I’m trying out this little IM widget for quickly creating a way for users of your website to IM with your existing IM client.

I spent some time this weekend upgrading a bunch of WordPress sites to the newly released 2.5. So far, I’m completely impressed with this upgrade. The admin functions are truly improved and the overall design is beautiful and much more intuitive than the last admin panel. The dashboard alone is worth the upgrade.

We’ve also taken to a new approach for updating our WordPress sites. Since we’ve had a love affair recently with SVN for version control, I decided it made a lot more sense to use direct SVN checkouts of the tagged releases in the WordPress SVN, rather than FTP’ing the entire WordPress directory every time we get a minor release. So… here’s how we’ve got it set up:

1. First, we run an SVN checkout to get the tagged release. This gives us all the core WordPress files.
2. Next, we upload via FTP all the files that don’t belong to the core WordPress file structure. These files are:
3. wp-config.php
4. .htaccess
5. our custom theme
6. our plugins (besides akismet and hello)
7. the wp-content/uploads folder
8. Then we make sure that uploads folder is writeable by the server, and all should be well.

So with this setup, the next time that we need to upgrade the WordPress release, we can simply SSH into the server and run an svn switch command to the newest tagged release and it will update the changed files. Then we run the upgrade script and we’re there. Much easier when you have to update a dozen WordPress sites at once.

So. Anyone see any gotchas in this approach?

I’m a big fan of the Son of Suckerfish CSS dropdown menus at HTML Dog - executed entirely using CSS with just a touch of JavaScript to give a little extra help to certain browsers out there. Lately, we’ve also been making use of the Blueprint CSS framework on a few projects and I ran into an issue when combining the two. The dropdown menus were appearing behind content when viewed in Internet Explorer.

By default, Blueprint has a stylesheet for IE that adds a position: relative declaration to certain classes. Took me a little while to track this down and the solution is pretty simple: add a z-index property to the nearest positioned ancestor of the dropdown navigation, and set the value to something greater than the z-index of the content (e.g. 100). Voilà! You’re back up and running.

In short, I changed the first line of this:

<div class="column span-42 pull-10 last">
  <ul id="nav">
    <li><a href="#">COMPANY</a>
      <ul>
        <li><a href="/ourstory">OUR STORY</a></li>
        <li><a href="/executivemanagement">EXECUTIVE MANAGEMENT</a></li>
        <li><a href="/news">LATEST NEWS</a></li>
      </ul>
    </li>
  </ul><!-- end #nav -->
</div>

to this:

<div class="column span-42 pull-10 last" style="z-index: 100;">

It seems that Adobe was on the case, updating dreamweaver to include revisions to the OBJECT/EMBED tags (Which makes the recently remodeled Internet Explorer happy). The update is included in the latest revision to dreamweaver 8.
Dreamweaver 8.02 Update

Those of us who appreciate the WYSIWYG will be able to view their flash files again.

Seems that every one has their own legitimate way of organizing code that does not have a specific linear order. I find the only thing better than hours of mind numbing all nighters is to check out other developers practices. Here is a nice one on css organization.

CSS Organization

I thought this was a good tip. Control-R or View-> Reload will refresh the source code of a page directly. Sort of handy i thought. I read it somewhere this morning but i can seem to find the article to give appropriate credit.

Chicago Symphony Orchestra

A design companies proposal for some work on the new Bobby Darin Film. Interesting angle.
http://www.iamalwayshungry.com/new/BTS-pro.html