Thripp.com is a new WordPress MU-powered social network focused on blogging, with the goal of harnessing technology to work with you—to enable your creativity by empowering your voice, while backing you with a community of supporters so you never have to go it alone. I just launched this on 2008 May 24, so we have a long road ahead. Join if you want to build a community that trusts it’s citizens.

Right now, the community is mostly me. I read everything posted and am active at my own Thripp.com blog, so you can count on the site progressing.

So far, I’ve implemented basic networking features: comment threading with email alerts, a friends system, subscriptions, and comment tracking, a forum, a blogs directory, collaborative blogging, mirroring to LiveJournal, Facebok photos integration, privacy controls, sitewide latest comments and posts lists, and social bookmarking. I’m planning to adapt BuddyPress to add more stuff, once it’s released.

Read the features page for lots more. But there are no themes. Just the one you see now.

You can register and start blogging, or you can post to the forum and comment on most blogs as a guest.

Featured blogs:
What’s life all about? by Hong
Photography by JT
Brilliant Photography by Richard X. Thripp [My site, with special features not yet available to the community.]
Daytona State College News by Richard X. Thripp [At DaytonaState.org yet on the Thripp.com network.]

Thanks for visiting!
Richard

Stats: Thripp.com has 184 blogs and 193 users.

I’ve been working hard on redesigning the Thripp.com comments system as of late. I don’t have a screen cap of the old one, but it was ugly. All the basic functionality was there, but the colors and dividers and layout and sorting wasn’t up to snuff with the new design. All that changes today. This is my new vision for blog commenting:

This is my gift to everyone on Thripp.com. Do you not see the beauty?

Let me tell you the features:

• The same wonderful threading interface through a modified version of WP Thread Comment.

• REPLY TO THIS buttons open a JavaScript reply window right below the thread. Use the links to reply to a particular post.

• If the original commenter entered an email address, he’ll be emailed your reply.

• Comments are newest to oldest by thread (yes!), with comments in green and pingbacks in blue. Pingbacks are always listed at the end, because comments are more important, but they’re newest to oldest in their own group too.

• Within a thread (comments that are all replies to above comments with the reply buttons), comments are oldest to newest for continuity. The best of both worlds!

• Multiple levels of nesting; up to 14 deep. Here’s an example. It looks totally cool at the deeper levels, and nothing breaks.

• If the person has no avatar from gravatar.com for his email address, a green box saying “No Avatar” is shown.

• Anonymous comments are allowed, but off by default. You can enable them for you Thripp.com blog under Settings > Discussions, by unchecking the boxes requiring the email and name. I do that on my blogs.

• My posts appear in bold red because I’m the founder of Thripp.com and I’m special. Everyone else is green.

• If you enter a website, your Gravatar is a link too! More people will click, because clicking it takes them right to your site, just like clicking your name.

• The date and time is a permalink to the comment. It’s just the same page with the in-page link, but is useful for sharing the comment with others.

• Beautiful colors and margins! I’ve spent hours tinkering with this and measuring everything down to the pixel. And yes, the layout is fluid and works in Internet Explorer 6.

• Front-end management is now fully implemented. This is the coolest thing for me. See those buttons saying EDIT and DELETE for each comment and pingback? They really work! They only appear when you’re logged in and at your blog. The delete button has a pop-up confirmation to be safe.

• Those boxes with the numbers puzzle some people. What they do is to let you thread a comment to a parent comment after the fact. The comment ID is shown in the box. In the above image, if I wanted to thread my ” ” comment to the testing comment rather than the explanation comment, I’d just enter “264″ in the box and hit Enter on the keyboard and it would be done.

• Pingbacks have a nice custom image saying “Thripp.com Pingback.” I like the colors on them too; they’re complementary to the greens.

• Threaded comments are in white while the originals (highest parent comments) are in green, so they catch your eye while scrolling.

And that’s a wrap. This applies to all old comments too, in case you’re wondering. I couldn’t get pagination in this release, but you can have hundreds of comments on one page with no problems. Here’s a post with 142, for example.

Enjoy the beautiful comments! I know I will. I’d be doing this work if I had just my blog but it’s great to be doing it in a way that benefits hundreds of people at once.

If you’re like me (I hope not), you have three Thripp.com blogs: The Thripp.com Development Blog (this one), Brilliant Photography, and Daytona State College News. Wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to feature content from one blog on another?

That’s just the feature I’ve added today, thanks to the Ada A Blog Recent Posts Widget plugin. You can add up to two other Thripp.com blogs to your sidebar under Design > Widgets, with the widgets, Thripp.com Blog and Thripp.com Blog 2. Here’s an example of mine, with my settings:

You can get the blog ID in the footer; it’s displayed for each blog there. This is better and faster than the RSS widget because it taps directly into the Thripp.com database and doesn’t show sticky posts first. I use the WP-Sticky plugin for all my blogs, which you can activate on Thripp.com under Manage > PLUGINS. It lets you pin a post to the top of the blog, like I do for the mission statement here and the intro on my own. Unfortunately, the post also appears pinned to the top of the RSS feed, but the Thripp.com Blog widget gets around it by fetching the posts by date.

If you’re wondering, the plugin only allows you to show one blog. I bumped this up to two by creating a duplicate copy of the PHP scripts and adding “2″ onto the end of all the functions and variables.

You can also feature another Thripp.com blog with this addition. Enjoy your new sharing options!

I discovered an annoying issue with the calendar widget on my Thripp.com blog today. I use the widget which is included in WordPress, WordPress MU, and Thripp.com, but for the Internet Explorer, Safari, and Camino browsers, it formats the pop-up titles with line breaks instead of commas. In Firefox it looks like this:

It’s pretty reasonable to use commas to separate post titles. But in Internet Explorer, WordPress generates the page using line breaks instead:

That makes sense, since Firefox can’t handle line breaks in title tags. Unfortunately, as you may know, I use WP Super Cache. If the first visitor to a page is using Internet Explorer, his hit generates the cached copy. For later visitors in Firefox, the titles then look like this:

Bad bad bad. There’s no space or comma or line break or anything. It’s illegible.

The solution is to serve the same formatting to all browsers, so caching is a non-issue. I don’t care for the line breaks anyway; everything should have commas. I found the culprit in wp-includes/general-template.php. This is in WordPress MU 1.5.1, but it’s the same in WordPress 2.5.1 and the new 2.6 series:

if (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘MSIE’) !== false || strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), ‘camino’) !== false || strpos(strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']), ’safari’) !== false)
$ak_title_separator = “\n”;
else
$ak_title_separator = ‘, ‘;

Change that to this:

$ak_title_separator = ‘, ‘;

Simple. I’m surprised no one else is talking about it. I guess I’m the only one who is annoyed enough.

If you want the best of both worlds, use this instead:

$ak_title_separator = ‘, \n’;

It’ll look right in Firefox and the same as before in Internet Explorer (line breaks), except with a comma after each title but before the line break.

The problem with this is that I’m hacking the core files, so I’ll have to re-apply the updates by hand when I upgrade WordPress MU. Thripp.com is on 1.5.1 now (2.5.1 in regular WP), but I’m skipping 2.6 to wait for 2.7 for Thripp.com. Hopefully the developers will have more bugs worked out, with new ones to go along.

Surely there’s some way to do this with a plugin outside the core, but since it’s such a small thing I’m not going to look.

Your Thripp.com calendar widgets can now look nice for everyone. You can add one under Design > Widgets.

Thripp.com is now 30% faster than I said it was in my previous post. Brilliant Photography gets the biggest chunk of the speed boost, because it was the slowest to start.

All the HTML is now one line. That doesn’t yield a big speed improvement, but it’s just cool. The big thing is that I turned small images into CSS sprites and merged all the JavaScript files into one honker (148KB). That file is compressed with gzip if your browser allows it, and all the current ones do, so the bandwidth hit is only 45KB. Still big, I know, but considering it contains prototype.js (used for the clickable smilies in commenting screens, 124KB), the media player (check out JT’s blog for an example), the pop-up thumbnail effect (this blog, my blog, and the clickable smilies effect, that’s pretty good. Lazy loading might be better, but getting it out of the way at once reduces HTTP requests and 45KB is not much on a modern connection. Your browser caches it, too.

The site is fastest if you’re not a member, because then I can use caching and gzip to the max. If you are logged in, I can’t because the page has to be dynamically compiled each time for the links in the sidebar and the administrative controls above the header. If you make a comment, the cache is invalidated temporarily for that comment to appear, and then you don’t get compiled pages anymore. It’s still fast, just not as fast. 99% of visitors actually don’t interact at all, so most of you will be enjoying uber speed.

I already had caching and gzipping; today’s improvements are mainly on the client side. Note that pages aren’t cached or compressed till the 2nd visitor in a 24 hour period visits a particular page. JavaScript and CSS is always compressed, though.

The Google search box in the sidebar is faster to load, because I switched from the fancy JavaScript version to the plain HTML + CSS one Google offers. And I made the Google logo part of the CSS sprites file.

So the typical page is 65KB (20KB HTML + 45KB JS), plus the sprites image file (10KB), plus background (15KB), plus Google AdSense ads (who knows how much). Everything except the first 65KB can be loaded in the background, so a figure for a typical visitor, pages load in 2 seconds. That’s pretty good. It’s not fast like Google, but probably the fastest WordPress blog around. And that’s for everyone.

I made the sidebar 30 pixels wider by taking away space from the content. The blog area is still wide at 778 pixels, so it doesn’t hurt anything. This makes a big difference because the sidebar was too wide before. You can give your categories longer names without the names wrapping, and I added the count for each one in parenthesis next to it, thanks to wp_list_categories with the argument, show_count=1 in WordPress MU.

I’m taking advantage of the extra space by clarifying things. Instead of “Search Here” and “Search All,” the search engines say “Search This Blog” and “Search All Blogs.” Instead of “Entries feed” we have “Entries RSS Feed.” Instead of “157 Spams” it says “157 Spam Comments.”

The text in the header, sidebar, and content areas have more padding. It looks better and is easier on the eyes, with a bit of white space between the paragraphs and the green border.

Ads appear on posts 1, 2, and 3 on each page, instead of 1, 5, and 10. This should make more money as it puts them center stage. Money is good because it lets me keep Thripp.com running. The second ad has a new design with a dark background like the header.

I cleaned up my HTML; Thripp.com is completely valid now, as are all the blogs by default. This doesn’t stop you from creating malformed HTML in your blog posts or comments, however.

I gave my own blog a facelift. The thumbnails in the gallery and for the random photos in the header are nice and big now. Some time I’ll have to let Thripp.com members customize their blog headers. WordPress MU has an API for that I hear.

Printable pages have bigger titles and better margins. I took the ads off them too (they never printed but were just for display).

Thripp.com and its blogs are now about 30% faster. I centralized the JavaScript and CSS files under http://thripp.com instead of each blog, so your browser can cache those when you browse different blogs on the network. Also I consolidated the JavaScript scripts down to 2 files from 4, gzipped them, and did the same for the CSS, going from 4 files to 1. Fewer HTTP requests means faster pages, and we saved about 60KB with the compression. All HTML is already compressed, but I pushed it further by removing blank lines and tabs from the source code. As always, Thripp.com checks the HTTP headers your browser sends to see if accept-encoding: gzip is there. If it isn’t, you get uncompressed files, maintaining backward-compatibility with old browsers.

<pressRelease> These small but incremental improvements represent my continuing dedication to Thripp.com and its users, browser and access compatibility, and standards adherence, firmly establishing the network as an unrestricted resource for all.</pressRelease>

Enjoy!

Check out the new background for Thripp.com. Instead of light green, it’s a light green subtle mesh pattern.

If you don’t see it on the page, refresh the stylesheet in your browser’s cache by pressing Shift + F5.

The new background is nice on the eyes and more interesting. Enjoy.

I spent the last six hours working on a redesign for Thripp.com. While I normally deal with programming, this time it was all CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Check this out; the boring old design:

And the bold new vision:

What do you think? I like it a lot. The new header and borders solidify olive green as the Thripp.com color, and the borders are pleasing to the eye for containing the content. The sidebar’s text isn’t so squished, links are nice and bold there, visited links go brighter green, the header is white on dark olive-green, and the header titles are

big and bold

instead of small and subdued. Outside the body, the background is light green instead of bright white.

This is a fluid layout. It’s optimized for 1024×768, but larger is fine. I browse on my 1440×900 monitor most of the time. The body of the text doesn’t go above 800 pixels, because it’s hard to follow lines of text if you go bigger. But unlike other sites which hinder readers with small monitors or ones who don’t browse full-screen, Thripp.com does not. You can read your favorite blogs comfortably even at 640×480.

This is the first redesign since I launched Thripp.com (then richardxthripp.com) three months ago. Good design makes everything enjoyable. I just found that out. Hopefully this one is a good one. I’m enjoying it over at Brilliant Photography.

Check out the stylesheet if you want to see my technical work. This was a lot of trail and error for me, because it’s my first serious work with web design.

Also, the ads now look the same in Firefox and Internet Explorer. Before, they were 19 pixels too high in Internet Explorer. Really, they’d be butted up right against the tags list. The ad is a paragraph floating with CSS, but I can’t get IE to respect the margins. Can you believe this is how I fixed it?

<!–[if IE]><img src=”http://lib.thripp.com/images/shim.gif” alt=”” width=”1″ height=”19″ /><br /><![endif]–>

Talk about a massive kludge. Conditional code and a spacer GIF. So old-fashioned. It works, so I’m happy.

Enjoy the new layout. I’m open to comments and suggestions if you don’t. This affects not only the 181 Thripp.com blogs, but also DaytonaState.org and VicAndHelen.com, which are part of the Thripp.com network.

I just made a decision: it’s Thripp.com now, not thripp.com. I like the capitalized address better. Never did when it was richardxthripp.com, but it seems right now.

Enjoy the new address! Let me know if you spot pages that have the lowercase version.

I changed the code that displays the tag list for each post. It looks like this now:

<?php $posttags = get_the_tags(); if ($posttags) { echo ‘with these tags: ‘; { foreach($posttags as $tag) { if ($tag->count > 1) echo ‘<a href=”‘.get_tag_link($tag).’” title=”‘.$tag->count.’ entries”>’.$tag->name.’</a>, ‘; else echo $tag->name.’, ‘; } } } ?>

What does that mean? Now, if the post is the only post with that tag, no link is displayed. Your readers’ time will not be wasted any longer. If there’s more than one tagged post, the link is shown like before, but now the number of entries is shown as the link title attribute. If you hover the mouse over the tag “posts” in this post, it will show “13 entries”, for example.

This is a small improvement, but life is nothing but a series of small improvements. The issue of the pointless tag pages started bothering me recently, so I’m glad to have it solved.