Recent Entries for July

For as long as I can remember I’ve tried to secure a domain for my surname, the obvious candidates were either a .com or .co.uk but both of these are taken by huge companies. The .com company leaves a particularly bad taste in my mouth, as they are only forwarding the domain to an internal page of another website, with no mention of the URL on the page. I’ve tried several different methods of contact to see if they would be interested in selling; phone, email and blogging but as you would expect, I have not received a response.

Unfortunately it seems like I won’t be able to secure either of these domains, so I’ve been looking at the options available to me. For a good while I was very interesting in acquiring a Niger domain, which would look like osbor.ne, but I decided after much deliberation, that no matter how much I wanted it, a £300 outlay every two years was just too expensive.

In the last few months there have been more people mentioning the latest domain extension to be brought to the masses, the Colombian TLD, .co. At first I thought it was just going to be another pointless domain, something that wasn’t going to catch on, much like the .me domains that came out two years ago. I pondered over this decision for a few weeks to help me decided what I wanted to do; forget about purchasing it or try my luck with a pre-order. In the end I decided to go ahead with the pre order and I now own osborne.co.

To be honest, I’m not really sure if a .co domain will ever have the same weighting as a .co.uk or a .com, or even if it will catch on, but it will definitely be interesting to see what companies lean towards it. There were two reasons which lead to me pre-ordering the domain:

1. People make spelling errors all of the time and a .co domain is only one letter shorter than a .com. Obviously this doesn’t mean anything but perhaps something like this could help a site climb the ranking quicker?
2. As I said above, I wanted a domain for my surname for a good few years now and I wasn’t prepared to let a suitable alternative pass me by. If a year passes and I haven’t used it as much as I thought then I’ll simple let it expire.

What do you think, is this new domain extension a waste of time or indeed something that could prove to be quite valuable?

Although it might not be immediately apparent, during the last two weeks I have been rolling out a series of improvements throughout this site.

Font Stacks

On my main body text I am using ff-tisa-web-pro-1 and ff-tisa-web-pro-2, which are being served up with help from Typekit. The fall back options in my font stack were; Helvetica, Arial and Serif.

Unfortunately with Typekit, sometimes you can see the font switch happen which is caused by your default fonts changing over to the ones served by Typekit and if you haven’t specified similar looking fonts then the switch over can be quite horrific, with line lengths changing and pushing words onto the next line. So to combat this problem, I switch my fallback fonts to Georgia, Palatino, ‘Palatino Linotype’, Times, ‘Times New Roman’ and serif. Although you will still see the font switch on some web browsers, the switch over should not be nearly as noticeable now.

One final thing I done, was republish my Typekit fonts as suggested on there blog in order for the fonts to render properly in the Opera browser.

Additional Information

This blog has always been pretty sparse, perhaps a little too sparse. So I decided to provide some more extra information at the bottom of each post, which give the readers more information about me. The sections are titled; who I am, what I do and where I do it.

I’ve also been toying with the idea of putting in related information that could accommodate extra information on the post.

Tweet Button

Last week I wrote about Noel Jacksons excellent little Tweethis button and if you missed out on this then it is certainly a worthwhile read. I’ve added the button to the bottom of my posts, directly above the additional information which I have mentioned above.

iPhone Version

Whenever I’ve had some spare time I’ve been chipping away at an iPhone version of this site, so hopefully I should be able to get that up and running before the month is out. Expect an accompanying blog post on how to create an iPhone version of your website in the not too distant future.

If you managed to pick up a copy of todays Scottish Sun, make sure you flick through to the music pull-out.

In February I wrote up an article on my first foray into the world of web apps, where I detailed how I went about building a Twitter mash-up site for Scottish music festival T in the Park. As I’m incredibly witty I decided to call it Tweet in the Park.

The site is a Twitter feed aggregator which will pull in any instance of the festival being mentioned, so that people who, like myself, are not in attendance this year will not miss out on a thing.

Late last month the Scottish Sun got in contact with me asking if I would be interested in doing a small interview to talk about the site and why I decided to create it. If you wish to download a pdf version of the page then feel free to do so — Tweet In The Park pdf.

When I created my first wordpress theme for this website, over two years ago, I had great trouble trying to attach an ID onto the body within the header code. I found it really surprising that there wasn’t much in the way of documentation as I believe that attaching an ID to your body tag is something which should be used on every website.

After several attempts at trying to settle on a method for my website I ended up using a switch statement which was placed within the header, it looked like the following:

<?php if (is_page("about")) { ?>
<body id="about">
<?php } elseif (is_archive("archives")) { ?>
<body id="articles">
<?php } elseif (is_page("portfolio")) { ?>
<body id="portfolio">
<?php } elseif (is_page("contact")) { ?>
<body id="contact">
<?php } else { ?>
<body id="index">
<?php } ?>

This ultimately ended up being far from ideal because if I ever needed to create a new page which didn’t fall within the stipulated pages then I’d have to add another option to the switch statement in order to style the page how I desired. When WordPress introduced version 2.7 they brought forward a new function which dynamically added a class to the body tag <body <?php body_class(); ?>> which would allow for multiple classes to be attached to the body, allowing designers/developers to style pages individually. However, this still wasn’t what I wanted to do with WordPress.

Nearly two years on and I seemed to have forgot all about my issues with attaching IDs to the body tag, until I was developing a WordPress website that required the body to have unique IDs, so I started my search for another solution knowing full well that my previous solution would not prove to be adequate. Thankfully there is now much more documentation on the matter and various different methods in order to accomplish this but I must admit to still being a little shocked at the fact that WordPress does not have this in it’s core installation.

I can’t remember where I found the method that I settled on but it only requires one small tweak of the template and then the body can have both IDs and classes, the code is as follows

</head>
<?php
$url = explode('/',$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']);
$dir = $url[1] ? $url[1] : 'home';
?>
<body id="<?php echo $dir ?>" <?php body_class(); ?>>

Do you have a better way of attaching an ID to the body tag? Please let me know in the comments section, as I’m sure there are probably even easier ways of doing it.

If you’re interesting in finding out more about why attaching a body ID to your page is a good idea then check out this great post by Harry Roberts of Venturelab and CSS Wizardry on how to get started. In the previous link, he shows you how to apply it on your own custom framework with use of PHP.

Recently I had been debating whether to stick a tweetmeme button on this blog but the one thing that kept constantly putting me off was the fact that the button used an iframe.

I didn’t really like the idea of slowing down page load times for something so trivial as a button, so I decided to live without it. However, earlier today I was catching up on some of my favourite blogs when I noticed that Noel Jackson had developed his very own Twitter button, which didn’t use an iframe. It was perfect, it was exactly what I was looking for.

It turns out that it’s ever so simple to incorporate into your wordpress theme, all you need to do is follow the link above and copy and paste two pieces of code. The first part is pasted into your functions file and the second part is pasted wherever you wish the button to appear on your site. I’ve stuck my twitter button on my single page, so to view it please click through to the comments section or click back to another post using the navigational arrows above.

All in I probably spent a little over two minutes putting this into my theme and another fifteen fiddling about with the CSS, which I’m still not entirely happy with.

If you were like me, thinking about putting a Twitter button on your site but not wanting to slow down page load times by having to use an iframe then I can’t recommend this one enough, it’s simple and very effective.

Earlier in the week Twitter was awash with a new CSS technique for text-rendering called optimizeLegibility. The premise behind this new technique is that browsers, which are notorious for rendering fonts terribly, improve the handling of kerning pairs and ligatures in modern browsers; Safari 5, Webkit Nightlies & Chrome.

After reading a lot of the big industry players talking about it I decided to implement it on my own website. Everything seemed to be running fine until I noticed the font rendering on Google Chrome for PC.

As you can see from the image above, the fonts seem to have a horrible text shadow applied to them and the li elements on my left sidebar were getting pushed onto two lines.

I’m not really sure what is to blame here as the font displayed perfectly across multiple other browsers on both Mac and PC. Is this a specific browser error for Chrome PC, even thought it says it should work or is this down to a conflict with the fonts on my website which are served up with Typekit?

I’ve commented out this technique until I can find out what is causing the error. If you have encountered anything similar then please feel free to get in touch.