mrblack.co.uk weblog

I’m no designer. This webpage is perhaps proof of that. However, taking that into account, I have to create webpages with at least some design to them. Notably business apps and admin control areas.

Now in this day and age we all should be using CSS to control layout and typeface definitions, none of that inline stuff too. This however can be a rather tedious and painful business for somebody such as myself.

The problem with this perhaps is that the only help rails give you in the term of CSS is a helper method that creates the html head CSS import and a standard and slightly ugly scaffold.css document. So my overriding issue is that whilst rolling around in Ruby joy, my CSS is gets messy. It ends up in an near unmaintainable heap, laden with IE hacks and unorganised in nature. Grr horrid.

What I really need to do is make some code that I can reuse over and over again.

A CSS FRAMEWORK if you will, which can be extended and reused for each project.

So I’m exploring this right now. There are a few lying around the net, including one by the behemoth that is Yahoo!

Content with style CSS framework - http://www.contentwithstyle.co.uk/Articles/17/
Yahoo! CSS Grids - http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/grids/

Now if Rails could help with its scaffold function, producing something of more than scaffold.css, that would be swell.

Just installed the new fangled wordpress 2.0. This means that things won’t work for a while as I iron out odd things in the UI. i should really test this stuff out before I install away, but where is the fun in that. I am currently using the K2 theme, which is still in beta and is having an arse of a time liking IE. So IE poeple (9 out of 10 of you) will have to live with the sidebar swiming around elsewhere Fixed!

Well Spam karma 2 is really doing the job at keeping spam comments at bay. So far it has killed spams 100% successfully ie, non got through the net and no real comments were killed. So for anybody running Wordpress I wholeheartedly recommend it.

Wordpress is cool. It offers a simple way for anybody to play around with blogging on their site, however, as with any piece of software which is widely used it can be open to exploitation. Wordpress, due to its popularity, has attracted comment Spammers, very annoying. I am trying to work out if this type of spam is spawned form virus infected “zombie” machines, not sure yet. Anyhow the most effective thing to overcome it is WP-Hashcash, which requires a browser with javascript working to make a comment, something that Spam bots usually lack. So far it has eliminated all my spam, of which I was getting about 20 comments a day.

Update: Well it seems that it isnt working anymore, recently i am get about 40 to 100 spam comments a day.

Update 2: Giving Spam Karma 2 a go.

I have finally set up a section of my site which shows how many times I play each artist. I wasn’t happy with other solutions so I built my own based on the NowPlaying iTunes plug-in and a whole load of scripty goodness. It can be found here and is linked to below the currently playing album art to the right of this post. (for those reading the RSS/Atom feed).