wanted are included, but I felt the design was ready for a live beta. Please if you encounter any quirks, malfunctions or errors do contact me or comment to this post.
Features or functions missing that I’d like to implement:
There’s no indication when you’re browsing the archives of where you actually are. As in “You’re browsing the archives for August 2006.” or so. Search results lack likewise.
I’d like a search form on the index page, but not sure yet where to put it.
Blockquotes should get a nicer design not just an indent.
The 404 page is missing.
At least the single post pages should show the categories and tags. I found that there are too many of them to fit in the little “entry details” field and when I tried it broke the grid layout.
I should add some more usability enhancements such as indicating required fields when commenting, listing the usable bbcode, links to trackbacks and pingbacks…
Code needs cleaning for validity, something I haven’t yet checked.
Features unlikely to be implemented:
The design is theoretically a three-column one, nevertheless there’s not enough space for sidebars, so there are none. A possible rework of the entire index page might introduce them…
I am not really familiar with the process of making a template open to language packs, therefore that feature is missing.
Having too many pages will surely break the header. The template is ill-suited to such sites.
I’m sure as soon as I press publish a dozen more will spring to my mind.
Anyway, if you like it and would like to use it I ask only a little bit of your patience just yet. Before making a downloadable version I’d like to sort a few things out and add the missing features. The reason why I applied it to SeSam.hu is that I’d like to test it live. Naturally since the whole site is licensed under creative commons if you insist on having this beta version email me and I shall send it to you.
The part of the internet who’s not yet apathetic about Microsoft’s announcements is happily blathering about the new features. Well it’s interesting enough - in my opinion - that the inclusion of options for the user to switch annoying notifications off has to be considered a feature…
Also, it might be just me, but the new taskbar reminds me of KDE’s (especially KDE 4’s) a great deal. Also it’s hard not to notice that with the Libraries added the folder view is increasingly reminiscent that of OS X’s. I’m quite sure Steve won’t fail to mention it in the next Keynote.
Not passing judgement here, just saying. It’ll be interesting to see by the time W7 ships (promised 2011) how linux desktop systems and Mac OS would look.
A BlizzCon nominee for Best Drama. I really like the creativity and the ingenious use of game resources behind the movie. It feels like a real one. If you’ve ever played WoW, it’s worth to check out.
Walking down a generally under-lit and deserted Japanese street late at night with the Resident Evil theme playing on the iPod has a level of creepiness unimaginable.
After a long running session I had my iPod nano completely run out of battery power. Arriving home I put it on the charger. I used the one I got for the iPhone, since it goes to the wall outlet.
The following day however when I wanted to do a run the iPod reported that it’s almost out of power again. I didn’t care much at the time since I’m prone to clumsiness and forgetfulness: maybe I just haven’t plugged it in properly.
When I tried to use it again yesterday evening however I couldn’t help to notice that in spite of the iPod being on the charger for more almost a full day it’s still not full. I just stepped out of the door when the music stopped as well. Checking the nano it was booting up as if recovering from some software error. It turned out to be more than a one-time glitch though, since the iPod kept restarting over an over again. Boot up, stay on for about 20-30 seconds then reboot.
I googled the issue a bit but none of the forum complaints seemed to contain anything helpful. Finally I tried connecting the unit to the MacBook and - surprisingly - that solved the reboot issue.
My theories are that either the iPhone charger didn’t agree with the nano (which I find problematic to believe since it’s basically just a wall outlet to USB port adapter) or the prolonged unsynced time paired with running out of power completely triggered some bug in the software.
If your iPod keeps acting up, try syncing it first.
I have a class in which we watch a couple of movies revolving around racism, stereotyping and cultural problems. Then there is supposedly a discussion.
In the first class we received a list of movies we’d watch during the semester. One about Koreans living in Japan, one about the Holocaust, genocide in Rwanda, child soldiers in El Salvador, a political prisoner in Chile and finally about the Japanese history textbook scandal.
We were organised into groups and were given a movie to do a short presentation on them beforehand.
The titles of the movies were in katakana. I tried asking the professor how my movie, ショア, was really spelled, but she had absolutely no idea. Really though, I should have expected that. Japanese customs dictate to rewrite everything in katakana, following some rough pronunciation. The only problem is it’s usually futile to even try to decipher what the original word was, especially the case with names.
I know, I should look things up in Japanese instead. It would improve my language skills.
A few keywords in google helped me out soon enough, and the Wikipedia even has a disambiguation for ショア. Without any sarcasm this time though, I should have known the Jewish word for Holocaust (Shoah). Or could have known about this apparently famous movie.
Mentioning the Holocaust also led to an interesting experiment, when the professor asked the students if they knew what the word meant. To my honest surprise none of them could explain, and only a few have heard it before. Even considering the predominant attitude of japanese students towards questions asked by lecturers (stare at notes, don’t say a word), this was quite shocking.
I don’t think you could get away with not knowing what happened - for example - in Hiroshima in any European university. And how is the Holocaust any different? Maybe history is like geography: for those living in the top economic powers it’s safely negligible.
Or I’m being a snob.
Anyway, today we finished with the first movie, パッチギ, about the life of a Korean family (?) in Japan. To be honest I didn’t like it one bit. It had everything that makes contemporary Japanese movies unwatchable. It just pelt stupid, with the actors running around with flailing arms at supposed fight scenes, the incessant shouting matches. The acting was so overdid and insincere that could only be compared to the TV dramas here. It just didn’t feel right with a topic originally serious to fool around like that.
Coming home I looked up the title and I learned two things. It is actually a comedy/drama, which explains the absurdity of it. I suppose I just don’t have the same humour the Japanese have. And also that it’s a sequel (?) to a previous one with a similar title.
What the class completely failed at was the discussion part. It could have been actually interesting for once to pick the brains of my fellow classmates on the topic of foreigners living in Japan. Not that I expected anything resembling a honest conversation… not in class. (Well, not wherever.)
We didn’t have time to actually talk about anything we saw, and next week we’re going on to the next movie. I suspect though that even if we did have an attempt at discussion, no-one would have spoken up anyway.
When I was home for the summer I heard in some TV programme that most drivers in Hungary use driving as an outlet for their frustrations. It is actually fashionable to ignore traffic rules and especially speed limits. After all it makes a good topic for conversation to brag about the speeds and times reached during various routes.
I try to drive as much as I can when I’m home. I spend most of my driving time on Route 4, one of the most notorious ones for accidents. The bad statistics are understandable considering this is one of the only regions of Hungary without a highway. We have to make do with Route 4’s two lanes.
Most of time time I get taken over within city limits (the road rarely bypasses towns and villages). People don’t like slowing down just because they happen to drive through a populated area. Taking over is like a fetish. If the car in front of you is older, less expensive, or if it’s a woman or old person driving, or if you feel like it, you must take over.
And when there’s an accident the one who who dies is not the one who caused it.
Last.fm’s recent decision to change some more musical tags overnight started a heated discussion on their forums. Up until now I mostly tagged my musicals with the artist being the title of the musical. Musicbrainz - and lately to some extent Last.fm - is of the opinion however that the composer should be credited. Which is equally wrong if you ask me, after all isn’t the composer a separate id3 tag?
The way I see it the biggest problem is with the id3 tagging. I think it’s the remainder of an obsolete format (mp3). It would be a lot better if there were a standardised tagging method, using XML, that all formats could embed from m4a to flac. I see XML as a solution because it doesn’t limit the amount of data that can be added. It could even incorporate a plethora of additional information such as if the track in question is a live recording or not, if anyone’s guest starring, if it’s a cover of a song, etc.
I’m sorry that the site wasn’t available for a few days. The reason is very prosaic. Despite the numerous emails I received reminding me of the domain needing renewal, in the end I forgot to actually wire the money to the registrar. Laziness or forgetfulness I don’t know… but it does tend to reflect my life.
