While minor changes to this site are still ongoing, the awkward phase should be over. Up until now this has been a static HTML site with a WordPress Blog in a sub-directory. As of this morning, it's all WordPress. The awkward part was configuring WordPress such that it could maintain my static home page, and keep the blog's permalink structure intact. I've taken a bit of the previous static content offline for now, but I'll add it again if I decide it's relevant. Permalinks should all work as before, but you might have to resubscribe to the RSS feed. The feedburner feed is unchanged, but the site's feeds have moved.

IE PNG Fix - TwinHelix

This script adds near-native PNG support with alpha opacity to IE 5.5 and 6. Now you can have full translucency and no more ugly grey borders! It requires only one line in your CSS file, and no changes to your website HTML. <img alt="" /> tags and background images are both supported.

A beautiful addition to any site you want IE6 compliant. I'm fond of PNG files with transparency myself, this makes viewing a site using PNG transparency possible for IE6. Update: I installed it on this site, and it's working. IE6 doesn't display my scrollwork quite right, but the transparency is working. SInce I didn't install the version that allows for a repeat, it just isn't repeating the images on the left side or top scrolls. On my personal site, I can live with that.

My most recent project at Riven Design was transitioning a Typepad photo-blog called Cascade Exposures to WordPress and it's own domain. The new site debuted today, and I'm really thrilled. Go take a look, Jan's work is impressive, and always worth a visit. While you're there, make sure you subscribe so that you'll never miss anything.

I'm still using the CSS Menu Writer that I got to evaluate. I have to say it's very slick. I'm working on a WordPress site that I hope to reveal soon, and it came in very handy. I've worked on tabbed navigation with CSS before, but this was relatively painless. A few quick menu adjustments and it gave me a set of beautiful tabbed menus. Of course it's never quite that easy. I had to track down a bit of a z-index glitch in IE6 and 7, but that was hardly the fault of the people at WebAssist.  The menus performed perfectly in my base page in all browsers. It was only when I introduced some additional CSS of my own that I had an issue. Why can't Microsoft come up with a browser that works as well as the new Chrome by Google seems to? If you're looking for a Dreamweaver plugin that takes some of the work out of clean CSS menus, I'd suggest giving CSS Menu Writer a look. Even if you use it like I did, to quickly build a base menu that I further customized, it is an incredible time saver.

There's a great article about Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts at Lorelle on WordPress . You might think to yourself that you don't want a blog, but WordPress can be used for much more than that. It would be reasonably easy to create a website powered by WordPress that looked nothing like a traditional blog. WordPress gives you the ability to easily post information in an orderly manner. Organized by time, date, and category. Using the methods listed in Lorelle's article, you could customize your site by essentially giving each category different CSS characteristics. This would give you a wide range of formatting and organizational solutions for your site.

JavaTechniques is a nice site with, to quote it's author, "a small, but growing collection of Java howto's and examples". It's also a nice example of how to put together a collection of content over time with WordPress as the CMS.

Have you noticed the attribute "ilo-full-src" appearing in your code when when working in WordPress with Firefox? You likely have the ImgLikeOpera extension installed. Disable it and everything should work fine. I don't know why it's causing the addition of this odd bit of code, but it seems to be doing just that.

As you can see, I changed the WordPress theme. Still fiddling, but since this site is rarely visited, I figure it wouldn't really matter. As in previous versions, the CSS and page structure is mine, while the PHP is a mish-mash of the two default themes and some of my own work. Hope you like it.

Update: It's change a couple of times now, and is currently using Drupal.

I've recently been playing with a free PHP Script. I'm incorporating a little of the dynamic content of the blog into the main page (since removed in an update) using a PHP script pulling in the RSS feed. It's a very user friendly set-up. The documentation leaves a little to be desired, and the sample template had to be completely redone for my use, but the actual script is quite impressive. If you're looking for this sort of thing, it's well worth your time. The superior quality of the script far outweighs the negatives of the documentation and template. To get the results I wanted, I changed the template file to PHP and removed all of the extraneous coding. Changing the template to PHP allowed me to remove a lot of the HTML in the template, making for cleaner ocde when it was pulled into the home page. Then all that was left was to add the proper CSS selectors and it was ready to go.

I've updated the theme on this site. The original theme I used was an experiment of sorts. I wanted to build a site with page edges that weren't straight. As you can see in the picture below, all four edges of the page in that style were jagged.

An interesting experiment, and I'm glad I tried it, but it was a little distracting. This new style is a lot cleaner looking.