So, many of these things can be remedied simply, but I can’t get it out of my head that you just skim the content because it’s all bunched up. The white space for the text is compressed against two differently coloured, high-contrast sections which mark the edge of the world. Instead of helping you focus, I feel trapped when reading it.
So, I reach out again, what would help alleviate this? What would make you read more on this blog. It’s not a for-profit enterprise, it’s simply putting my opinion and some of my work onto the Internet.
Please, your thoughts in the comments or contact me steve at steveworkman dot com (or use the contact form on this site).
Since I started using Feedburner to add adverts into my RSS feed (there are now ads, let me know if they’re intrusive), I’ve been getting errors like the one above in my XML feed. Basically, there’s a few new line characters being output by several classes. This means the XML is invalid and services like Feedburner complain, as do some browsers (FF, Opera, Chrome).
In PHP, there’s a simple way to fix this, using a buffer and stripping newline characters off the beginning and end. WordPress have considered this before, and have rejected this method of fixing it because it’s generally caused by plug-ins which should fix themselves. Hence, their solution for 3.0: indicating when additional characters are output when the plugin is activiated.
So, I did that for all my plugins. I found that the following were giving me extra characters:
AVH First Defense Against Spam (2)
FeedBurner FeedSmith
JR Post Image
Last.fm for wordpress
Tweetbacks
Twittar
Twitter for WordPress
WP-Spamfree
So, I then removed the blank line at the top of each of these files. This got the number of blank lines from 12 to 2, which still isn’t enough.
I then re-installed wordpress, thinking one of the core files had become corrupted. Still no valid XML.
More research led me back to the output buffering solution. wejn.org has a pre-prepared file to resolve this issue. It’s a simple install and is well documented. Since putting this fix in, I’ve had no issues and my RSS feed is back up and running.
I’d still love to know what caused the single line, but I’m glad there’s a fix to sort it out.
Four years have passed since I started writing this blog. Since then I have written 88 posts (including this one) with 89 tags in 23 categories. There have been 94 comments, 31 of which were on the CSS3 Bookshelf. The site has been through four designs under three different names on two different hosts.
For many years, the site went unnoticed, getting less than 10 page views a day. With the latest iteration, a conscious effort to drive more traffic by writing good articles every week, and a bit of help from Twitter, this improved to 30 visits a day. A few good tweets from Bruce Lawson increased this to 50, with the odd spike around the 250 mark. Then I write about a technique to make a bookshelf with new CSS technology. A lot of pushing gets a spike of 300 visits. Then, whilst on a day off, Smashing Magazine posts it twice as part of a “what you can do with CSS3” compilation, which sends me 1000 visitors a day for the weekend. That’s more visitors than I’ve had in the last 3 years put together.
So, what’s next? Well, I’m going to keep writing. There’s so much more that interface design can help us accomplish and good design becomes more and more important every day. I’m going to blog more about design itself, and things that inspire me. At the moment, a lot of those thoughts are limited to my twitter stream, so I want to expand that. I’ll talk more about my after-hours tech activities, the interesting stuff that I don’t always get to do during the nine to five.
I’m also going to get more involved in the community, discussing more issues and attending more group events. London Web Standards is fantastic and I’m going to try and make it to every one from now on.
So, there’ll be more of the good stuff, some more tutorials and more discussion. If there’s anything else you’d like to see, please leave a comment.
You know those days, the ones that turn into weeks, and when the weeks can quickly turn into months you start thinking I really should have stopped the rot when it was weeks (and before that, days). That feeling, is what I have now. Over the past few weeks (actually, nearly a month), I’ve been rushing around trying to get projects sorted, doing extra projects and starting new ones. Therefore, I haven’t had a chance to post. My bad.
Good news is, I’ve found 10 minutes to write, so, here’s my last month:
1. I’ve been asked to write articles for UX Magazine from an industry perspective. I’ll be posting once every few months, with my first one due in a week or two. I’m really pleased to be able to write for these guys who are just trying to spread the word of UX
2. I’m at a new client, doing standards-based SharePoint work. I know, those two words don’t go well together, but just go with me on this one.
3. I’m finishing an iPhone demo too. This could be really big so fingers crossed
4. I’m going to buy an iPad. I had previously said that I won’t buy one til the 2nd generation, and, like with my 1G iPod Touch, I’ll probably regret it in the end, but I want one dammit!
5. Finally, if you didn’t know already, I’m now engaged to my girlfriend/now fiancee Emily. We had a very good party last weekend and even 8 days later are still not fully recovered
Here’s a promise that I’ll have an on-topic post for next week.
