To that end, I’ve begun adding some of my guitar-related projects to The Lab, more of which will be coming as I find time to write up details.

Intarwebs!

As a result, I have added some severe ReWrite rules to .htaccess in an attempt to stem the tides. I’ve blocked anything remotely suspicious, including all localhost IP’s (my log files reveal someone is developing locally using one of my CSS files… you idiot); any odd referrers that reside behind 403 Authorization or are ‘vacant’ but return suspicious whois queries.

One tool that I found very useful whilst testing these changes is wannaBrowser, which fakes HTTP user agent strings and referrers.

If I have any reason to believe that I’m blocking legitimate users with these measures I will change the redirection to a page that allows you to contact me and say that you feel hard done by. Otherwise I’ll just leave them in limbo and not waste another precious kilobyte on all this suspect traffic.

If you know why that makes me happy, you’re a nerd too

The first thing most people will notice on the new home page is the addition of the Recent Entries table. The table format allows me to show all the relevant details of more new posts in less vertical space than the old ‘heading and excerpt’ format. If any Wordpress users want to see how I went about manipulating The Loop, I’ve attached a heavily stripped down version of the code below. It’s very simple, but that was my plan this time around – to stop ignoring the bleeding obvious methods in favour of more elegant, but essentially unnecessary solutions.

<h2>Latest Entry</h2>
<?php 	$cow=0;  // create our counter
 		$cowsleep=6; //tell it when to stop
if ($posts) : foreach ($posts as $post) : start_wp(); ?>

<?php if($cow==0) { ?>
	<h3><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></h3>
	<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
	<a href="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>">Continue reading <?php the_title(); ?></a>
	<hr />
<?php } ?>
<?php if($cow==1) { ?>
	<table summary="Recent journal entries from all categories">
		<caption>Recent Entries</caption>
		<thead>
		<tr>
			<th scope="col" class="title">Title</th>
			<th scope="col">Date</th>
			<th scope="col">Comments</th>
		</tr>
		</thead>
		<tbody>
<?php } ?>
<?php if($cow!==0) { ?>
		<tr>
			<td><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></td>
			<td><?php the_time("M j, Y") ?></td>
			<td><?php comments_popup_link(__('0'), __('1'), __('%')); ?></td>
		</tr>
<?php } ?>
<?php if($cow==$cowsleep) { ?>
		</tbody>
	</table>
<?php } ?>
<?php $cow++; //increase counter value by 1 ?>
<?php endforeach; else: ?>
			<p>Sorry, something's gone awfully wrong... </p>
			<?php //custom error reporting ?>
<?php endif; ?>

The problem I over-intellectualised the most was clickable dates — month and year names that point to the archive of that period. As soon as I remembered the most important part of permalinks, (they never change) I whipped up a quick and messy solution in a minute.

<a href="<?php echo get_settings('siteurl');?>/journal/<?php the_time("Y") ?>/<?php the_time("m") ?>/" title="Archive for <?php the_time("F") ?>"><?php the_time("F") ?></a>
<?php the_time("j") ?>,
<a href="<?php echo get_settings('siteurl');?>/journal/<?php the_time("Y") ?>/" title="Archive for <?php the_time("Y") ?>"><?php the_time("Y") ?></a>

All I have to do is include that script where ever I want a post date to appear and it will do the rest using nothing more than the the_time() function and the domain name. Not very portable, but considering I would never intentionally change the URL structure it shouldn’t be a problem.

Mini Posts

Part of the reason I wanted to get more posts onto the home page is that I would like to start including mini-posts amongst the more lengthy articles. The quickest way I could think of to account for excerpt-less posts was using Scott Reiley’s highly versatile get-custom plug-in. By adding the custom field of short and assigning it the value of true, I can check for this on the fly and change the mark-up accordingly.
Here is a quick example; changing the text of the permalinks.

<?php if (c2c_get_custom('short')=="true") { ?>
	<a href="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>" title="Permanent Link">Permalink for <?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php } else { ?>
	<a href="<?php echo get_permalink(); ?>" title="Read entire article">Continue reading <?php the_title(); ?></a>
<?php } ?>

Minor Tweaks
There have been a fair few minor changes, including ditching the graphic submit buttons and reverting to the trusty submit input element. Hopefully you like the new alterations -- let me know if there’s anything else you would like to see changed. In other news, I finally have a post for the Lab section of this site; hopefully I'll find the time to finish it off later in the week.
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		http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/08/24/sawdust/
		http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/08/24/sawdust/#comments
		Tue, 24 Aug 2004 02:06:47 +0000
		Andrew
				
		
		
		

		http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/08/24/sawdust/
		
			No Soup For You!
The first change that should have happened long ago was serving up real XHTML (content=application/xhtml+xml). This site is now XHTML 1.1 in modern browsers, with old fashioned SGML tag-soup being fed to lesser equipped browsers. I’ve nervously decided to also serve all my posts and comments as XML, which means that one bad bit of code in a comment will bring on the Yellow Screen of Death for the whole post. That was never going to last long!
Not Everyone Uses a Mouse
Too often designers/developers set link styling for a:link, a:visited and a:hover, and think that is enough. That is not enough. Many users, myself included, like to ditch the mouse while reading a long article and navigate via the keyboard (*gasp*! What is this, 1986?!). Jumping from link to link using the tab key is fast and easy, but irresponsible design decisions can make the experience akin to driving blind. Try it out now.
No problems, because I have set visual changes on the :focus pseudo-class. That’s all well and good, until IE comes to the party. IE doesn’t support :focus, but in traditional IE style one of its bugs can be played against another. In this instance it is the :active pseudo-class that comes to the rescue. Microsoft decided to interpret :active as :focus, meaning that any changes set on :active will be applied when that link receives focus.
Automated Testing – Home Delivered Lies
As a standard practice, I run my sites through the Cynthia and Bobby automated accessibility tests. The results for Left Justified are quite good, with only a minor warning or two in the Priority 3 (WAI-AAA) section.

What a crock.

I know for a fact that I don’t even meet all the Priority 2 requirements.

3.4 Use relative rather than absolute units in markup language attribute values and style sheet property values. [Priority 2]

That alone is enough to disqualify Left Justified from anything higher than a WAI-A rating. Yet if I wanted to, I could stick up a big ugly “Bobby AAA” button and have it link to a positive test result – but I won’t, because being a responsible web designer/developer/person (I’m using the term web person from here on in) means that automated tests are just that — a test. It’s nowhere near an equivalent to human testing, let alone a replacement.
So now all of the T’s are crossed and i’s are dotted, where are the XHTML 1.1 and CSS buttons on the footer of every page? Not here, folks. 
Validity isn’t an accomplishment, it’s a requirement.
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		http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/08/17/begging-on-the-corner/
		http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/08/17/begging-on-the-corner/#comments
		Tue, 17 Aug 2004 11:42:22 +0000
		Andrew
				
		

		http://leftjustified.net/journal/2004/08/17/begging-on-the-corner/
		
			Ideally I’d love to work within a team on a full time basis, but if you’ve got any freelance work I’m accepting all offers. If you’d like to see more of my work (my portfolio isn’t entirely up to date yet) or discuss any possibilities, please feel free to drop me a line via my contact form.

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