That Norwegian Guy » wordpress

iPadify your WordPress

Eystein — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 04:22:25 +0000

Just tried Padpressed on the iPad. Seems like an awesome idea, I was very wowed be the Youtube videos on the site. So I went ahead and tried the demo on my iPad. (Don’t bother trying in desktop Safari, the designs are completely different.)

First impression

I’m sad to say that the demo felt a bit to much like a beta version. It tries so hard to behave like a native iPad, and it gets about 80% there. Which makes it a bit weird, odd, or uncomfortable to use. The iPad uncanny valley.

The article links seem to trigger a little bit to fast on the scrolling of the articles on the homepage. It’s like the scrolling sensor is competing with the anchor sensor and the wrong one wins. I ended up in articles repetedly when I was attempting to scroll.

Once in the article itself I wasn’t allowed to scroll all the way to the bottom. And it allowed sideways scrolling, even though it didn’t need it, so I ended up scrolling diagonally by mistake.

Second impression

Wrong. I just tried again, and realised the sideways swiping is for going to the next article. Just like it says on the website. Playing around with it for a bit makes it easier to use. But I don’t think it’s ripe for a typical client website, unless the business has a very specific demographic. For something that has a lot of returning users, e.g. a web-app, it could work better.

Just a bit more than a Tweet after 3 minutes of use.

Aside

It won’t hurt to know a little bit about what to consider when designing and developing for the iPad before you just whack a plug-in in to take care of it for you. This article, Designing web apps for iPad, at Six Revisions seems helpful. I haven’t read it, but consider it Instapapered.

WordPress themes using HTML5

Eystein — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:10:44 +0000

I’ve been thinking of doing a WordPress theme in HTML5 for a while, and the best way to get inspiration is to look at other people’s work. I haven’t found very much though. So far I’ve found:

Do you know of any others?

A couple of good HTML5 resources:

And finally, a great overview of how to build a WordPress template from scratch from ThemeShaper.

WordPress automatic upgrader FAIL

Eystein — Thu, 14 Aug 2008 13:56:26 +0000

A quick warning to anyone using wordpress considering using the WordPress automatic upgrader. DON’T USE IT! I was lucky and it worked on this blog, so I went ahead and used it on another site. Which is now permenantly stuck in maintenance mode. Thanks guys. Offcourse, if I’d done my googling before trying it out I would have know better. There are plenty others who have the same problem. And the solution in the faq? Doesn’t work either.

Enough ranting, I gotta get back to googling now.

The NextGEN Gallery for WordPress

Eystein — Mon, 26 May 2008 11:51:35 +0000

The nextgen gallery is a great not-so-little plugin for WordPress. If you have a imagegallery you want to display I’m pretty sure this will cover most of your needs.

My problem, offcourse there was a problem, was that my square thumbnails would stretch the images. So annoying that I ditched the idea of square and went on with my day. Before doing so I did my share of debugging/googling forums, so I could rant to my co-workers afterwards. Mid-rant I realised what the problem was.

The thumbnails are set upon upload, so changes to the format is bound to make changes.
Solution: delete gallery and upload the images once more.

Lesson (re-)learned this time: When stuck with something it always helps talking with others about it.