WordPress 2.3 Beta 2

The folks over at WordPress have announced Beta 2 of version 2.3, scheduled to be released September 24th. According to Mark Jaquith they’ve fixed “a bunch of bugs” in the week since Beta 1 but the code is “still rough.” This really makes me begin to question their deadline. The release date is only a few weeks away, and if there is a bunch of bugs that needed fixing this close to release, there are probably a few more waiting to be found. Why not wait until you’ve fixed them before releasing the code as final? It’s not as if WordPress stands to loose money if they don’t hit their target release date, and so I must wonder: why they would announce one at all?

Facebook signup issues

Like a lot of people, I don’t care much for MySpace anymore. All my messages and friend requests are from spammers, and just signing in is painfully slow. I haven’t even bothered to sign in for a few weeks now. Lately I’ve heard all sorts of talk about facebook and a friend convinced me to sign up this morning.

Except I couldn’t. Facebook wouldn’t let me. Apparently, they don’t approve of my name. It’s like grade school all over again; I can see them all giggling, pointing… Well, no, not really. But it is rather annoying. For some reason, it seems the gay press are the only ones to have really picked up on to this story. I consider this rather unfortunate — this is not a discrimination issue and should not be turned into one* — taking into account the sheer size and popularity of facebook, and think an issue like this should have gotten more coverage.

Honestly, I’m sure this is a simple issue of some bit of filtering software doing it’s best to avoid fake signups. Hopefully it will be resolved soon. In the mean time, I sent an email off to customer service a few hours ago and am waiting for a response. If they’re anything like MySpace, I’ll probably never hear from them. What a pain; and I didn’t even want to sign up in the first place!

* For the record, I don’t have a problem with people who choose alternative lifestyles, but I do have a problem with people taking an issue and twisting it into something it’s not.

DePo Clean (Remix)

First off, let met say that I’m not the most creative person in the world. I’d been bashing my head against the table for days trying to come up with a theme I could be happy with when I stumbled upon Derek Powazek’s DePo Clean Theme. I fell in love with it’s simplicity and clean looks and soon went to work making changes. Not that Derek’s design wasn’t good enough for me, I just felt it required a little massaging to meet my needs. See, I like to take other peoples’ ideas and rework them, and I think I’m pretty damn good at it. For those of you who are interested, I’ve included a list of features and changes and explained how certain things work on my blog below.

• Cleaner code. I’ve gotten rid of the <br /> tags, removed superfluous CSS, fixed layout issues and generally cleaned up the code. The HTML and CSS now both validate.

• Plugin usage. flickrRSS for the photo stream at the top of the main page, Ultimate Tag Warrior to tag posts and create the cloud in the sidebar, Extended Live Archives for the archive page, and Alex King’s Twitter Tools. Without them, the theme still functions, but I feel you lose a lot of functionality.

• Asides vs Posts. The main page treats asides differently from regular posts; tags, comments and titles are not displayed in the space for meta info. I use asides for individual photos, links, quotes and the like, so I see no reason to have all sorts of meta info displayed for something so small. They still have permalinks of course, so you can click through to comment and see their tags.

• Photos in posts. By default, an image inside a post is set to float right and allow text to wrap around it. To display a photo or large image, just add class="photo" to the image tag. The image will be left aligned with no float, so you’ll probably want to start your text (if you include any) in a new paragraph below. Keep in mind the column is 480 pixels wide and nicely accepts photos of that size.

• Sidebar and footer. Because I get so few hits, I have no use for advertising on my blog. Instead, I’ve decided to use the sidebar as a space for the tag cloud and links to other blogs and websites I visit frequently. The footer now is a space for links to my other content on the web and books and music I am currently enjoying.

Again, I’d like to thank Derek for giving us an excellent theme, and a great starting place for people like me who like to do a bit of customization. While many people, including myself, use browsers like Firefox and IE almost exclusively, the font rendering used in Safari really makes this theme shine, and I really hate to see it any other way. Epiphany on Linux does a good job too. If you have the chance, I highly recommend using either one just to see what kind of impact good font rendering can do for the web.

I’ve made a few revisions to the theme since I originally made this post, and now I feel it’s ready for consumption by the general public. Remember to install the proper plugins and have a look over the code; there are a few things you’ll want to configure, each of which are commented.

Download it here: DePo Clean (Remix)