Ubuntu boot splash screen — old (left) and new

Ubuntu has a new logo and identity brand, and I really don’t like. Why through away the legendary friendly circle icon and replace it with a badly kerned wordmark?

header.php isn’t poetry at all

The content of the <title> should be generated within functions.php by using the wp_title filter, so that plugins and users can overwrite it. In header.php we would have only:

<title><?php wp_title('|', true, 'right'); ?></title>

and in functions.php something like:

add_filter('wp_title', 'twentyten_title', 10, 2);

function twentyten_title($title, $sep) {
	global $post;

	$title = wptexturize($title);
	$page_no = get_query_var('paged');

	if (is_front_page())
		$title = get_bloginfo('title') . ' ' . $sep . ' ' . get_bloginfo('description');
	elseif (!is_feed())
		$title .= ' ' . get_bloginfo('title');

	if ($page_no > 1)
		$title .= ' (page ' . $page_no . ')';

	return $title;
}

Theme’s stylesheet style.css should be loaded after the wp_head() call, so that users can overwrite styles added by the plugins.

Header image should be a CSS background image not an <img>. It should also be added through an action call so that plugins or users can remove or alter it.

Doctype is the only HTML5

Why not use at least <header>, <footer>, <nav> and <aside> if we have decided go with HTML5? If it’s because of IE6 then we can use conditional comments and that little amount of javascript that is necessary to construct those unknown elements.

Everything is <div>s

Site title and description should be placed inside paragraphs. Additionally <strong> and <em> could be used to represent their hierarchy:

<p id="site-title"><strong><a href="...">...</a></strong></p>
<p id="site-description"><em>...</em></p>

The same goes for .entry-meta, .site-info and .site-generator. It is better to use paragraphs instead of generic divs whenever possible.

Widgets are not lists

It is totally not semantic to place block type content inside inline elements (which lists are). Nested lists can also cause some unexpected and not-so-easy-to-work-around styling and targeting issues. Let’s avoid them.

Function Exists

Why are we calling function_exists('twentyten_unique_function') before every function that is unique to the theme?

Relative vs. 72 pixels per inch

Web is meant to be flexible and accessible on all devices. Thus, I suggest we:

• don’t use pixels for sizes, and
• include a mobile stylesheet.

Currently the baseline — font size × line height × paragraph spacing — is 16 px × 24 px × 24 px, which is equal to 1 × 1.5 ×1.5 = 2.25 in relative values. The default font size should also be a relative value — medium — which is equal to 16px in most of the browsers.

Every element should have a 2.25 baseline — entry meta, for example, is currently set at 12 px or 0.75 of the base font size. With the same line height of 1.5, it would need a 2.25/0.75/1.5 = 2 em paragraph spacing (bottom margin).

Heading line height of 1.5 is too much. It should be around 1.25 which allows to have wider bottom margin.

When spacing individual HTML elements, it is good to think that every element is responsible for the spacing below it.

Order of comment input fields

I have read the post and now I want to leave a comment — why do we increase the chance of me loosing that great idea by asking for my name and email address before the comment itself?

RewriteEngine On # remove this, if you have it already

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} index\.html
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1/ [R=301,L]

I used this technique for a site that I built — ichomesforsale.com which is hosted at Godaddy.

Henry Birdseye: “Is it getting to the point where the software is going to cost as much as the machine?”

Unknown: “I think it will get to that, yes.”

Birdseye: “So, if something like that can cost so much. Why not just make your copy?”

Bill Gates: “If you don’t get a legitimate copy, you won’t be… came aware of the improvements, and… overall the impact that type of ripoff is going to have is that people won’t write quality packages.”

Unknown: “It takes time to write software. We haven’t found any way to really reduce that time. It takes time to define the problem. It takes time to write the software.”

Henry Birdseye: “But increasingly, as you begin to (medal?) with the prepackaged things and get a little experience, you just can’t resist the temptation to do some of your own programming. And people are gonna be doing that.”

Bill Gates: “There’s a lot of people who are forcasting that there’ll be software stores just like there are record stores today and that there’ll be thousands and thousands of those, and I think I have to agree with that.”

And yet, 86-DOS — the operating system which Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Paul Allen pitched and later licensed to IBM — was actually written by Tim Paterson and called QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System).

The irony, however, is that Paterson’s QDOS was hugely ‘influenced’ by CP/M — a widely used and popular operating system at that time written by Gary Kildall.

As a result, IBM PC was running MS-DOS which looked a lot like CP/M but was in fact licensed from Microsoft who bought it for $50,000 from Tim Paterson who originally wrote it to be able to run programs written for CP/M.

MS-DOS (right) interface influenced by CP/M (left)

Although no one knows exactly why IBM just didn’t buy CP/M directly, we can clearly see how the very foundation of Microsoft is built on top of good ideas and work of others. I wish they would acknowledge that.

Sharing knowledge and making it accessible for everyone is the only way to foster innovation and make this planet a better place for all of us. Your knowledge and understanding of things becomes brilliant only when others can use it and build on top of it. So, the greatest aspiration one might have is to become a rock solid gear in this timely universe of billion components which makes it tick, tick, tick.

Matthew Carter

Thomas Rickner

While you have probably heard of Matthew Carter, it’s unlikely that you’ll know Tom Rickner who hinted these fonts making them so easy to read at sizes with very few ink dots available to form their shape and guide the eye.

In the summer of 1994 Microsoft commissioned Carter and Rickner to design a new system font for Windows 95 which we now know as Tahoma. Here is the story of Verdana.

Once you’ll discover where the names of those fonts come from, you’ll never look at them the same way.

Open source rocks!

However, the problem is that this CSS file is loaded on every page request. Therefore, until WordPress supports combining all CSS files into one, here is a quick way to hide this CSS file on all pages that don’t contain a gallery (line 128 of cleaner-gallery.php):

Note: this will add cleaner-gallery.css only on single post and page views (not indexes or archives).

add_action('wp_head', 'cleaner_gallery_head', 0);
function cleaner_gallery_head() {
	global $post;
	if (strstr($post->post_content, '[gallery'))
		wp_enqueue_style( 'cleaner-gallery', CLEANER_GALLERY_URL . '/cleaner-gallery.css', false, 0.7, 'all' );
}

Hopefully, Justin can incorporate this into the next release of this handy plugin.

Add this to your theme’s functions.php to allow readers post fragments of code in their comments (wrapped in <code>...</code>) which are automatically encoded (think of < and <)

add_filter('pre_comment_content', 'encode_code_in_comment');

function encode_code_in_comment($source) {
  $encoded = preg_replace_callback('/<code>(.*?)<\/code>/ims',
  create_function(
    '$matches',
    '$matches[1] = preg_replace(
        array("/^[\r|\n]+/i", "/[\r|\n]+$/i"), "",
        $matches[1]);
      return "<code>" . htmlentities($matches[1]) . "</code>";'
  ),
  $source);

  if ($encoded)
    return $encoded;
  else
    return $source;
}

Worth noting:

• Everything wrapped in <code>...</code> is encoded.
• Line breaks after opening <code> and before closing </code> are removed in order to avoid unnecessary <br /> tags.

<p>August 18, 2009 by Author Name</p>
<h1>Title of the Post</h1>
<p>Post body goes here.</p>

is semantically worse than moving credits after the title:

<h1>Title of the Post</h1>
<p>August 18, 2009 by Author Name</p>
<p>Post body goes here.</p>

Your support and donations are much appreciated and encourage further updates and development.

by Ainars Mielavs.

Therefore, I created a plugin called Multiple Galleries which adds checkboxes next to images in the Insert Gallery window which makes selecting images to be included in galleries fast and easy. If no checkbox is selected, all images are included.

I created this plugin because I am designing a new WordPress theme for designers, artists, architects and all of the creative types where the ability to have multiple galleries per portfolio entry is very important.

However, to enjoy the real value of the Pricey GPL, you have to purchase a monthly subscription to the PriceyGPL.com service (an API key) which displays a random paragraph from one of the GPL licenses.

Questions

1. Can software released under GPL be pricey or does it have to be a service or a subscription tied to it which can be pricey?
2. How are these two ways of pricing different from the users’ viewpoint whose rights the GPL is protecting?

They say it’s GPL, while the price tag reads: “Single-site License (Limited time only) $45″, which clearly violates one of the main freedoms protected by GPL — the freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

Update: Basic Math is now fully GPL.

Fortunately, I have found a quick and simple way to add this functionality to any plugin and allow plugin authors to take a complete control over when and how the updates are released. The solution consist of two parts:

1. filtering the contents of get_transient('update_plugins') under wp_update_plugins() in /wp-includes/update.php, and
2. providing your own update API.

Here is a working (and a very basic) example of a plugin and an API.

This solution also enables developers to sell their plugins and still retain the convenience of automatic updates for their users.