Archive: 2008 August
Check out Comments > My Comments on your blog’s menu, thanks to this WordPress MU plugin. I removed the one under Dashboard, since this one seems better. You see the comments you’ve made at other blogs recently, and comments after them.
We already have a good comment threading/email system, but this is good if you’ve just forgotten where you’ve commented recently. You can click “dismiss” on any comment to remove it from the page (the comment won’t be delete though; only the owner of the blog you commented on can do that).
Also: I removed Design > Themes, because there is …
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Check this out:
That’s what you’ll see on your blog when you’re logged in. You can post right from the home page! Sure, you can load up the write post screen, but that’s slower and more complicated (WordPress MU’s backend is a bit bloated). When you click in a box, the default text is highlighted so you can type right over it. You can save your post as a draft, in which case you’ll be redirected to see it in the list on your drafts page, or you can publish it immediately.
From the home page …
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I’m delighted to announce the addition of DaytonaState.org as the complement to Thripp.com! Thripp.com will now be called the Thripp.com network wherever possible, which is inclusive of the new site.
I’d been blogging at Daytona State College News (DaytonaState.org) for a while about the school, but now you can actually blog over there just like Thripp.com; you can be You.DaytonaState.org. Sign up here: daytonastate.org/wp-signup.php.
DaytonaState.org is the only online community dedicated to Daytona State College. If you’re a student, faculty member, or just love the college, join today! Your account is for life. I’ll be reading everything posted …
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Yes, you read right! I just added this feature, and redesigned the footers to use the same color schemes as the headers. To add text or HTML to your header, follow these steps:
1. Log in to your Thripp.com account.
2. From your blog, click Design > Widgets in the toolbar above the header.
3. Click the drop-down box that defaults to “1: Sidebar.” Select “2: Header,” then click Show.
4. Look for the widget “Text: Arbitrary text or HTML” in the list on the left. Click Add.
5. In the blue box that appears on the right, click “Edit” and then type whatever text …
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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 …
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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 …
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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, …
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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, …
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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 …
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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. 
