Chris Miller » CSS

The Guy in the header is Mr. Fawkes

Chris — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 03:37:40 +0000

So it’s bonfire night, the time of year when we remember that bastard who tried to blow up the houses of parliament! Why? I don’t know.

Where is he nowadays when he’s needed?

Anyway, if this is in fact bonfire night then you’ll be able to see my bonfire night theme for this site.

I thought I’d post the full rhyme that is linked to this day, I can’t ever remember hearing the whole of it before:

Remember, remember the fifth of November,
gunpowder, treason and plot,
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
should ever be forgot.
Guy Fawkes, Guy Fawkes,
’twas his intent
to blow up the King and the Parliament.
Three score barrels of powder below,
Poor old England to overthrow:
By God’s providence he was catch’d
With a dark lantern and burning match.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, make the bells ring.
Holloa boys, holloa boys, God save the King!
Hip hip hoorah!

A penny loaf to feed the Pope.
A farthing o’ cheese to choke him.
A pint of beer to rinse it down.
A faggot of sticks to burn him.
Burn him in a tub of tar.
Burn him like a blazing star.
Burn his body from his head.
Then we’ll say ol’ Pope is dead.
Hip hip hoorah!
Hip hip hoorah!

Have an explosive bonfire night,
- Chris

Halloween is here

Chris — Sun, 30 Oct 2005 23:52:45 +0000

So it’s nearly Halloween again. Usually around this time of year there’s some sort of flat party that I’d be going to or hosting in a flat in Glasgow. But since I’m living in Dumfries, there’s no Halloween for me!

So rather than having a party, I’ve created a new theme that will be shown from the 29th of October until the 1st of November each year.

In case it isn’t Halloween just now here’s a screenshot of the theme:

Have a good Halloween, I leave you with me, as a zombie!
- Chris

A new kinna archive

Chris — Wed, 09 Mar 2005 09:59:12 +0000

It’s an all new look, all new blogging software, all new everything. Well not quite… yet.

I thought it was high time to start looking for some funky plugins for my new WordPress install. After a few minutes of looking through the WP site I had found a list of likley candidates for install:

Smart Archives

This plugin allows you to generate a full archive page which is not available in WP by default. It lists all the archives by year and month, then lists all the posts in each month. The output of the plugin can be seen here.

Weighted Categories

This is a plugin which allows you to have weighted category links much in the same way which flickr does the weighting of tags. The output of this plugin can be seen at the bottom of the archives page.

Fancy Tooltips

This plugin makes the tooltips which appear whilst hovering a link, abbr tag etc., nicer looking. You will be able to see it if you hover a link on this page or in the image below.

Flickr Gallery 0.4

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to install this properly and get errors when trying to run it. I will have to try a few other things to get it working – more news when (or if) I get it working.

There’s a lot of cool plugins available for WordPress,
- Chris

A whole new view

Chris — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 22:04:49 +0000

It’s happened again. The look of the blog has changed.

Since updating to WordPress 1.5, I’ve been meaning to recreate the style of the site as a WordPress theme. I decided that rather than doing so (and due to the large differences between WP 1.4 and 1.5) I decided to create a new structure for the blog and the site and also to update the style at the same time.

From this the Simply Blue theme was born.

Because WP 1.5 does things in a different way to 1.4, I decided that rather trying to recreate the same style in 1.5 it would be easier to create a new theme based upon the WP default. Using this new theme I changed the rest of the site to match it.

Hope you all like the new look,
- Chris

New look: Clean & Simple

Chris — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 15:40:03 +0000

Hello all, hope you are having a very scary halloween, I am: I’m doing DAS.

This post is about, if you haven’t guessed, the new theme of the site.

Since updating the CSS last time I have not been happy about how cluttered the site looked, I intended to change this to look cleaner whenever I got the chance. Since I am meant to be doing DAS it is the perfect time to do such a thing (also with an extra hour in the day today I had best put it to good use!).

So here is is. The initial “clean” looking chris-miller.org, there’s still some work to be done to make me happy but for now this will suffice.

Anyway this is just a quick post for that reason and to say whhhhoooooo (happy halloween).
- Chris

It works in IE

Chris — Fri, 10 Sep 2004 02:35:58 +0000

So, the time has come for me to try and get my site to work in IE. All you folks who read this site using IE will appreciate this (even tough I hate you all and wish you a painful death), but the fact is that sometimes even us devout Firefox, Safari, Mozilla and [other good browser] users will no doubt have to use IE.

Therefore I decided to tackle the task of painstakingly trying to fix the way the site was rendering itself in IE, thinking back towards Gary‘s post about CSS Rules of Thumb and my subsequent comment on it.

I am in league with Lucifer, he came round and we had a brainstorm about how to fix the problem. It turns out that if I have a

tag in the header of my site that I will get lines above and below it. Also in my CSS I had a padding element set for the

tags within the header to be -10 so that the quote given underneath is close to the heading itself. This displays correctly in firefox/safari/[other] but in IE it meant that half the background of the page was covered by an extension of the header. The only thing I could do to fix this was to remove the -10 then change the padding on the heading so that the quote was closer.

Bada bing, bada boom, it works in IE. A few extra changes to the template to make it look a little better and whoosh we have Internet Explorer lift-off. Go on, if you’re not viewing this website through IE (and quite frankly why the hell would you?), open it up and take a look, hopefully it looks the same as it does now. And if you are using IE to read this: for god sake, download firefox, it’s much better.

After all, aren’t we all just trying to get our websites to render correctly in all browsers?
- Chris