Rodent Regatta

I’ve just subscribed to an RSS feed that results from a tool produced by Ben Hammersley. By using this tool, you get an RSS feed of all the validation errors in whatever site/URL you choose. Many of the validation errors are just as cryptic as they would be when reported by the validator. The fact is they are coming from the same place. However, this might be an easy way to get a site to validate and then prevent errors from creeping in on a post-by-post basis.

If you don’t have Matthew Mullenweg’s site bookmarked or firmly implanted in your RSS feed reader, change that immediately. His site is a great daily read for anyone interested in web design, the future of the Internet and the concepts behind personal publishing.

Jason Kottke has redesigned his site. It really is elegant in its simplicity. Yet, there are so many features that I don’t know where to start. From the blogroll, to the archives, to the remaindered links and on and on, it’s great.

Gary Petersen may (I’m not yet sure) have set off the final collapse of my efforts to learn and use Textpattern this morning. His narrative on Product Blogging actually covers a lot of additional ground.

First, about Textpattern. I’ve really been struggling to understand the relationship between tags, templates, XHTML and CSS with all of the weblogging tools. I understand XHTML tags. I understand a portion of what can be done to style those tags with CSS. I still don’t understand the placement of a weblogging tag in and around an XHTML tag within a template and styled by CSS. Furthermore, Textpattern is a product that is far behind Movable Type and WordPress. If those products represent a teenager and an adolescent respectively, Textpattern is in the second trimester of pregnancy!

Help for Textpattern comes from a discussion forum. There isn’t any documentation. Dealing with the product assumes you’ve already learned and dealt with the relationships between tags and templates and such. Installing and setting up a test weblog is fairly easy, but learning how to style that weblog or to transfer an existing weblog from another tool is unbelievably challenging.

This morning finds me reconsidering WordPress and Movable Type. I realize that I’ve learned a lot more about Movable Type than any other tool. I also like the communities that have grown up around MT and WP.

Gary’s entry makes it obvious that WordPress was easy to set up and easy to start. He also mentions a product called ActiveWords.

Finally, Gary’s entry brings to mind some new ideas for making weblog technology work for a business and its products. We’re going to start applying that advice right away.

I’ve come to admire people who can crank out skins for their web sites at will. You Can’t Get There From Here has a new skin. Shelley Powers has been really busy creating new styles for her site. She’s even got two groups – static and dynamic. I haven’t a clue what the distinction is.

I’m still fighting a mental block with things like the width of text areas and sidebars. Is it the CSS that’s setting these widths or is it something in the XHTML? Until I understand simple things like this, I suspect style-changing is way over my head. There’s even some possibility that the choice of switchers is dependent upon which weblog tool you’re using. My interests are Textpattern, Movable Type and WordPress. Do they require different switchers?

The style switchers that are used are also puzzling. My first exposure to ”skinning” or style switching was based upon this tutorial. I believe lots of the Movable Type sites were using this technique. Then, there is the CSS Zen Garden and the customized style switcher that is used there. It seems to me that this site uses a PHP style switcher which means it is ”server-side.” The code that makes the switch of styles is actually run at the server (I think).

At Jeffrey Zeldman’s site there are three links – here’s #1, here’s #2 and here’s #3 – to information about understanding client-side style switching. I may be wrong again, but I perceive that these techniques involve javascript, which makes the change a client-side switch.

I haven’t the slightest clue which is better or why. I couldn’t begin to tell anyone why CSS Zen Garden uses one technique for switching while Zeldman.com uses another. [If someone knows and can explain it in nongeekspeak, I’m all ears.]