Stroep » wordpress http://blog.stroep.nl Just a collection of random works - Mark Knol Tue, 10 Jan 2012 20:09:53 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 Stroep – New designhttp://blog.stroep.nl/2009/08/new-design/ http://blog.stroep.nl/2009/08/new-design/#comments Mon, 10 Aug 2009 23:13:40 +0000 Mark Knol http://blog.stroep.nl/?p=715
Almost 1 year since my first post. I already updated my blog to a newer Wordpress installation. But since my design was getting older, I was tired looking at it. It looks a little bit messy. I think the layout (top nav, left content, right sidebar) interacts nice; so I keep this layout. But the design was a little bit overdone and I was not totally happy and I hacked multiple times layout things to it. More browsers didn't like my site anymore. ]]> Almost 1 year since my first post. I already updated my blog to a newer WordPress installation. But since my design was getting older, I was tired looking at it. It looks a little bit messy. I think the layout (top nav, left content, right sidebar) interacts nice; so I keep this layout. But the design was a little bit overdone and I was not totally happy and I hacked multiple times layout things to it. More browsers didn’t like my site anymore.

Stroep v1

Stroep v1

I just want stroep.nl has to look better.

Last time I downloaded a theme as basic for my design and edited it. First I felt a little bit ashamed doing this. I am a designer and I can design and build my own theme. But.. I don’t have the time to reinvent the wheel of creating themes. So I don’t feel ashamed anymore. I think it’s smart using good templates as start for creating personal(!) blogs. Oops.. I did it again :) I used this Linetech as start for the design. It’s a great theme. I easily modified it to my stroep-style.
I love the sidebar from my previous design. You can switch between comments/recent post. So I kept this principle. I pimped my tag-cloud too. It has random colors. Don’t ask me why; I think it just looks cool and I never seen it before too btw. Speaking of random; the header images shows some random art too.

Stroep v2

Stroep v2

I always wanted a clean dark layout with art in the header. I found some great wood-patterns. These are great because I really think this patterns make the blog more ‘friendly’ in comparison to a noisy background or a solid dark color. I know dark layouts have downsides; It’s less readable. Well for now I can live with it. The pro of a dark design is it makes art/photography look more beautiful. This blog is mostly about generative art or topics about flash related stuff, so I think its worth giving a dark design a try.

I also removed 2 advertising-blocks, and just added it 1 to the sidebar. Nobody clicks it anyway. So it doesn’t have to break my new layout (yet). If someone wants to have a banner on this site (which has something to do with design/art/programming or related things), just contact me. I have about 1000 visitors a month.

My blog looks better (not perfectly the same) in modern browsers. If you use IE6 you get a nice update message. My philosophy is we all need to stop supporting old crappy browsers and notify unlearned or conservative users. I used transparent PNG’s, rounded corners with CSS, and all without any fix for browsers who doesn’t support it. For my blog I don’t care and to be honest I feel forceful not having to support ‘them’.

Hope you like it! Let me know what you guys think.

]]> http://blog.stroep.nl/2009/08/new-design/feed/ 1 Hyper cache – cache and compressionhttp://blog.stroep.nl/2009/08/cache-and-compression/ http://blog.stroep.nl/2009/08/cache-and-compression/#comments Mon, 03 Aug 2009 23:22:49 +0000 Mark Knol http://blog.stroep.nl/?p=696 I installed the 'Hyper cache'-plugin yesterday. It minifies my output-html and posts are saved as static files on the server and the plugin enables gzip-compression. It automatically clears cache and starts over after one day. I don't like to promote shit, but this plugin rocks! :D]]> Hyper cache pluginI installed the ‘Hyper cache‘-plugin yesterday. It minifies my output-html and posts are saved as static files on the server and the plugin enables gzip-compression. It automatically clears cache and starts over after one day. I don’t like to promote shit, but this plugin rocks! :D

Minifiy html profit

Homepage index before:45,5 Kb
Homepage index after:44,7 Kb
Total:0.8 Kb

Well, this doesn’t change the world. But check this out:

G-zip compression profit

Documents (2 files)18 KB (49 KB uncompressed)
Images (44 files)124 KB
Scripts (6 files)35 KB (112 KB uncompressed)
Style Sheets (1 file)3 KB (21 KB uncompressed)
Total:180 KB (305 KB uncompressed)

Do you see? My content is 305 KB without compression. Now it is served as 180 KB! ;) Anyway; G-zip compression is very good if you need to safe bandwidth, but don’t forget you have some higher server load. I guess it also uses some more CPU at the client side. If you want to learn more about g-zip compression, it is already better explained on betterExplained.com.

Sending compressed data is very interesting. I think the world would be better place if every wordpress-installation has a cache plugin. :)

]]> http://blog.stroep.nl/2009/08/cache-and-compression/feed/ 0 TinyURL on every WordPress-posthttp://blog.stroep.nl/2009/03/tinyurl-on-every-wordpress-post/ http://blog.stroep.nl/2009/03/tinyurl-on-every-wordpress-post/#comments Fri, 06 Mar 2009 20:23:51 +0000 Mark Knol http://blog.stroep.nl/?p=453 Just a quick but handy tip I've found on this post from smashing magazine.A lot of people who are using twitter, use tinyURL to create very small links for longer URL's of blogposts or cool links. Its very powerful solution and cost just a little bit time to create, but you can help 'the twittering people' by automatically create the tinyURL-link in your post.'Read more' to find out how you can do this with WordPress. It cost less than 2 minutes too implement :) ]]> Just a quick but handy tip I’ve found on this post from smashing magazine.

A lot of people who are using twitter, use tinyURL to create very small links for longer URL’s of blogposts or cool links. Its very powerful solution and cost just a little bit time to create, but you can help ‘the twittering people’ by automatically create the tinyURL-link in your post.
Here’s how you can do this in WordPress. It cost less than 2 minutes too implement :)

Just go to design > theme editor > functions.php and add this function

function getTinyUrl($url) {  
     $tinyurl = file_get_contents("http://tinyurl.com/api-create.php?url=".$url);  
     return $tinyurl;  
}
 

Basically you can use this function for every site, but for WordPress it’s handy to use the permalink to create the URL:

In the theme editor > single.php you can add this line where ever you want to show the link to the tidyURL.

<?php  
 $turl = getTinyUrl(get_permalink($post->ID));  
 echo ‘Tiny URL: <a href="’.$turl.‘">’.$turl.‘</a>’;
?>
]]> http://blog.stroep.nl/2009/03/tinyurl-on-every-wordpress-post/feed/ 2