tcervo

Another thing to keep in mind with all of Jakob Nielsen’s top 10 lists: they’re all just guidelines, and even Nielsen himself realizes not ever “rule” will apply to every site. In fact, he only reasonably expects a few.
This is a bit of a side comment, but there’s always been a bit of Nielsen bashing, and his latest list has generated the same type of crap: “#10 is stupid, it doesn’t even apply to me”, “I violate #4 on purpose because…”, etc.
I was lucky enough to see Jakob Nielsen speak in person in San Francisco a couple years ago. One of the first things he said in his keynote, is that he has *never* expected every site to obey every guideline he comes up with. What he’s done is notice a great many sites violating some fundamental guidelines, and he puts out his lists so that others can avoid the same mistakes. For some sites, many of the guidelines simply won’t apply.
For example, in his Ten Steps for Cleaning Up Information Pollution, he has ‘#2. Don’t use “reply to all” when responding to email. Abide by the good old “need to know” principle that’s so beloved by the military and send follow-up messages only to those people who will actually benefit from the reply.’
I’ve read posts on some sites saying this is stupid, because sometimes reply to all facilitates a group discussion. I say, that’s missing the point entirely. The second part of that “rule” is to abide by the “need to know” principal. If the email is part of a group discussion, then “reply to all” is perfectly valid. What the rule is intended for is when people (and I work with plenty of them) reply to all for *every* message they receive, even when the reply is directed only at the sender.
Ok, enough of a tangent…

Just to further this non-WP thread: The plain-ol’ text editing capabilities of DW rock! Since the MX version, they’ve integrated most of the old CF Studio/HomeSite functionality. It’s got good tag auto-completion (type a tag, for example, and it generates the closing tag automatically), code hints (start typing a tag, and…if turned on in preferences, it will pop up a list of available attributes for that tag…select an attribute, and it’ll insert it with an expty set of quotes), tag coloring, etc. Since I always select “Make file XHTML compliant” when creating a new page, it’ll even add the closing “/” on image tags, etc. Add to that the built-in validation, built-in O’Reilly tag documentation, excellent site management, and a host of other great features. If you’ve ever created (or integrated) web services, the introspection feature is great, also…
I do all of my hand-coding in DW, and use it’s built-in secure FTP and site mgmt. So, for example, if I change the name of a file/directory/or image, DW will update *all* the links anywhere in my site that were pointing to the old location/name. If I, for example, decide I want to categorize all the images in my /images folder into sub folders: /images/headers, /images/icons, /images/photos, etc., when I drag the images into the newly created folders, DW updates my links for me. Totally rocks.
Oh yeah, and DW has integrated the Lift accessibility suite (whereas it’s an add-on for FP), and DW won’t TOUCH code you’ve created in other apps (unlike FP, which will rewrite the living daylights out of the code until it’s a complete mess), unless you tell it to (using the “Clean up HTML”, “Clean up Word HTML”, or the optional “Clean up FrontPage HTML” menu items.)
I could go on for days…

I’ve never really thought about this (until now), but here goes a possible example:
I’m currently setting up a second install of WP, in a separate directory, to use for just movies. My categories are really genres (Westerns, Thrillers, Comedy, etc.) If I had the ability to do sub-cat’s, I could incorporate this in my main blog without making my category list huge (and out of context.) Instead, I could simply have “Movies” as a top category, and when the category is selected, *then* the sub categories for that category could be displayed (at least that’s one way of doing it…)
-tony
https://www.tcervo.com

Seems to be scrolling correctly for me (up and down)…I’m using Mozilla 1.5.
Have you checked out this csszengarden entry?:
https://www.csszengarden.com/?cssfile=062%2F062%2Ecss
Try it in Mozilla/Firebird/etc…it has a similar scrolling middle section, but without using iframes. Very cool. (The IE version of that page is VERY different, achieved with some clever style sheet trickery…it’s all just 1 file!
-Tony

Just a quick note: last night I began writing a new combo acronym/abbr script. It’ll read an external csv file (already built), and markup the page accordingly. Each entry will be flagged in the csv as either an acronym or an abbr. For the abbr’s, the script will wrap a span around the text to make IE happy.
I’ll be unavailable the next couple days, but hope to put the finishing touches on it over the weekend.
-Tony

Jaykul,
What do you mean when you say “…my regular expression…replaces more acronyms”?
Isn’t the number of acronyms only dependent on what you put into the array? (Sorry, I’m not a PHP guru…yet ??
-Tony

Well I’ll be…
I had an extra line between the closing ?> of the function, and the line:
<?php add_filter(‘the_content’, ‘abbrit’); ?>
Got rid of that, and it’s fixed….
Thanks….

The way the cut tag is used on LiveJournal, I don’t believe would be relevant here. (At least I can’t think of a reason to use it.) On LJ, you can add other LJ-ers to your “friends” list, then on your Friends page, you see recent posts from all of the people in your friends list. Some people use the cut tag to hide large blocks of content (large images, whatever) so they don’t monopolize other people’s friends pages. I have no idea if what I just said makes any sense, unless you see it in action…Sorry!
-Tony

The guy that runs pvrblog did a great writeup on using adsense. You can find it here:
https://a.wholelottanothing.org/features.blah/entry/007472

Is anyone else having a problem with this script in the my-hacks.php file?
It works fine…it creates the tags, works like a champ. BUT, when I go to login, I get:
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at E:\webs\tcervo.com\wwwroot\movies\my-hacks.php:75) in E:\webs\tcervo.com\wwwroot\movies\wp-login.php on line 122
I’ve done the fixes (acording to the Alex King post, and one other…basically commenting out a couple of lines) that supposedly gets rid of the Cannot modify header error…but I’m still getting it. If I get rid of the my-hacks.php file, I can log in again. BTW, this hack is the only thing in the my-hacks.php file.
Thanks,
Tony

allusion,
Perfect, that did the trick. I missed that thread the first time around…
-Tony

Hmmm…good thing I tried upgrading a not-yet-rolled out installation first.
I followed NM’s directions exactly. I had a “clean” install of 0.72. (This is a second install of WP, in a different directory and using a separate DB…the 0.72 test installation was working fine, and had not been moded or hacked in any way.)
Once I got to the point of running /wp-admin/upgrade.php, here’s what I got:
—
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in E:\webs\tcervo.com\wwwroot\movies\wp-admin\upgrade-functions.php on line 536
Warning: Invalid argument supplied for foreach() in E:\webs\tcervo.com\wwwroot\movies\wp-admin\upgrade-functions.php on line 606
Step 1
There’s actually only one step. So if you see this, you’re done. Have fun!
get_settings: Didn’t find setting hack_file
—
So, clicking on the Have fun! link takes me to my blog, despite the errors. But, my index page has the following:
“get_settings: Didn’t find setting comment_allowed_tags”
—
Note: the “get_settings: Didn’t find setting comment_allowed_tags” message shows up on EVERY page, including the login page, admin page, etc. (You can see it at the very bottom of the page.)
You can see it here: https://www.tcervo.com/movies/
Any ideas? This has me scared to death of upgrading my “real” blog…

Ooops, I only gave a penny and a half. Here’s the other half-cent:
If a visitor is browsing with a non-CSS browser (or if you’re CSS layout is incompatible with ver. 4 browsers so you’re loading your style sheets using @import), a CSS calendar will make absolutely no sense whatsoever. In fact, it’ll be quite a mess…Try it…turn off your CSS and see what it looks like.
BTW, if you use Moz/Firebird/NS7, you can install the PNH Developer’s Toolbar, which is a super-duper, fine and dandy plugin. It gives you simple toolbar access to toggling CSS on/off, images on/off, outlining block level elements, outlining table cells, submitting any web page to the different validators, and more. I use it TONS when trying out new designs, and it’s kinda fun to see if other people’s sites validate, and what they look like with styles turned off…
-Tony

Here’s my 2-cents (which is always free)…
I’m a big-time proponent of web standards, and using CSS for layout instead of tables, valid code, blah, blah, blah.
However, I just don’t see the purpose of a CSS-based calendar. A calendar is tabular data…exactly what the HTML/XHTML table tags are meant to display. Now, a properly constructed calendar table, with appropriate headers, scope, summary, and nicely styled with CSS to make it “pretty”, that’s just fine and dandy.
-Tony

“PS. dos prompts for ME are just the word ‘command’ rather than cmd, for everyone’s future reference.”
Well, at least they’re consistent…NOT!