The Google Search
You may not yet have noticed but for the past few days, you have been able to search this site using Google’s search engine, rather than the native one that comes with WordPress. There is a difference – imho Google’s search is better, and it has the virtue that I can set up a “search this and related sites” search as well as a search-the-whole-web search. However Google does not index this site perfectly, so I may add the usual WordPress search to the search page as well.
If you put any search term in the top search box you’ll go immediately to this site’s Google Search page and have the various postings on this site listed in Google format, which in all probability, you are very familiar with. On the search page I’ve added a general “search the web” capability too. I tried messing with the Google code to see if I could add a few extra Google capabilities like “define:” and “stock:” but I haven’t been able to get that going yet.
Cursing IE
Setting up the Google Search should have been easy. Essentially all that WordPress requires is that you define a new page format and patch in the Google script wherever you need it. And it didn’t take too long to get it up and running, until I checked on the page in Internet Explorer. From that point on, and for about a whole day, I was cursing Microsoft.
The simple fact is that Microsoft implements a non-standard scheme for rendering CSS code. (if you don’t know CSS stands for cascading style sheet, and it is the CSS file is template that defines how the web page is rendered. Steve Arun, who designed the original WordPress theme (or skin, as I think of it), that I use here and which I’ve mutated somewhat from the original, clearly knew how to square the circle between IE and FireFox. I salute him. I tried for hours to try to make the two browsers agree.
Eventually I simply threw up my hands in dispair and set up a separate CSS file for IE. So now I have to maintain two sets of style sheets.
The Guinness Clock
For this blog, the situation with themes is complicated, because there are 11 different themes that I switch between every now and then (usually daily). I’ve been gradually working towards implementing what I call the Guinness Clock (see Evolution or Intelligent Design? for an explanation of the inspiration for this idea) which is simply a batch program that changes the theme every hour, and also changes the photos that appear at the top of the page. The effect of this is that the site cycles through 110 slightly different skins every 5 days or so.
Why would I do that?
Well, it’s eye candy. Out of pure interest I’ve spent a good deal of time on studying color. All of the themes have colors that can be described as “harmonious matches.” This doesn’t mean that you will necessarily like them, it just means that the colors have been selected using a method that ensures there are no clashes. The photos have similarly been adjusted using a PhotoShop capability (Match Color) that ensures that they blend with the theme.
The reader likes variety – at least most readers do. I struggled with the question of how to have the same effect as a real-world newspaper or magazine on this web site – it is clearly branded but the content looks a little different each time you come to it. Magazines and newspapers do that by variety within a theme – each issue is recognizable within a brand but different, and that’s exactly what I’m imitating. All that I’m doing that is unusual is varying the colors.
Now that I have this working I can do more to enhance the impact. Anyway if you want to watch the theme change, you can only do that by coming to the site about 1 minute to the hour and refreshing the page after the hour. You may need to refresh a couple of times (because of the caching software) but you can watch the theme change. At some point I’ll put a button up that allows the reader to enforce a theme change…
That’s for later.
