Today we released www.uglycute.com — the result of a two day workshop together with Konst & Teknik, Ola Bergengren, Uglycute and me.

I’ve started on the 2.0 version on the theme that will (along other features) make thumbnails easier to manage.

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RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /martin/

# FeedBurner
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/haraldmartin [R,L]

There are a couple of input fields on the options page; one for each “length” of the spectrum (for it to start over again). I.e., if you want a div element with the id “header” to get its background colorized from Colhour and its Colhour cycle starting over every day (after 24 hours), you just enter the CSS rules in the “day” input field. The actual color-value should be replaced with `%colhour%´ so the plugin can insert the current color in its place. 

I suggest not having any other CSS rules in the Colhour admin than the ones dealing with the colors you want replaced. I.e., strip out the fonts, border sizes etc and keep all that in your .css file where they belong (and can be cached).

Bad:

#myDiv {
    font: 1.1em Courier; 
    padding: 2em;
    background: #DDD url(my-background.png) no-repeat top left;
    border: 2px dotted %colhour%;
}

Good: 

#myDiv {border-color: %colhour%;}

Download here, put it in your wp-themes/plugins/colhour.php (note the .php extension) folder and activate it as usual in WordPress admin » Plugins. The options can be found under Options » Colhour.

Finally this site looks like something other than the default WordPress theme. Peter and I wanted to connect our work sites to each other and decided to use his simple but easy-to-use WordPress theme as a base.

The problem was that his theme never was cross browser compatible and worked more or less only in Safari. My first task was to re-code the theme from scratch to make it work in all modern browsers using valid XHTML and CSS with as clean and simple code as possible.

I also set all font sizes using em:s (instead of px or pt) to make the text resizable. It wasn’t too hard making it work (even in Microsoft Internet Explorer) thanks to some great resources. Sooner or later I’ll convert the positions, margins etc to em:s as well, but font sizes should be enough for now.

I also added AJAX comments and used effects from script.aculo.us. I’m using Prototype to add CSS classes to some elements and to wrap i.e. all <h3>‘s content in a <span> to achieve the look I wanted without any unnecessary markup. Since <input type="search" /> only is supported by Safari and I wanted to use it, I used a script (thanks Wolfgang Bartelme) that replaces the regular text input field with a search field for Safari only. This way the document will stay valid XHTML 1.1.

Next task was to make the theme more personal for my site. I’ve tried some different looks but couldn’t really decide how I wanted it and choose (for now at least) a slightly darker version of Peter’s theme. I think it looks good and is easy to use without making too much noise.

When I implanted the tagging I first looked at Ultimate Tag Warrior 3 but it seemed too advanced for my needs, so I decided to use the native category system in WordPress 2.0, that lets one add tags (categories) by just entering them in separated by comma in a text field (WP 1.x didn’t have this feature). The tag cloud is a modified and simplified version of Tag Cloud Plugin.

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