Twittering with Tools

nick — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 19:12:00 +0000

LINICKX.com is evolving, I'm not sure how yet but I've started by introducing twitter tools, google has changed the face of websites, according to google analytics my home page is not longer the top landing page, i.e. most people visiting my site hit the content they want directly and don't need to navigate through the site... with this in mind I'm thinking about turning linickx.com into a tumblr type thing... twitter tools allows me to post short "thoughts" and "comments" without having to go through the full WordPress write post thing.

I started the idea along time ago when photomatt introduced asides, i.e. I've always had categories and different front page presentation styles for blog posts, firefox posts, delicious posts and then everything else... so I'm thinking about taking the idea further by creating individual posts,feeds and styles for delicious links and rss shared items (from google reader).

Since I want to keep my feed clean (it's imported into many social networks like mugshot & facebook) I've used this post to filter out my new "sync" category... sync as in I'm synchronising my web life with my website :) - Oh Yeah before I foget don't add the code to functions.php as it creates a php warning, create a wordpress plugin.

My web/work/social life is quite busy - who's isn't!... so I'm a little worried about how to style the whole thing I found a nice way of quote text with css, so the tweets look good, but I'm worried that bookmarks and shared posts could make the site look cluttered or confusing, I've already had to add a "twitter reply" link to each post since the 1st thing people have asked me is what's twitter.. doh must be a UK web-ignorance thing.

I guess we'll just see how this pan's out, I've just renewed this domain, so it'd be nice to finish for the domains birthday :D

Converting HTML to xhtml, a couple of tips.

nick — Tue, 01 Nov 2005 17:20:00 +0000

As part of my blogging re-vamp and a continuation of making sure my site was standards compliant I've had to go through the pain of converting my old HTML to new xhtml.

Why did this happen ? Well to be honest I made a bit of a mistake, I've had some training on HTML, and have a book too ;-) , so obviously that's what I started to code my site in, then I introduced wordpress, and unwittingly started to code my theme in HTML, only to find out that all the work I'd done was wrong because wordpress uses xhtml :-(

So what have I learned ? How painful was it ? Well that really depends on your original html, you see my old HTML was mostly in lower case (because I'm lazy) this is contrary to some teaching materials, so if you were really good at using uppercase tags, then migrating to xhtml could be very painful for you.

Basic lessons that got me by were:

All code in xhtml MUST be in lower case, this even includes \<form action="POST" > statements, rather it should be \<form action="post" > :-)
Short codes cannot be used, i.e. align=center or border=0 isn't valid anymore, they must be align="center" and border="0"
Tags must be properly nested, so you can't do \<a>\<i>something\</a>\</i> it must be \<a>\<i>something\</i>\</a>
All tags must be closed, i.e. \</p> is now mandatory, and \<br> should look like \<br /> in fact the same goes for \<img> and \<input> tags too !
Some Tags don't mix; I've found that you can't open a new \<div> without closing a \<p> first.
And the most important lesson was use http://validator.w3.org/ if you can't work out what the problem is, googling and changing the tag you're using worked for me.