Latest from Arc Iris

The Cult of Tech and the Tech of Cults

Ok, I admit it, the title is a shameless attempt at attention-grabbing, but it masks a serious point: corporations are trying to be the new religion. If you feel any hint of hurt on reading that Apple-lovers must perish, or conversely any slight surge of triumphalism, then it is likely you have aligned yourself with (or against) a corporation in the same way that people are wont to align themselves with any religion, creed or cult.
Read the rest of this entry »

This post is an expanded version of a comment I made here, plus some new information I’ve since discovered.

I had in my mind that it should be possible to update WordPress themes in the same way as one can update plugins and WordPress itself, that is using Subversion (SVN). When creating a new site, I usually cut and paste a list of essential plugins into the svn:externals file and this ensures that every plugin has the most recent version - or at least as recent as I remember to ssh into my server and type ’svn up’, which as it happens is pretty often, although I’d actually like to automate this for all my sites at some point. (The problem with doing it automatically on lots of sites simultaneously is that if something breaks during the update then you won’t know about it).

WordPress plugins are usually available on svn.wp-plugins.org or on Google code and thus updates are available directly from there via SVN- if a plugin author doesn’t host on an SVN server I put them on my own SVN server which is hosted with Assembla and then manually update them myself if necessary. This means that although it’s a hassle to do that, I only have to update one server which can then service various sites via SVN.

Unfortunately WordPress themes are not usually hosted on SVN servers, apparently something similar to the plugins repo was tried but either proved unpopular with the more designer-y theme developers (as opposed to the more coder-y plugin authors) or ran into other problems, anyway afaik it was pulled last year with only a few themes hosted on it.

I really wanted to have my themes updated via SVN so I did some research and found out that several of the more framework-type themes are indeed hosted on SVN repositories- the excellent Tarski which I am currently using for this site, Sandbox and also Thematic.

The problem is that once one starts changing the CSS of the theme around to suit one’s taste and/or clients’ requirements, the next SVN update will wipe out those changes (in fact there is a way around this which I’ll come to later), but anyway for me, a more elegant solution for having a custom style sheet is to create a child theme of Sandbox (or Tarski or Thematic, or whatever theme you choose), as outlined here:

http://themeshaper.com/how-to-protect-your-wordpress-theme-against-upgrades/

This keeps the main theme totally separate from your CSS modifications and means you can have several child themes of a parent theme which is updated to the latest version via SVN without any worries about it affecting your child themes. Kudos must go to the WP developers for designing this efficient and elegant solution - ‘Code is Poetry’ indeed.

Adding the Blueprint CSS framework adds another dimension to Sandbox and in fact a ‘bare’ theme consisting of just Sandbox and Blueprint is actually quite a usable theme, given the nice resets and typography that Blueprint introduces to the (to my mind) overly stark Sandbox in its native state.

So the basic steps would be to follow the method outlined by Michael Wender here and then create a child theme of Sandbox and then select this as the active theme. Once I’ve created the child theme (let’s call it ’sample’), I put the Blueprint directory inside the folder with my child theme and then link to it like this:

@import url(’../sample/blueprint/screen.css’);

That way Sandbox can be easily updated to the latest version using SVN and the child theme(s) and Blueprint code are not affected by the upgrades.

The only fly in the ointment is that adding Blueprint means you have to change the header.php file as shown in Michael’s tutorial, so you have to tell SVN not to update the header.php file - otherwise you’d have to keep making the modifications listed in the tutorial after every SVN update - this is done by adding header.php to the svn:ignore file.

svn propedit svn:externals .

In the file that opens, put header.css and the names of any other files you don’t want to be updated by SVN (don’t forget the dot on the end!).

I have since discovered that it’s possible to create a functions.php file within the child theme, presumably within which the functions which should be put into header.php can be placed, thus meaning that you don’t have to use svn:ignore. At the moment I haven’t tried this, not really understanding all the functions and hooks as yet (I’m more of a designer-y and CSS person at this point)- anyway there’s more information on this here by Scott Wallick, the developer of Sandbox.

I am currently designing a new theme using the Blueprint + Sandbox method which I’ll be using on this site as soon as it’s done.

• 1. Become, like, really good at loads of things and then write about them.
• 2. Get to know loads of really influential people and then write about what you think they’re gonna do next.
• 3. Carefully cultivate Robert Scoble’s friendship and then when he’s not expecting it, write a really nasty post that he will link to angrily.
• 4. Write about members of the Technorati Top 100, calling them by their first name as if you hang out all the time.
• 5. Check your RSS feeds 20 or 30 times a day in case Google unexpectedly buys a company that builds interactive toilet seats, and then immediately write a post moaning about it.
• 6. Go without food and sleep in order to stay up to date (if you’re a serious blogger there’s no need to warn against sex- you won’t be getting any anyway).
• 7. Always write everything in lists, even if it’s a totally inappropriate format- e.g.

• • 1. Not been posting much lately
  • 2. Because I just found out my dog has IBS
  • 3. However the vet is hopeful she’ll
  • 4. make a full recovery.

• 8. Desperately comment on other peoples’ posts, even when you have nothing to say: e.g. ‘wow, Godin, you are so right AGAIN!‘
• 9. Become really successful and then write about how you did it.
• 10. Write lists about how to get blog traffic, knowing that most of the advice is stuff people are doing anyway, but knowing that everyone is continually searching for that one special trick that will make them stand out from the dreary herd of monkeys trying to produce Shakespeare just for one solitary second before they sink back into the word-filled miasma of obscurity for ever and ever.

Tags: blog technorati scoble godin anger bitterness disappointment sour grapes

I’ve been doing some research lately into developments in wifi and posted about it already here.I’m trying to make sense of it for myself, as a ‘lay’ person who knows a little bit about wifi and wants to know more, and I hope passing on what I find out will be useful to others.

Fon has changed the wifi landscape already, with their large-scale backing by Google and Skype (about $22 million at the last count). Because they have all this money and well-known bloggers on the board, and their founder is the guy who set up Jazztel and Ya.com here in Spain, (Martin Varsavsky- interview with him in Spanish here) they are getting a lot of users involved (several thousand in Spain already).

The idea behind Fon is not new, and there are and have been similar projects, like MyWifiZone , this in Spain: Akiwifi ,and there’s also a new user-friendly system that can be used with the popular AirMatrix mesh box: http://www.defactowireless.com/Air-Net.htm -they seem to be basically taking the ‘free or paid’ Fon model and using it with mesh boxes, which Fon, as far as I can tell, is not doing at the moment- everyone just shares their own broadband connection, either for free (in return they get to share other peoples’ connections in other parts of the world) or for money (the ISP and Fon get a share of this money) – only the free part is working as of now. Maybe they will introduce a true mesh-based system soon, let’s remember it’s only a young company.

Amid all the excitement about Fon, there have been some people urging caution (like this excellent article from The Observer, and The Register), and with good reason: I’ve been reading up on some Spanish forums and people have been digging out their broadband contracts and actually reading them- and it turns out that none of the ISPs here will actually allow their broadband to be shared at all, let alone re-sold, with the exception of Jazztel (which was started by Mr. Varsavsky), who are ‘thinking about it’- they’re obviously caught in the middle a bit between their founder and not wishing to upset the other ISPs.