Please note that you may have been redirected (you might like to make a note of the URL in the address bar of your browser and update accordingly) This is a permanent archvie but is no longer actively maintained. Please visit http://joshuaink.com for the latest updates.

Rebuild day 3 point 6

Sunday October 24, 2004

Quick note on logs: I have switched all my logs off for the time being, all I am seeing is my own IP address as I hammer the hell out of my server! For your interest site logs can be modified in Admin > Site Preferences > Logging. Normally I have as "Referrers only" but for now I am blind.

I had wanted to start setting up some sections but to do that it is very likely I am going to need to start creating new site templates via textpattern Presentation > Pages, so before I can really start building up the site content I need to get the structure of the site at least a little bit sorted. I could probably set up some Categories now but I will hold off on those because I want to dedicate a whole day to these two confusing bits of textpattern.

First job, comment out the textapattern CSS output, change over to XTHML strict, put the name of the site in place and bang in my strap line.

So from Presentation > Pages I changed the top portion of the default page to this:

  1. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN"
    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
  2. <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
  3. <head>
  4. <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />
  5. <!-- <link rel="stylesheet" href="<txp:css />" type="text/css" /> -->
  6. <title><txp:page_title /></title>
  7. </head>
  8. <body>
  9. <div id="container">
  10. <!-- head -->
  11. <div id="head">
  12. <h1><a href="/" title="The home page"><txp:sitename /></a></h1>
  13. <p><q><txp:site_slogan /></q></p>
  14. </div>

Just before we move on to those textpattern tags, I have also made a decision about how to present code; I've always struggled to decide on the best method (never much fancied <pre>) but an ordered list seems like a sensible route, that is after all what code is right? The list is wrapped in a code tag and hopefully a little later on down the line I can do something with the look and feel via CSS.

Anyway, the two important lines are 5, 12 and 13 (yup, ordered list is definitely good). Line 12 is what produces the site name and to modify this you just go along to Admin > Preferences and it's the first thing you come too ("My Site" is the default), a little further down you will see "Site Tagline" ("My pithy slogan" is the default) and this relates to line 13 which spits out my snappy strap line "made from 100% recycled opinion". Whether a strap line qualifies as a quote is debatable I guess but there we have it for now.

Line 5 is just how textpattern links up to it's internal style sheet, I may get rid of this completley but found quite a nice server side style sheet switcher which I used on version one of my blog, I may use it again, so I'll just leave line 5 commented out for now. (Remember you heard code in ordered list here first! ;) )

Update: Please read this later entry regarding ordered lists for code.

My darling girlfriend has got my on decaf coffee, which is great, I can drink even more and shake less...

  1. Angad

    2143 days ago

    Can we atleast have a simple layout ?
    That can have teh menu on one side and the articles on the other?
    And maybe a font change?

  2. John Oxton

    2143 days ago

    Sorry Angad, I just can’t do it a this stage, I am trying to do things in a particular way so that I can keep the rebuild notes in some kind of order. I will try and get some RSS feeds in place soon, that should help! :)

Christmas gifts?

Beginning CSS Web Development book cover

Recently

The last seven posts made on this site.

Geeky shiteMeta

A proud member