It comes as no surprise that I have no ‘ɐ’ or ‘p’ key on my keyboard and I needed a better solution than having to construct it on my clipboard using the upside-down generator .

Enter Lessn.

Lessn

To cut a long story short, I downloaded and installed Lessn and made a little change that constructed the international domain for me. Whilst I am aware all this is doing is outputting the new domain, it adds it into my blogging ‘workflow’ . Not to mention the benefits of Tweeties custom shorteners [though I am yet to play with this]

The changes are simple, change line 7 & 8 of /-/index.php to:

define('CUSTOM_DOMAIN', 'www.uıɐɯopɹnoʎ.com');
define('LESSN_DOMAIN', 	preg_replace('#^www\.#', '', CUSTOM_DOMAIN));

A beautiful little book Zoë’s Nanna gave us

This hack was born out of necessity as I found that the admin UI on large Perch sites looked daunting to new editors. Though the UI is beautiful and clean I was finding the lists would be endless and the editor could not find the page, let alone the region. This is something that Perch are looking at but I wanted a solution for the meantime. Unfortunately the solution is horribly hacky, involving altering the perch.js file.

How to

Add the following to the bottom of the perch.js file (found in the your-perch-folder/assets/js/perch.js)

function pageTidy () {
	if($('td.page').length > 1) {
		resetToTidy();
		$('.page span').css({ cursor: 'pointer' });
		$('.page span').click(function() {
			resetToTidy();
			$(this).parent('td').parent('tr').addClass('currentPage');
			$('.currentPage').children('td').show();
			$('.currentPage').nextAll().each(function(index) {
				if($(this).css('display') == 'table-row'){
					return false;
				}
				$(this).show();
			});
		});
	}

}
function resetToTidy() {
	$('.d  tbody tr').hide();
	$('.shared').parent('tr').show();
	$('.shared').parent('tr').nextAll().each(function(index) {
		if($(this).children('td').hasClass('page')) {
			return false;
		}
		$(this).show();
	});
	$('.d tr').removeClass('currentPage');
	$('.page').parent('tr').show();
	$('.page').siblings('td').hide();
}

Then add pageTidy(); to the init function. So it would now look like:

var init	= function() {
		$('body').addClass('js');
		enhanceCSS();
		initPopups();
		hideMessages();
		pageTidy();
	};

Warning

Use at your own risk! I have found it seems to work happily on my project but I can’t imagine that it’s a good idea to be hacking away at core files.

SMALL Helvetical update.

Hi all. The new UI refresh of Google Cal is great, they have really done a brilliant job. Yet it hasn’t been too kind on Helvetical, making it unbearable to use. I set about trying to patch up the holes but the nature of a userstyle has made this an ugly and unproductive task. So I feel it is best to start from scratch again and build in some of the feature requests.

In the mean time, I have created a patched up version that makes the userstyle usable yet far from pretty. Download from http://userstyles.org/styles/20669. Obviously the alternative is to disable it for a while.

It would be great if we could use this time to build up a feature list for Helvetical 2. So leave a comment or mail me. BTW, this isn’t some excuse to put the project on the back-burner — I have penciled in the end of the month to complete.

Cheers, Ad

Helvetical pimping up Google Calendar.

I know I am not alone in my love/hate relationship for Google’s apps, the functionality is brilliant but the UI is ugly. Google Calendar is most definitely not the exception to the rule, it hurts my eyes.

Helvetical extends the work done by Jon Hicks on Helvetireader, turning the mayhem of the Google interface into something that doesn’t offend. It was created for use with Fluid.app but I’m sure you can hack the CSS to work for your needs.

Please note that this is an on-going project so things are a bit rough around the edges. I hope to update soon.