xset

Reboot: the aftermath

// May 2nd, 2006 // Tech

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single website in possession of a new theme, must be in want of a good bug fixing session.

I was in such a rush to get the damn thing out of the door yesterday that I managed to overlook a number of issues. Issues which my eagle eyed readership immediately discovered and pointed out. Maybe I should do a google on this one and make the site Beta for all eternity? But seriously, thanks for the feedback guys. It is appreciated and I’ve done my best to fix the place up a bit.

Live Search / Search link issues

This was a big feature to include and I anticipated problems. The first issue was the search box appearing behind the header graphic due to some sloppy CSS positioning.

The second was a little more fundamental. Due to a restriction in FireFox, visiting the site at www.drytherain.co.uk caused an exception to fire in the AJAX script. This is because FireFox (being a bit dense) considers www.drytherain.co.uk to be different from drytherain.co.uk and prevents cross domain scripting.

So I needed to get the site to run on one or the other. A quick google later (do you have any idea how many results you get for googling www. ?) and I hit on no-www.org, a rather cool site dedicated to removing the www from the world wide web. Leaving aside their political bias they do provide a very handy mod.rewrite rule to redirect traffic from www. to the root domain.

A quick tweak later and live search is running for everyone with javascript enabled. For some reason the search page doesn’t load but that will only be the case for non javascripty people and frankly – you can wait.

Archives didn’t work

My fault again. Stupid Wordpress can’t work out that when I named the file archives.php I meant archive.php? I dunno – you just can’t get the CMS these days.

Width inconsistency

Greg point this one out and it had been bugging me for a while. Basically the current post and meta box used pixel values for widths whilst the previous posts used percentages. In typical form I couldn’t resolve this yesterday and it took me about 2 minutes to sort this morning.

XHTML Validity

Not too bad with the exception of the blasted Flickr badge. Fortunately, Veerle has already posted a solution to that. Once that’s in place it will be a simple tidy up of a few extraneous tags and alt attributes and away we go!

Still to come

I wanted to get AJAXY comments enabled but couldn’t get it to work to my satisfaction. I’ll be looking at that over the next day or so.

I also really want something a little more interesting than the current site header graphic. Any suggestions?

Finally I need to rework the print and thin client stylesheets as well as dumping in a decent tab index and access keys to tick all those accessibility boxes