A Web Developer's Musings
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This website’s main traffic for the last few years has been for content and tools related to Battrick – users following the links there to this site, or finding this site in search results for the term “battrick” and / or the name of the tools I’d built for it.
Read the stats, and the decision I’ve made
aka “Woah! Where did the green stuff go?”
For the last couple of years, I’d been working through a couple of WordPress themes, simple in design, without much thought to the limitations they might be giving to my site. Despite my comments a few days ago, I’ve decided to take the plunge and purchase my first WordPress theme, called Thesis.
The decision to buy it was a difficult one for me – While I appreciate good work should be paid for, I’m a great believer in open source software, or that due to the work I do, I’m capable of producing something similar myself. I thought this would be no exception.
Boy, was I wrong!
I’d obviously been studying the front-end output from the theme from their demo and showcase sites, and while it had a few nice bits, I still wasn’t sure about it. Having bought it though, I’m totally blown away by the back-end code. Not just the usability of the options available, but also the quality of the underlying code that runs it. Truly remarkable.
Despite Thesis looking fairly fantastic out of the box, it was designed to be a base level theme that each blogger could build upon, via custom CSS and function files. I’ve started tweaking a few bits on this site and I’m loving the ease with which I can do it.
It’s almost a cliché, but I’ve read that this will be the last theme I’ll ever need to install and I’m starting to believe that they could be right.
The Thesis theme claims to be have “killer typography, a dynamically resizable layout, intelligent code, airtight optimization, and tons of flexibility
” all of which supposedly increases the SEO, usability, accessibility and flexibility of a WordPress installation.
I did some scouting of their showcase examples and struggled to find websites which even came up as valid XHTML, let alone be semantically correct as well. Even with recommendations from Craig Killick I couldn’t see what this theme could do that a free WordPress plugin could do. Although most of the invalid code was probably due to plugins, it didn’t bode well. I wanted to “believe”, but with the evidence I had so far, I couldn’t.
I then found a post from one of the authors of the Thesis theme on his own blog: The Definitive Guide to Semantic Web Markup for Blogs. The post itself makes fair points that I agree with, even being nearly two years old. I checked over at my own blogs and saw how they failed from the recommendation. It would take a fair bit of effort to correct them.
I then took a look at the Thesis demo site, and Craig’s site (which also uses Thesis), and it seems the theme author has already implemented his suggestion into the theme. This is a big plus, and it may have turned my thoughts to wanting to buy the theme. If nothing else, it’s getting me thinking a bit more about the wording in my content, just so that if I do buy the theme, I’ll get quicker benefit of it.
At the moment, Thesis theme still has a few issues – the new canonical link is incorrect (a minor but annoying point), but a major one for me, is that there is no support for microformatted content. I’m so used to having microformats that I almost convinced myself it was native to WordPress itself (and not the themes I use).
If you use the Thesis theme, is there any one technical thing you think is worth the cost alone, or are you more focussed on the improved results you have (hopefully) seen?
I had an issue today where IE7 wasn’t applying opacity to images, even with the filter:alpha(opacity) hack (as CSS3 opacity isn’t supported).
Turns out I’d disabled something a long while ago, and after a bit of hunting I found what I needed to enable. This probably won’t affect most people as it’s enabled by default – just affecting those with a little bit of knowledge who try to be safe, but don’t really know what they’re doing :-/
Tools → Internet Options → Security → Custom Level → ActiveX Controls and Plugins: Binary and Script Behaviours. This option needs to be enabled to allow the filter:alpha(opacity=xx) hack to work.
Although this is primarily a site about me and my thoughts, I’d be interested in exchanging some guest posts with other bloggers. I think it’s good to have different bloggers on one site, to keep the interest going. It also, obviously, allows shameless plugging back to the author’s own site, thereby potentially increasing their traffic.
The topics you’d be able to write about for me would be of a non-personal nature (knowing what happened to your Uncle Dave last week may not even interest me, let alone my readers), but otherwise just about anything goes (within reason of course). Politics, web development, hobbies, sports, health, religion, technology, science, etc. are all fair game.
I’m happy to write about any topics you suggest. This is purely experimental from me and it may or may not be something to continue.
Anyway, if you’re interested in exchanging posts, let me know, and if you include your correct email address, I’ll contact you shortly to work something out 
Update: You can see our recent guest posts from the Guest Posts page.
Katie’s parents have been together for 40 years, so they had a small barbecue to celebrate. Present were myself and Katie, her parents, her mother’s parents, and her brother and his girlfriend.