Reiner Saddey’s Place

Vistered Little revisited

Posted on February 10th, 2007 by Reiner.
Categories: English, Computers.

After having added some wallpapers to Vistered Little, I learnt that they will all be downloaded, regardless whether they are actually shown or not. That sums up quite a bit… The reason is, that the background selection does not display real thumbnails, but just tiny squares taken from the center of the wallpaper images instead.

That was easy - I thought. Thus I modified Vistered Little so that the menu would fetch its images from a separate directory (wallpapers/thumbs) and then prepared real tiny thumbnails (20×20 px). All and everything appeared to be great, even my Nokia E61 now showed the site without a glitch (it used to choke on the multi megabytes before), but… IE 6 would no longer refresh its background on a selection change

The problem only occurs with Internet Explorer 6. IE 7 is ok, as is Firefox. I’m currently working on this bug… In the meantime, press F5 to refresh.

It appears as though programming real world browsers is a preview of living hell. IE 6 completely refuses to load images when requested by setting document.style.background, but happilly displays them if - by chance -  they have been loaded at least once before. Changing the background image within the onload event of an Image object did not work with Firefox 1.5, but works as advertised with both IE 6 & 7.

So here’s a code snippet that appears to work for FireFox (1.5), IE (6&7) and the Nokia E61 alike - the background is set both, immediately and within the onload event, if required

function setBackgroundWP(bgNumber,bgUrl) {
  var im = new Image();
  im.bgSty = "url('" + bgUrl + "') top center fixed";
  im.setBackgroundWPOnLoad = function() {
    if (document.body.style.background != this.bgSty) {
      document.body.style.background = this.bgSty;
    };
  };
  im.onload = im.setBackgroundWPOnLoad;
  im.src = bgUrl;
  document.body.style.background = im.bgSty;
  createCookie('wpcookie',bgNumber,7);
}

Disabling JavaScript reveals a tiny bug within Vistered Little: The initial background style refers to the wrong directory within functions.php.spitOutWallpaperCSS() :

// nono print "/images/" . $wallpaper . "') top center fixed; }n";
print "/wallpapers/" . $wallpaper . "') top center fixed; }n";

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New Theme: Vistered Little is Great

Posted on February 6th, 2007 by Reiner.
Categories: English, Computers.

I always wanted to have it, because it’s just hilarious: Vistered Little.

It appears to work properly with WP 2.1 and even with WP-Cache 2.1, as far as my requirements are concerned.

Points to keep in mind:

1. Switching backgrounds requires JavaScript
2. There’s a tiny ommision within the file vistered-little-1/index.php, which prevents the footer to display properly, only if your web server’s scripting default is not set to PHP.  Look for “<?” at “<?php } else { ?><p class=”footertext”>” and change it to “<?php”, so that your web server knows precisely, which script processor should be called.
3. I didn’t find any admin link, so just navigate to <your blog url>/wp-admin

Many Thanks to Ricardo Galli for creating the most-wanted WordPress theme in the world!

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Problems with WordPress 2.1 and IIS and TinyMCE

Posted on February 5th, 2007 by Reiner.
Categories: English, at other Locations, Computers.

After upgrading to WordPress 2.1 strange things cropped up: Editing posts was unacceptably slow (after 2 minutes browser still showing xx left), icons were missing from the visual editor, and other weirdnesses made it virtually impossible to create or revise posts.

It took some time to identify the cause: With WP 2.1 running under Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) ISAPI, TinyMCE tries to access the webserver using https seemingly at random :-( This is caused by tiny_mce_config.php trying to determine whether the original request used https in a way that does not work with IIS and ISAPI. (more…)

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Upgraded to WordPress 2.1 and WP-Cache 2.1

Posted on February 4th, 2007 by Reiner.
Categories: English, at Home.

The upgrade was quite painless but still took me 2 houres to complete, because (more…)

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Self made Filser letters - better than nothing

Posted on April 17th, 2006 by Reiner.
Categories: Deutsch, English, ThisNThat.

Just try this:
http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=de|en&u=blog.saddey.net/

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Small is beautiful - WordPress in a Handbag

Posted on April 9th, 2006 by Reiner.
Categories: English, at Home, Computers.

My blog has just been updated to most advanced state-of-the-art equipment.

Both energy saving hot plug drives and proven brand hardware now provide 24-7 uninterrupted operation. The main reason being, that my hosting center does not produce any sounds at all and is therefore now allowed to be online even during night time (more…)

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