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Being the impatient type (read: stupid), I overdid it a bit yesterday, and with 2 slipped discs I now find myself virtually confined to bed. I am dividing my time between reading Hemingway and tinkering with my blog. I have a low boredom threshold which means I can’t focus on either for any great period of time.

My tinkering, as usual, took me into murky waters and, inevitably into problems with cross-browser compatibility. I like the idea of using little icons to identify what happens when you click on a link, for example a pdf file. This works a treat… until your link spans more than one word and those words occur at a line break. This is actually ok for all browsers except Internet Explorer. What a surprise.

There’s not really a fix which I liked - I don’t want hacks, or IE-only code - so I just put a non-breaking space between the words. Check my previous post for an example. I understand it’s not technically a bug, but wouldn’t it be nice if pages could look the same anywhere? If anyone has a decent solution to this, please let me know.

Firefox 3

I joined in the rush to download the latest Firefox browser, version 3. I am happy with it, but I won’t go on extolling the virtues, there are far more qualified people out there already doing that. Plus the fact that it’s only been a day, so in my opinion it’s too early to pass judgement. I am happy that it’s faster, it looks good and hasn’t crashed yet. Still hogging my memory though, where are those tweaks? apparently this is to be expected. With all the improvements, and all the functions, extra speed, memory will be consumed. I can live with that…

Update: http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord

I don’t need to tell you that things will often look different here. Themes come, themes go. This is not just a blog thing, I am prone to rearranging my flat quite often, too. With my flat, it’s an improvement. With the blog, it’s usually a whim. Looking around for different themes is quite an experience. Plenty of sites advertising free premium (!) themes, many of them duplicating each other’s content. This was all too bewildering for me, and I just decided to google “minimal wordpress themes” and found the theme I am using now. I will keep this for a while, but mainly because there’s little to make me want to change it! In fact I should promise here and now that my next theme will be one of my own creation, that guarantees that nothing will happen for a while!

In keeping with my desire to have an easy-to-maintain blog, I set about exploring photo plugins. My brief is the following:

• I want to be able to add either a single photo or a set of photos (gallery) to a post or page
• I want the photos to be either uploaded to the webserver or included from flickr
• I want to be able to use lightbox to display the picture(s)
• Not too much hacking of code, this has to be clean

Not a lot to ask, you may think. I came close, but by using two plugins, one for my pictures, another for flickr. However, to avoid conflicts, it ran with two variations of lightbox, one of them thickbox, and this didn’t appeal to me. Each plugin uses it’s own scripts for the lightbox, and they won’t play ball with each other. This will change in the future, plugin authors are being encouraged to check for existing code before introducing their own. But for now I gave up and settled for one plugin; flickr tag which gives me most of the functionality I need. I compromised on not uploading pictures to my server, using flickr for everything instead. There is a bit of syntax to master, but it is worth it. So I can include a single picture:

Or I can insert a set, based on my flickr tags:

It works, but is is frustrating that I didn’t achieve my goals. If anyone knows of a better solution, I am keen to hear about it.