flipthedolphin » » flipthedolphin.com

New theme is on the way

Niccolo Favari — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 16:39:00 +0000

I’ve been working on this new theme (the one you see right now on this blog) for a week. It’s not finished yet as you can see unstyled comment forms, unstyled links and unstyled single pages…

I have to fix a couple of bugs here and there, and there’s still a lot to do with the pages.

And yeah, the about link does not work anymore. Sorry, I’ll make a new about page soon. Unfortunately this theme won’t be available for download unless I find a way to fix the hardcoded stuff I put inside it (like the silly about text in the header).

Oh and by the way I definitely removed adevrtisements. You won’t see them on flipthedolphin.com anymore.

Joined Twitter

Niccolo Favari — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 18:59:18 +0000

Yes I did it. I joined twitter. Unfortunately I cannot receive SMS from Italy and it seems I’m not able to send messages too. I’ll have to stick with gTalk or the web interface.

Probably I’ll put a twitter updates widget into my weblog too. Totally useless but I like it.

What’s going on with my wordpress theme?

Niccolo Favari — Sun, 13 Jan 2008 06:15:00 +0000

I’ve changed wordpress theme. Right now I’m using Sandbox 1.2 which is a semantically rich and meaningful theme.

The Sandbox is a theme for themers. It has the ability to be easily skinned, so beginners will feel comfortable styling it since they only need to know CSS. More experienced designers will drool at the rich semantic markup and profusion of classes, dynamically generated by a few functions.

I’ve also downloaded the Blueprint CSS Framework and put the folder inside the Sandbox theme folder.

So what?
I’m going to create my own theme step by step, day by day. Adding, moving, customizing stuff and so on… I really don’t have a clear idea in my mind, right now, but things will be sorted out as I move on editing the layout of this site.

Keeping an eye on the “100 Excellent Free Wordpress Themes” post by Smashing Magazine, I’ll start writing down the features I want/need and the overall style I want to give to my theme.

I still don’t know if I’m going to release it to the public or not because probably I’ll keep using it on this site to get that “personal identity” on the web.

Switched hosting provider, please notify on any error

Niccolo Favari — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 11:46:12 +0000

I managed to switch to another hosting provider without going offline for a single minute. This is zero downtime but there may be minor glitches all over the site.

Let me show you why:

I exported the whole old wordpress 2.2 database in XML format and then reimported it in wordpress 2.3. Had to delete the categories and fix the database with a plugin before doing so as the resulting import was incomplete. So any site linking to a dead category will receive a 404 error page. Sorry but had to clean this blog up.
I changed the wordpress folder on the server from /wordpress/ to simply /wordpress/ and set up a permanent redirect (301) for such folders via cPanel
I created hotlinking protection for images, css and javascript files via the htaccess code generator and put it inside my .htaccess manually. I let feedburner take my images but I’m really not that sure it will work… notify me if you don’t see images in feeds
I tested the feeds and upgraded to feedburner feedsmith 2.3
Still have to fine tune the feedflare code since it’s not displaying correctly
The robots meta plugin does not work at all… will have to find a way to fix it since it’s a really useful plugin. The re-activation method did not make it

So now I have this brand new blog, cleaned up and with bandwidth protections on. I think I’ll also benefits from canonical urls but I have to admit that I don’t know how to use them… do I have to modify my .htacess file manually or does wordpress do the magic?

Think I’ll fix things up in the next weeks.