Posts Tagged With ‘blogging’
Updated: 07 Aug 2009 06:12 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: analytics • blogging
Yesterday, a co-worker pointed out to me that the proxy/monitoring software “they” use on our network was now blocking traffic to my blog. This is something relatively recent, which made me curious about what level of traffic I get here from my work domain, particularly given that the overall traffic numbers have really never been all that impressive. Clearly, I’m serving a very discerning albeit small readership…
Google Analytics makes answering a question like that incredibly simple. I pulled traffic numbers for the period from 1 January 2009 through today, and found
- 1,339 total visits
- 1,958 page views
- an average of 1.46 pages/visit
- an average time on site of 0:00:50
Like I said, not all that impressive overall. So, what do the numbers look like for visits from my work network for that same period?
- 97 visits
- 1.88 pages/visit
- an average of 0:00:37 on site
Yup, that works out to less than one visit every two days. Like I said: not all that impressive. Maybe it is the subversive nature of the content…
Updated: 22 Apr 2009 06:28 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • icons
I just stumbled across this… I’ve used the Pi Diagona icon set for a couple of little test projects and have always been impressed by the quality of these, particularly in looking at what the artist has done with the 10 x 10 pixel set. In going to pull down another copy of the Diagona icons this morning for my on-going effort to develop a new theme for my blog (hinted at previously and coming soon, I promise), I came across the artist’s new “Fugue” icon set: an amazing set of over 1,700 icons rendered in PNG format at 16 x 16 pixels. Amazing!
Even more amazing is that these icons are freely available under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license or can be purchased under a royalty-free license for under $50 (USD). Expect to see these icons here in the near future…
Updated: 11 Dec 2008 07:22 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • WordPress
WordPress 2.7 “Coltrane” was released yesterday and given that I had a few minutes to spare this morning, I went ahead and upgraded. As has typically been the case for me in the past, the upgrade went flawlessly (at least, as far as I can tell) and took less than 5 minutes. The only kink I ran into was that I needed to flush by browser’s cache/history because something in there was causing the administrative interface to go wonky. I’d sit on either the dashboard or the “Add New Post” page without touching anything, and after about 5 seconds the page would auto-reload to a page showing what appeared to be the formatting buttons used in HTML mode. All is, however, now well.
All I can say at this point is “Wow!” The WordPress team has given it a major overhaul. It looks and acts completely different. It’s definitely faster, more customizable, and much more polished.
Updated: 12 Oct 2008 08:48 am by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • WordPress
Finally got around to updating to the latest WordPress and the latest version of a couple of the plugins that I use (including Akisment). Uploading the files to the server took longer than the actual upgrade…
That’s about the extent of anything I’ve managed to accomplish with respect to the blog lately.
Updated: 23 Jul 2008 10:09 pm by Ron
Filed: Geek Stuff
Tagged: blogging • captions • css • WordPress
One of the changes made with WordPress 2.6 is support for captions on images within posts. Having recently upgraded this blog to the current version of WordPress, I was curious to see how big a deal it would be to provide appropriate styling for those captions in the resulting markup for a captioned image. What I found: it was simple.
WordPress now wraps the inserted image with a DIV with a couple of classes (wp-caption and a class specifying the alignment), and follows the image’s IMG tag with a paragraph classed with wp-caption-text. The image’s IMG tag is also classed, but the purposes of this discussion, that won’t matter. The alignment classes on the wrapping DIV are alignright, alignleft, and aligncenter; these are the same classes that have been used to specify image alignment in the past, so we’ll want to make sure we don’t clobber any style attributes already applied to those classes lest we goof up the appearance of posts authored under previous verions of WordPress.
In previous versions, WordPress used those same classes (alignright, alignleft, aligncenter) to specify the alignment for the images; the difference now is that those classes are applied to the enclosing DIV elements rather than the image itself. In my existing stylesheet, I have already defined the following CSS to float the images to the appropriate side:
.alignright { float: right; }
.alignleft { float: left; }
By leaving those generic, images in posts authored with the earlier WordPress versions will still be positioned appropriately and the enclosing DIV will be positioned appropriately, while allowing the text of the post to flow around the image and the accompanying caption, in posts from the new version. (Centered images aren’t floated, but are “centered” based on the margins applied to the DIV, as shown below; note the use of the auto left and right margins.)
The other item to note in looking at the markup applied when we insert an image is that both the image’s IMG tag and the wrapping DIV have widths specified (the IMG via the width attribute, and the DIV via an inline style attribute). The DIV’s width is set to be 10 pixels larger than the image’s width.
In my theme, I’ve provided a subtle border and a bit of whitespace around images, and I wanted to retain that same basic appearance with the new layout. I also wanted the caption text to now appear inside that border and for the caption text to be a slightly smaller size than the page’s body text.
Enough, already! Let’s see both the necessary entries in the CSS and the results…
div.wp-caption { border: 2px solid #e4e4e4; padding: 0; background: #f0f0f0; }
div.wp-caption img { margin: 5px; }
p.wp-caption-text { font-size: 0.9em; margin: 0 5px 5px 5px; }
div.alignleft { margin: 0 0.8em 0.5em 0; }
div.alignright { margin: 0 0 0.5em 0.8em; }
div.aligncenter { margin: 0 auto 0.5em auto; }
Li enjoying a juice-break on her first camping trip (July 2008)
And here’s the result. We’ll add some filler text and an image with a caption as an illustration. Integer id massa non purus pretium consectetuer. Donec volutpat mollis tortor. Maecenas orci turpis, venenatis nec, dignissim in, cursus eget, nulla. Nam condimentum, orci ac fermentum iaculis, justo nunc consequat pede, adipiscing hendrerit lacus orci vulputate nisl. Etiam consectetuer justo quis pede. Duis arcu nisi, fringilla sit amet, dignissim ut, vulputate quis, velit. Morbi metus. Donec diam justo, porttitor vitae, ultrices ut, auctor nec, sem. Fusce fermentum risus vitae justo. Cras feugiat justo non turpis ultrices pellentesque. Nam diam justo, convallis ac, euismod quis, ultricies rutrum, quam. In quis ipsum. Quisque imperdiet. Curabitur et orci in urna lacinia placerat. Aliquam erat volutpat. Sed lobortis. Mauris quis est a lorem tincidunt mollis. Duis pellentesque accumsan nulla. Nam tempus.
Comments? Got a better way? See a problem? Let me know.
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