Apologies for the lack of content lately but as you can see I’ve been tweaking the blog a bit. I’ve been working with a “framework” for theme design which allows me to create a sort of sub theme in which I have worked to create an attractive (I hope) layout that focuses on content and typography. It has all sorts of places that I can diddle and fart around with but the hardest part so far has been changing the header to accommodate both the sexy font on the title and the cute little graffiti on the wall. The font on the title is called “walkway” and the graffiti is a font called “abuse”. That concrete wall is a photo I took back in Canada. It was a bit of a water feature/fountain at a nearby park. I’m sure the visitors that day thought I was mad as I randomly photographed walls, the back of benches, piles of stones and side walk edges. I did get rather a lot of fine backgrounds but I settled on the wall.
I’m about 80% done, but no further layout changes are planned. All the work to follow is in the background. You’ll notice the “currently listening to” widget. It needs to be “ajaxified” so that the song title updates for you automatically whether you refresh or not. I’m no java programmer so I expect it will be 80% of my work for that 20% of the finished project. Enjoy the site. I must say it looks best on a big screen and I have made no allowances for resolutions of less than 1024×768. If you have less than that, you need an upgrade. On my monitor it looks just lovely. I’m happy with the result.
7 Comments
I think it looks just lovely, too.
Re: “ajaxifying” your “currently listening to” widget…. look at using jQuery. I’ll bet they have something that will do the trick.
This stupid thing has already been quite a challenge. I use Winamp to stream Radioparadise. I use a plugin called AMIP to create a text file with the current stream title. It recreates the file every time the song changes. I use a template file to format this file. It creates a tagged html file with the stream info. I use a second program called CURL to ftp this to my web server. Once there I have a Wordpress plugin called ONAIRNOW that reads the file. and outputs it to a widget. I can use CSS to format the appearance.
The problem with ajax coming into the mix is that plugin on the server side just barely works with the complex theme design I have and it’s not written to readily be tweaked with java.
I’ve looked at a few java libraries (Sajax, jQuery and TW-ajax) but so far all I’ve been able to do is stop everything from loading until the song refreshes, so you most often get a blank page
Still, there’s nothing that can’t be done, right?
Casual readers may wish to avert their eyes… geek-speak follows:
So the trick is to have the ONAIRNOW widget update the page on a HTTP request while having some time based code that will read the current song title from the HTML file on the server and update the page using AJAX.
I think this example is similar to what you want to do: http://bit.ly/gExW
Replace the .updateme class in the example code with the onAirNowTitle id created by the ONAIRNOW widget and change the url for the jQuery AJAX call from refresh-me.php to the HTML file with the song info. I don’t think that this would require making any changes to how the ONAIRNOW widget works.
I’m pretty sure I could get this to work on a straight up web page, but I don’t know what complications Wordpress and widgets might introduce…I’m still learning.
(Grins) I love it when you talk geeky to me…..ooooo…..replace my class, big boy…..
The good news is jQuery is bundled in the wordpress install so I don’t really need to worry about libraries. Although it may bite me in the ass as all the ajax runs on the client and who knows what client may come by and how that client may implement ajax…..
I think I’ll take your advice and use the php code instead of the widget to display the info. That way I can avoid all the weirdness of widgets until I get it to work. Even at that, the front page of my blog has around six php files just to display the content. Each file is loaded, does something, then calls the next bit…. so no nice < head>< /head>< body>< /body>….The head is called from Header.php, which then loads layout.php, header-extensions.php, a whack of CSS and begins the
tag….then passes over to page.php, which passes to main.php, which passes to content.php which passes to sidebar.php which …..finally gets us to the footer.php and the footer support files and finally closes the < /body> tag.All I have to do now is figure out where in this miasma of geekdom I call the damned java.
The explanation above is actually simplified…sigh.
now that is some sexy font. you’re making me think about pulling out my cement pic as well. nice job.
Hey! Cranelegs! Hi and thanks for the comment. I used to work with a guy that always said concrete was the sexiest thing ever invented to build with. He said you could do more interesting and artistic things with concrete than with any other building material. I suppose he’s right. Arthur Erickson sure did some nice work in cement.