Unfortunately, I may have to tweak the plugin a little bit since it is missing what is, in my opinion, the most important feature of a customized 404 page, which is to offer the user a list of possible candidates that actually exist on your site. This feature is apparently already available in another 404 plugin called Smart 404 (Also on wordpress’s download site), but this one doesn’t seem to function on WordPress 2.7 yet. Anyways, I highly recommend the plugin Useful 404 for now. Simple to install and does the job very nicely for now. Any other 404 plugins out there?

Using the famous divide-and-conquer problem solving method (ha ha!), I started to remove some text to find out the culprit paragraph, and realized that the problem was only present when I had a lot of content on the page. After a few google searches, I found a thread on sitepoint’s site that explains exactly my problem (titled: Web Page Wiggle Issue and Margin Auto Wiggles & The Vertical Scrollbar). The problem lies in the use of “auto” for centering pages, much like in the very popular “body {margin: 0 auto; width: 960px;}”. This causes the page to wiggle (move to the left) between pages where the vertical scrollbar is needed (longer content) and where it doesn’t appear (firefox adds the scrollbar as needed, whereas IE always keeps it!). From the website, I found two fixes for the problem:

You can easily fix this, using CSS, by adding this one line in your stylesheet:

html {overflow-y: scroll;}

Another fix, if you are using JQuery, is the following:

$(function(){
    $('<div/>').css({
        position: 'absolute',
        top: 0,
        width: '1px',
        height: ($(window).height() + 1).toString() + 'px'
    }).appendTo('body');
});

What are you waiting for? Go get the latest version and get blogging!

If you a little like me and you’re scared to try to upgrade your wordpress engine… well, fear no more! I did it in about 30 minutes, following wordpress’s superb three step process, and this including the upgrade of a handful of plugins (about 10 of them). Yes, among other things, WordPress 2.3.3 will tell you when a plugin is out-of-date and which, to my surprise, helped me realize that most of my plugins were due for a tune up.

The nicest thing about this upgrade is that my site is now using a much more secure, powerful, and faster blogging engine. It also fixes some glitches with my new template K2 which were really annoying me. The problem was that when I was browsing categories, I would get the following error:

WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near '' at line 1]
SELECT wp_posts.post_date_gmt FROM

That was because the fine folks behind the latest K2 template were using the new mySQL database structure that WordPress introduced in their version 2.3.

I am usually reluctant to install a new version because of all the little bugs that tend to come out. I specifically waited a little while before installing, but now that I know that it takes about 30 minutes to upgrade, I don’t think I’ll wait as long next time. I highly recommend moving to 2.3.3!!

I’ll write more very soon. I am working on a personal project for the wedding and it’s been taking a LOT of my time. Anyways. Right now, I need to crash.

In all seriousness though. I am glad to see that there are some people running IE7 already out there. I mean, I know the RC has been out for a while, it’s been out since August 24 2006, but this means we should be getting feedback from the users very soon. I’m excited to know how much ground they have covered with this release. The sure have been working real hard on their CSS support, the CSS 2.1 specs that is.

There is a bit of a story behind this wallpaper. I found it through a post by Veerle entitled Design is Just Owning a Clip Art Gallery. I found it funny and saw that it was inspired by HicksDesign’s brilliant wallpaper shown above. Please, visit his website to download the proper wallpaper as I have resized it here to look better on the website. Enjoy!

Of course, there are many other ways to implement this. For example, I could use javascript to update the time every minutes (or seconds) without reloading the page, however I chose a server-side language so that the outcome is independent of the viewer’s setting (Javascript on/off).

<?php
 function countdown($yr, $month, $day, $hr, $min){
 // make a unix timestamp for the given date
 $countdown = mktime($hr, $min, 0, $month, $day, $yr, -1);
 
 // get current unix timestamp
 $today = time();
 
 // get the number of minutes between the times
 $diff = $countdown - $today;
 
 // Make sure the date is not passed already
 if ($diff < 0) $diff = 0;
 
 // Number of Days left
 $days = floor($difference/86400);
 // Number of Hours left
 $hours = floor(($diff - $days*86400)/3600);
 // Number of Minutes left
 $mins = floor(($diff - $days*86400 - $hours*3600)/60);
 
 echo "".$days." days ".$hours." hours ".$mins." minutes";
} ?>

To use the function, you simply call it using

<?php countdown(2007,7,7,14,0); ?>

I recently bought Designing with Web Standards by Jeffrey Zeldman, which I mentioned in an earlier post, and do not stop learning. It is one of the best purchases I have made in a long time. Whenever I take the time to sit down and read a chapter (or two for that matter), I just can’t stop. So, I recently decided to subscribe to the RSS feed of A List Apart to get my fix of web standard compliant advices and tricks to add to my webpage. Last week, I was delighted to find a post on how to create a wrap around text effect, like the one in this post, which I had previously observed in action on Mike Davidson’s site.

I presume that Mike [Davidson] had computed the “sandbags” by hand, which would be fine, I guess, if you only have to do it once or twice a month, but could end up being a very long process. However, the article in question: “Sliced and Diced Sandbags”, promised to automate the process using a little php script, written by the author himself, Rob Swan. Automate the process it did. And very well I might add. It is based on the transparency values stored in png files, but let’s not get into the details. Explaining the nuts and bolts of his script is not the point to my story today.

Installing the Script

So I sat down and read the whole tutorial, in the hope of being able to use the newly acquired knowledge on my webpage. The first step was to copy and paste the script “as is” and to try it on my machine first. Perfect! It worked perfectly. I have to admit that the whole background-image idea in each ‘div’ made it look a little too ugly for me, and reminded me of how Mike [Davidson] did it in his original post.

The New Script

So I decided to update the script to fit this “new” idea from Mike. It turns out it produces much simpler division blocks (divs) and is quite a bit smaller in size. Here is a snippet of the things I have changed from the original script (I obviously had to make it fit the box here and so it looks funny):

echo '<div style="position: absolute;
  background-image: url(' . $imageName . ');
  background-position: -30px -60px;top: 10px;
  right: -60px; no-repeat; width:' . $width .'px;
  height:' . $height . 'px;"><span>
  </span></div>';

echo '<div style="z-index: 10; padding-top: 0px;">';

foreach ($sandbag as $position => $blankPixels) {

  $sandbagWidth = $width-$blankPixels;
  $yPos = $position*$sandbagHeight;

  echo '<div style="relative; padding: 0px;
    margin: 0px; width: ' . $sandbagWidth . 'px;
    height:' . $sandbagHeight . 'px; float:' . $align
    . '; clear:' . $align . ';"><span></span></div>';

}

echo '</div>';

Conclusion

My two main problems with the script at the moment is that I can not find a way to include both inline css style and external css style, and the choice of putting the background image at -30px and -60px is completely ad hoc (and style dependent!). For the first problem, it seems like the browser totally disregards what is in the external css file when there is an inline style specified. I know that the inline style should have precedence on the external style, but does it take over completely ? Isn’t there a way around this ? As for the second problem, I do not expect a way around this, and plus, what’s a little ad hoc work when you have the sandbags automatically created for you ?

References

• A List Apart’s article by Rob Swan: Sliced and Diced Sandbags
• Mike Davidson’s original post: Newsvine: Next Steps.
• Great little tutorial: Creating a PNG file using Photoshop

Get the complete script here. And please, make sure you also give credit to Rob Swan hard work for creating the original version of the script.

I have to give props to Heather for noticing the error on the non-transparent image for Internet Explorer and the non-wrapping wrapping text for IE. It is now fixed and should not be a problem anymore. Please, let me know if you see anything else.