YAWPS! – Yet Another WordPress Site!

There’s a blogger import, you know.

hehehe…. yeah, I see that now. I had kinda assumed there wasn’t one because I didn’t see it from the admin side. Thanks for the tip, I’ll be sure to use it the first chance I get.
TG

its pretty simple and it works too. ??

Holy Cow! That was easy! That rocked!
Cool. Thanks!
TG

TechGnome,
I too, had to import Blogger stuff. I was shocked at how easy it was. Full credit to the developers for setting that tool up!

Rather than starting YAAWPS as a topic, thought I’d just throw a note in here! ??
https://www.chait.net is my home for the moment… I came across WP, and it had all the basics I wanted in a site management tool. Not all the bothersome stuff something like Nuke has, but all the basics to get started.
I’ve done HEAVY editing of the index and css. I’ve tried to follow some ‘css rules’ and order the data, always include data (and display:none it when I don’t want it shown), to maximize CSS processing.
It uses a modified banner-plus-three-column layout. The right side is pretty standard, though I’ve added an RSS aggregator on the homepage, a latest-posts history, and the meta links use CSS trickery to overlay graphics over the text links.
The center column depends on a bunch of tagging so that I can really play with the layout. You’ll notice if you click on the first test post, the style ‘changes’ when it is showing a particular post rather than a category — this was the neatest trick I’ve added so far, just finished it up tonight. You’ll also notice a (Page #) inserted in the top-left of the article body when not on page 1 of a multipage article. And of course, the post meta-info is shuttled into the top-right of the block.
Margins and padding don’t work on all browsers equally. This stuff works for IE6, but firebird is a pixel off, and Safari is off by a LOT.
The left bar I’m leaving open at the moment. I’m looking at adding amazon links and other ads, etc. for the moment, it’s a place for a simple background element. ??
The banner section uses the sliding-windows thing pretty much right off A List Apart, to get the categories as cool top-tabs.
The RSS feed is causing me the most CSS-style-overloading headaches. The #menu has all the overloads in the world for playing with the style of list elements. So I haven’t gotten the RSS links to actually override the base link coloring… I’m still learning the intricacies of CSS.
I look forward to further enhancements — personally waiting for multi-category (and possibly sub-category) tagging on articles. I’m almost ready to start putting together my first ‘real’ article, so stay tuned (probably 6 pages, LOTS of images interspersed).
The other ‘trick’ I want to work on is callouts within the article body (quotations or otherwise) being floated elements ‘around’ the location where they are ’embedded’ in the article. Whether they float within the content block, or get floated over into the left-edge column (picture an article that has embedded links to products, and the amazon pic-price-links show up neatly outside the block, but reasonably aligned to the text…).
Anyway, glad to be a WordPress hacker! ??
Feel free to post here, and/or drop me a line at davebytes AT comcast DOT net.
=David Chait

David,
That _is_ a pretty slick site.
I like how you’ve got the meta section laid out and was wondering how you managed that? I skeaked a peak at the source, but couldn’t quite figure it out….
TG

which meta section do you want help with? meta-links (right) or meta-post-info (inset)?
I can detail the tricks used for both (I wrote the whole kit-n-kaboodle, but explorer crashed and I lost the post… ugh!).
=d

Please welcome TechInterviews.com to the club of WP sites.

david,
I am interested in the meta-links area on the right where the CSS/RSS/XHTML/W3C tags are.
Sorry to hear about exploder… er explorer…. ??
TG

The Site Meta stuff is done using a variation of the FIR algorithm… actually not sure it is FIR or one of the others — grabbed it from ALA or a link from ALA (www.alistapart.com).
It basically hard-sizes the main block to a fixed size, then hard-sizes the enclosed block (that applies the bgimage) to the SAME fixed size, AND positions it as absolute, thus causing it to overdraw the parent block. Cool trick. I also super-shrink the text so it won’t ‘bleed’ ever (which I found it doing with my new blocks).
The new block ‘boxes’ I picked up from https://www.vertexwerks.com/tests/sidebox/ (though ALA has another variation, and the sidebox version was supposedly based off the original sliding-doors work from ALA). Though, at this point, I’ve ‘made it my own’ — it is HEAVILY integrated into the index.php block layout (EVERY side block is wrappered properly to be ‘skinnable’ like that), and to match the rest of my CSS encapsulations, AND finally I whipped up a new graphic style that closely matches my header style. Everyone feel free to check out https://www.chait.net, and let me know if you have any questions — I’m glad to share!
I should note that the sidebox stuff fails when the content is too big for the box — like when you start to heavily shrink the window width, or when you have otherwise wide content (the referer list is currently killing me…).
I’m looking at examples that allow for a fluid main content area, and fixed width side panels.. that’s the update for the next few days. ??
=d

I like your layout David… I might want to use the boxes you made for the posts. I like having the post info in the top right corner like that…
Im at https://wumarkus.com if anyone’s interested. I just upgraded from b2 today.

Yeah, the inset boxes are cool. Just wait — I’m about to start using CSS (I hope!) to replace some of the text tagging with icons (such as for the category). That’ll add a lot. Might move the comment(s) # into the box too (it really is meta info), and considering changing the output of time and date of posts (as it’s ‘bland’).
But, I’m also looking at putting the posts into graphical drops like the sideblocks now use.. then I can do some more customized look for the inset boxes too, and let them float in a bit from the edge (which will help issues across browsers to not be quite so obvious!!).
=d

Soso – looks pretty good! But yeah, you shouldn’t have had to add tables in, given the simplicity of your layout. What problems did you run into?
=d

Hey all, I just put the finishing touches on *my* WordPress site, https://www.chrisnitkin.com. It’s my weblog/journal/etc… I just migrated from Movable Type and the MT->b2->WP import thing worked beautifully. The site is XHTML 1.0 Strict (with minimal work on my end!) which makes me very happy. It’s basically a re-colored WordPress default template and I’m planning on adding a color-theme-switcher sometime soon.
Let me know what you think! Thanks!