Are We Having Fun Yet?
On 20 Oct 2010, at 01:26, Jeremy Kearns-Watts wrote:
I guess we moved into scary territory with that last email. You may also have noticed that I've started putting these up online in an 'Internet Hell Blog' section. I said I was gonna, and it does seem to me like some of things might be helpful to someone. And they are a tad entertaining. Since you might be building a website for me are there things I should do to make your work easier? Planning and positioning and that sort of thing? I feel I should make a tree, with pages and branches.
However, just for now, and to help ensure a response a short question, that I really hope will be simple to answer.
So, I've got a whole 5 email accounts coming through the Mail client at the moment. All of them are IMAP apart from stuffet which is POP, if that helps clarify things later, please tell me. In the Composing option tab I've told it to default send new messages from SOASmail, which normally works. If I want to send a brand new message from a different account I have to re-select it.
The issue that I'm having is that it keeps merging with another email account, and apparently sending things from that one. Usually it's with people I'm replying to, and in some cases I'm trying to reply from a different account than the one they are sending to. Lit-Soc has it's own account and I have to reply to people from it, but since the replies are personal I want to reply using SOASmail. The biggest annoyance is that Mail claims that I replied from SOASmail, but the replies I then receive have been sent to Lit-SocMail. Now in isolated incidents I could believe the people to be forcibly replying to a different account, but it's happening almost universally, so I checked on the webmail clients and they both agree that I'm sending mail from Lit-SocMail and not SOASmail. So apparently my option selections (even after I have double checked and made sure) are being absolutely ignored.
I have checked around on the internet forums and such but as usual the responses are all outside of the goldilocks zone, being either for imbeciles (me emails done come back from address since i done sent it to nameatplacedotcom - Have you tried using '@' and '.'?) or for Server Bosses (I found a legitimate question and answer for this but can't find it now, it went roughly like - Each time I access my mail server I have to type in this annoying code blahblah>>itemfind§changeserver~access=?true and then I after I check it is back to blahblah>>itemfind§changeserver~access=?false what is going on? - Basically the problem is [very difficult technobabble] you need to reclassify your wave harmonics of the internal flux capacitating server so that the polarity is reversed and it suddenly remembers your magic code, through magic).
So yeah, I keep coming up with new exciting problems. At least I'm not sending you my password troubles yet (they are all the SOAS technicians fault and I shall pester them!)
Thanks in advance.
- Jeremy
Re: WordPress issues
On 16 Oct 2010, at 01:38, Jeremy Kearns-Watts wrote:
Oh man, I'm going to have to reply to this as I go through it. Though I can see them now, finding me tomorrow morning having reached halfway through your email, passed out with a little trail of blood either from a nostril or an ear, the only sign of the massive internal haemorrhaging that took place. Bad vibes already, though I have to say that I really like your idea of a prescript. I am also totally going to have to start putting these on a Tech Blog somewhere next to the Critical Theory one.
Hokay so, I don't even mind about the laptop now. Two screens really are better than one. The only two things I miss are having laptop generated music in random places (you just can't haul the eMac downstairs and plug it into the Hi-Fi in the same way...) and YouTube. I did try to boost the eMac up to One Mighty Gigabyte of RAM, but something terrible happened somewhere and it looks like I'm going to have to send the sticks back since they just don't work.
Before we get too far I'm going to admit that I did look at your prescript, quickly, as I went and skimmed the whole email. But don't worry what I basically did was look at the piece as a whole, without taking in any of the details (although the diagram did distract me for some time) then say to myself, 'Son, you gonna have to sleep on this one'. Y'see it turns out that being third year doesn't make you immune to Fresher's Flu, I knew that I should have brought out the hypodermic masks when people I'd never seen before started sneezing some three feet away from me. I also really like how the WordPress problem is not mind-taxing, go on, rub it in a little more.
I really like your interim solution. I will probably end up using it for longer than you think is decent. I did eventually manage to change the actual title of the thing. Mainly so it didn't say: Critical Theory Blog: Critical Theory Blog. It took me about twenty minutes, but I finally found the right menu. I did find the Menu option screen before I mailed you before, but couldn't really see how it worked.
Oh, oh, oh! I don't get bored by the explanations! They really help me. When I go a-googling for solutions, they are always either written for half-brained mouth-breathers, or for Unix System Administrators, but you really do manage to explain stuff at just the right level, though I probably will go back to you pretty quickly when things stop working. I pride myself on finding entirely different problems every time, so hopefully you don't have to repeat yourself.
Since from here on you seem to be using rather 'definitive' terms, I'm just going to make the occasional comment on things as I see them, instead of the blow-by-blow analysis of the introduction.
- I have never heard of Drupal.
- Hokay, so my theme is a cruel and heartless master. I can understand this. I can fight this. Also WordPress is amazing.
- Flowers man. Could you seriously do that? I love those trippy sites, almost always utterly useless, but wonderful distractions.
- I like your solution. Please make my site all pretty and do everything.
- I thought I already knew a little HTML.
- Don't really know anything about CSS or PHP, except that you buy big books with those acronyms written on the cover.
- I am willing to learn.
- Please understand that I already view all computers as magical black boxes. I just know that I can make certain magic happen, and how to kill them should they gain sentience.
Thank you for the whole thing. Turns out it wasn't as much explanation as I feared. Night is coming on heavy and aggressively, though as the moon fills out I should begin to feel a little better. Even if just because the accursed flu will have left me by then. But for now the symptoms grow more acute, I think the pills are wearing off. I aught to have written four more emails tonight, but I need to sleep, Aikido in the morning.
Hope everything is well up north. Put your address in the next email and I'll write you properly.
Cheeribye,
- Jeremy
Re: WordPress issues
On 15 Oct 2010, at 00:34, Thomas Zachary Lillington wrote:
(Prescript?: I know it's long, but it will be helpful if you actually read rather than skimming everything :))
Heyhey,
Okay, firstly I know I've been crap with the laptop problem, and I didn't call. I know I have a history of giving excuses :P, but anyway I've been seriously stressed and rushing round for the last two weeks and can explain when I get a slot longer than about an hour when I'm not actually supposed to be doing something else. Anyway because I can give you a semi-solution/explain the full solution before I go to bed since its not to mind-taxing I will deal with the WP problem part 1 :)
Okay,
#Interim Solution #
There is now a Critical Theory Blog bit on the menu, which gives a link to the Critical Theory Blog list of entries. It doesn't actually list them because the default behaviour assumes you want a list of categories not posts. I know this isn't quite what you want but it means you have something at least. How I did this for future reference: If you go on Appearance > Menus you can make custom menus. Because the theme you are using is old (and so doesn't have menu slots) you have to use one of its widget slots (Appearance > Widgets) and there is a widget (Custom Menu) that contains a menu slot, which goes in a widget slot.
# Full Solution/Explanation #
I shall first start off with a big long explanation about stuff it seems to me you may be missing about wordpress/why I suggested you use it. I realise you may be getting bored of having these every time you ask me a question but they'll help in the long run, and I figure you are smart enough to understand things rather than me giving you the baby explanation (which will just mean you will come straight back to me when something doesn't work) :)
When using software for making other software (i.e. websites) we hit the customisation vs convention problem. If you look at the diagram below you can see a load of software
CONVENTION |<-[iWeb]-[RapidWeaver]-[WordPress]-[Drupal]-[Completely Custom Coded in PHP/RoR/etc.] - >| CUSTOMISATION
Little Setup |< >| Lots of setup
Time consuming to update content |< >| Quick to update content
Content squashed into site |< >| Site fits content
So basically (as you may have worked out from the diagram) as we lean towards convention basically you get easier initial setup (because you are using someone else's convention and so they have done it for you) but because of that you lose control over exactly how your content is displayed (as you are having to agree with how someone else thinks it should be), the design you are using (because you lose the ability to customise it yourself), and it becomes more time consuming to update as the uploading process is more generalised. As we move towards customisation we get a lot more control over these but at the cost of longer initial setup as we are having to do more upfront work ourselves. Another advantage/disadvantage to convention is because someone else has already made the decision, they can provide nice easy to use options for the different things they have decided they say you can do, but at the cost of not being able to go outside this.
For example I find iWeb and Rapidweaver incredibly painful to use as they are are so constraining to what you can actually do, and in the end you have to end up choosing the best of someone else's choices of design/layout, and so loose any personality in your site or the ability to actually make your site fit the content.
WordPress however is an interesting piece of software because it can effectively work in two modes (and somewhere in between) - a conventionish mode and a customisationish mode, and is roughly in the middle of the spectrum. The way you are using wordpress at the moment is basically taking advantage of its convention functionality. Themes (along with plugins/widgets) are where we can basically move between these. The theme you are using is very tightly designed (that is you get what is says on the tin but doesn't let you change whats inside easily) and this is where your frustration is coming from, since this is taking you further towards convention than rapidweaver was (which because that provided no way for serious customistation, gave you more options for different conventions) because it assumes you would use a different theme/ do it yourself if you want more customisation. Basically the problems you are finding aren't to do with wordpress, which is a hugely powerful and flexible piece of software, but with the theme you are using. Well within limits, its still only in the middle of the spectrum - don't try and build an amazon copy with wordpress - but for personal web publishing it can do pretty much anything you want it to.
WordPress is so flexible (and I only realised how flexible in the last couple of months) because it is constructed of three parts: a data model which stores and retrieves your content, an admin panel to edit that content, and a *slot* where you can put in the code to display that content. This saves time because for example with doodleblock I had to construct all three of those, however WordPress adopts mostly convention in the data model (i.e you can make posts, media, links, and pages, but not e-commerce products; although there is some more flexibility following v3) and the admin console, where you are usually happy to use someone else's choice as you don't need anything different there. However the view slot lets you do whatever you want, from dropping in a theme that someone else has made that displays the content in the way that they think you want it (what you have) to doing something bizarre with the content, i.e. I could make it draw a picture on the screen where instead of printing my posts I draw a fullscreen picture with flowers for each post in, where the number of petals was the number of times I said "the" and the height was the age of the post.
Now to the solution which you should now understand what I am getting at when I explain the alternative solutions. Either you stick with the current theme and put up with its constraints; or you look around and find a theme that gives you more customisation options in the admin panel which are easy to use, and less convention (though this can only get you so far); you edit an existing theme code to make it do what you want (depending on what the theme is like/how far you want to deviate this is often more work ironing out bugs/understanding it than its worth but may allow what you want to happen); or you make your own theme. The final one is what I would do (and have done before) as I find that it is often easier to just make a theme to do what you want, rather than searching around to find one that might be bent to do what you want. Now to be honest I cheat a bit and steal the logic code from the default theme, but replace it's presentation code with my own and adjust the logic where needed/strip out bits I don't. This solution is ultimately the one I think you need to be heading to (or more likely the variant where I make your theme :P) because most of the questions you are asking me about your website are not superficial ones like "I want the trim on my buttons to be blue not green" which are what themes usually allow you configure, but "I want my website to work/display in a fundamentally different way than before" (like wanting your new blog bit to be more than just a category of news, but almost a different type of content with its one little section).
As you may have noticed at the top I don't have a huge amount of free time right now, however hopefully in a few weeks thinks should have quietened down a touch and I should be able to help get something that does *exactly* what you want, looks pretty good (and not just like you used a theme) as well as fix your laptop (though hopefully that will be even sooner). When I say help though I mean help :) If you are going to run a proper website you need to understand a bit about how it is actually constructed so you don't always have to run to me for help. So whilst I will do the heavy construction work which will either take you too long to learn, or to long to actually do as you hit all the pitfalls that I did before when you don't need to, I think it would be very useful for you to learn a bit about what I am actually doing so later on you can make small changes when you need to. This basically means a basic understanding on HTML and CSS, so you can read what I write and have it make sense and make basic changes to things like color or spacing or font-size; as well as a very superficial understanding of the syntax of PHP, and then how all three (along with possibly javascript) link together to make the website. This should take a smart person like you at most a weekend to grasp to a basic level, HTML and CSS are in themselves very simple (they aren't programming languages, just a way of tagging text with structure and presentation settings respectively) - the challenge comes with structuring the HTML and creating the CSS to fit your design and dealing with cross-browser bugs which I'll do - and grasping the syntax of PHP enough so you can *read* my code and sort of follow what it does should take very little time - what takes time learning to program is how to *write* the PHP code, reading code is mostly English - and this should be useful because then you won't see what I'm doing as a magical black box and you'll be able to ask me to do exactly what you want it the website to do :) Honestly learning to look inside the black box is easy, its making it that requires lots of learning.
However that will be for a later time. I hope the explaination wasn't too heavy, I didn't start of meaning to write that much :)
Anyways, speak later and goodnight/morning,
Tom