Notes on WordPress, php, html, css, search engines, and anything else that I think is worth remarking on.
Yesterday, two 'tech supports' lied to me about almost everything. The solution that I came up with worked for a few hours, but then a real sysadmin must have noticed it, because it stopped working today. Unfortunately, if you look at the list of hosting companies that EIG has gobbled up over the years, the only other game in town is GoDaddy, and I'm not going there. These are the new Robber-Barons.
More: Server Caching Madness - Part 2 ...
For a while now I've been working on the WordPress plugin that does the slideshows. I had re-written the php back-end from NivoSlider, and then I decided to rewrite the front-end. The front-end is driven by jquery, so it was a good opportunity to get familiar with that. It's actually pretty simple.
Over a few months of tinkering, I added several hundred slide transitions, grouped in families to make things manageable. Eventually, I pretty much exhausted all the things you can do by animating css with jquery. So I turned to inline svg image masks. You can do much more with real graphics than just css, but there is one hitch - svg is poorly supported in Chrome and all its derivatives, including Opera, Edge, and Brave. But if you load this page in Firefox or Safari, it will demonstrate what you can do with svg.
More: Slideshows ...
I've been working on another website lately, but it uses the same code base as this one, so all of the improvements get carried over. The latest thing I've done is a complete rework of the slideshow plugin.
First, I stripped out a lot of fat - unused features, ugly themes, 'call-homes', etc. I hardwired some stupid options, added some new ones, fixed a few major problems, and made it much faster. Finally, I put the whole thing through the wringer and got rid of anything that was not strictly needed, everywhere - PHP, JS, CSS. My version is less than half the size of the original.
The result is a yuge improvement, both on the front end, and especially on the back end:
More: Slideshows ...
In my last post way back yesterday, I lamented how the site was getting bloated and slow. So I decided to do something about it. This is another post that is going to get all computerish, so you might want to hit that Random link in the sidebar and get out of here.
More: Speeding Up The Website ...
It would be really great to be able to do spellchecking right inside WordPress. Specifically, it would be great to be able to check the entire site in one shot. That would require something working from inside, ie, a plugin.
I looked at a lot of spellchecking plugins, and I didn't find one that was acceptable. It's not that they don't actually work, but every one seems to cause non-fatal errors, and I don't want faulty code running on the site. But I could still use some sort of tool, as this website is cobbled together from a huge mass of forum posts that were not all written with the greatest care.
Finally, I tried a browser extension: Grammarly. Grammarly adds spell checking to any html input field. This adds spellchecking to the WordPress editor. The downside is that it only checks one page at a time, and that page has to be open in the editor. That's not that bad, you'd have to open the page to fix anything anyway.
More: Spellcheck in WordPress ...
I have been satisfied with the overall look and feel of the site for a while now, so it became time to clean up the code. A lot of features and ideas were scabbed-on in whatever way worked, resulting in a lot of kludgy code and redundancy. Some things ( like the main navigation menu ) became so convoluted that it was hard to predict exactly what they would do.
More: Still Hacking ...
Hosting and domain names aren't getting cheaper. If you think there is something worthwhile here, you can make a small donation towards these costs. Just click the PayPal button here:
( PayPal takes 3.49% + 49ยข per transaction )
More: Support Luthiery Labs ...
My grandmother told me: "If you can't say something nice, then don't say anything at all."
More: Talk_ass.com ...
It took me about half an hour * to reverse-engineer the functionality of thousands of lines of plugin code to make the little up-arrow bug you see at the bottom-right of every page. That bug is very useful because it shoots you straight back up to the navigation menu, no matter how far down a page you might be. Here is the entire code for it:
More: The Problem With WordPress Plugins ...
Web hosting is not what it used to be. Unstable servers, insane server caching policies, and tech support that only makes things worse.
More: Hosting Woes ...
