I know sometimes I can be hard to listen when I am quite happy with what I’ve just created. But this guy is unreal - even after 25 years.

See for yourself…

Since we’re using WordPress regularly, we thought that creating a Wordpress theme based on Golden Ratio rule will have two pretty good points:

• We’ll have a theme just the way we want in Golden Ratio
• We’ll present the actual way how you can use Golden Ration in design.

We also wish all of you to participate with ideas and comments!

So, for start here are some written in stone rules we will keep in mind throughout the process.

Golden rules for creation of Golden Ratio Wordpress Theme

Rule #1: Theme must be functional, practical & user friendly

This basically means that we’ll round some numbers, we’ll think about the most common ad spaces people use, we’ll make the font sizes readable, etc.

Rule #2: Website shouldn’t be wider then 960 pixels.

This one is pretty understandable - it is a safe width for most screens.

Rule #3: Simple is good

We’ll make the main theme as simple as possible, so it can be upgraded later.

Let’s start!

Here is our initial, rough-rough composite.

I personally enjoy 3 column design for blogs, with the main column on the left hand side, and the 2 smaller ones on the right. In order to follow the Golden Ratio rule, two side columns should be in different width. However, nowadays you need at least 160 pixels for the far right column (since that is the place for adverts, and the 160 pixels is what we need). We also need some margin space on the left from that column. Let’s say 20 pixels will do.

Now let’s do some math

So, we have:

160+20 pixels =180 pixels (for the right hand sidebar plus spacing)

Now, let’s calculate the second sidebar:

180 x 1.618 = 291.24 pixels. We’ll round that up to 290 pixels.

We’ll take our 20 pixels back, so we’ll have 270 pixels for the second sidebar.

Now it’s time for the main content.

290 x 1.618 = 469.22. Again, we’ll round it up to 470 pixels for the main content.

This space is enough for the 468×60 regular banner ad, which you might use as well.

However, when you calculate the sum, you’ll get:

160 + 20 + 270 + 20 + 470 = 940px

That’s absolutely fine, since we have 960 pixels defined as a safe maximum width. So, we’ll decrease the original value for 20 pixels.

So, by applying the Golden Rule, we have a 3-column WordPress theme with the: 470px column, 270px column and 160px column, by looking from left to right.

What about the header & footer?

For the header at this stage, we used simple calculation. For the top part, where the logo and navigation bar should be, we took 100 pixels. Bottom part of the header is 160 pixels high.

For the footer divider, we’ll continue this array of numbers.

160 pixels x 1.618 = 258.88. We’ll use 260 pixels for the footer height.

Conclusion

Till now, we have defined the main sections. In my next post, I’ll deal with the font sizes. Your comments are more then welcome.

Why not - how complicate can it be? All I have to do is type something like this in google and I’ll have my “Tell a Friend” working on ie, ie6, firefox, safari in no time… Yeah right.

As you’ve might of guessed that was not the case.

Finally we found something that works so here it is

Copy the js code blelow

paste this code on the place you want your “Tell a Friend” link to appear

Our site’s design is not the only thing changed in our company. If you check our team page, you’ll see some news - Array Studio is no longer in back-end programming business. We leave that part to our partner companies, yet we are 100% focused on the creative part of the Web Development, like usability, front-end programming and of course - design itself. Our former co-founder, Slobodan, now has his own company now, and we wish him the very best.

So, to keep us busy, we have opened a print design section. You can see some of our works on our portfolio page. You’ll find our updated web design portfolio there as well.

That’s all for now. Hope you didn’t give up on reading our blog in the past 2 years.

In order to keep all our wallpapers in one place, we decided to create a separate page for all of them. So, if you wish to check them out, go to this page, or follow the link below.

Much more to come very soon!

View All 1280×800 Widescreen Wallpapers

The only problem is that this is still in only in Edge Rails, i.e. it’s not yet in stable Rails release. But there’s a really simple way to add source code annotations rake task to non-Edge Rails app:

svn export http://svn.rubyonrails.org/rails/trunk/railties/lib/tasks/annotations.rake \\
 lib/tasks/annotations.rake

For more information about Rails source code annotations see Ryan’s blog.

Insert query syntax looks like this:

If there is already a row with primarykeycol set to 1 this query is equal to:

UPDATE table SET col1=0, col2=col2+1 WHERE primarykeycol = 1

Ordinarily to achieve the same result you would have to issue an UPDATE query, then check if there were affected rows and if not issue an INSERT query. This way, you can do everything in one step - first try insert and then update if insert fails.

One situation for which this type of syntax is perfect is when you work with daily counters. For example, you might have a table with PostID, Date and Count columns. Each day you’d have to check if you already created an entry for that day and if so increase the count column - and this can be easily substituted with one INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE query.

Unfortunately there are some caveats. One being that when you have multiple unique indexes it will act as if you had an OR condition in WHERE clause of UPDATE query. This means that multiple rows should be update, but INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE will update only one row.

For more information you should read article in MySQL manual: INSERT … ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE Syntax

First, click on the buttons below the cycle and choose from (Mono, Contrast, Triad, Tetrad and Analogic). Then, play around with colors and see what you’ll get. Use variations to set the colors perfectly. There is also a simple preview where you’ll be able to see how colors fit. I prefer dark and light pastels myself.

Here is the link to Color Scheme Creator. Enjoy.

I still haven’t had chance to look at the new improvements but it seems that Niceforms now supports keyboard only navigation, scalable buttons, increased browser support, etc.

Unfortunately it still has some of the problems I tried to fix more than a year ago. Granted they tried to fix it, but it still has problems. For example, when you click on a select element if you move over some options and then move out it will immediately close the drop down. On the other hand if you open select element and don’t move over to any options (i.e. click on down arrow), but you move the mouse away from it - the select will remain open, which can again lead to strange effect where you can have a lot of open drop downs.

Perhaps that can be fixed in future versions - or at least I will try to make a patch for it.

If you want to get Niceforms 1.0 you can from author’s site.

There are localization plugins that make life easier, but most of them are rather complex, hard to use and have significant overhead (i.e. takes time to setup, learn, etc.). Fortunately, plugin called Localization Simplified aims to simplify localization as much as possible:

Fast and easy localization of one-language applications. Adds UTF-8 support for Ruby + database. Modifies ActiveRecord errors + html error helpers, Date/Time helpers, locale time formats, to_currency, to_sentence

It’s easy to use mainly because it only overrides existing Rails methods, so you don’t have to do anything special to use it.

Localization Simplified is a great plugin which you can download from Ruby Forge.