Posts about Karsten Reincke

I have already dis­cussed bootScores blurred images. The prob­lem was easy: In coop­er­a­tion with Word­Press, bootScore embeds images of size ‘medi­um’ in the post lists. And that even on large screens, where the browsers have to fill much more space than the images could do by them­selves. Con­se­quent­ly, the browsers upsize the images that are […]

There were two things I want­ed to see changed in the bootScore theme before ven­tur­ing into the big inter­ven­tions. For­tu­nate­ly, it was easy to get a more fan­cy tag cloud and an improved list of recent posts show­ing the fea­tured images as thumb­nails:

To avoid the trap of blurred images, I sug­gest­ed let­ting Word­Press auto­mat­i­cal­ly gen­er­ate also square bootScore-spe­­cif­ic thumb­nails of size 600x600. The bootScore tem­plates index.php and archive.php should request these images via the com­mand get_the_post_thumbnail(null, ‘bsTeas­er’) instead of ask­ing for the medi­um size. This would make it less like­ly that a pic­ture would need to be […]

No web­site with­out a logo! Inte­grat­ing logos cor­rect­ly is often a tricky task. They have to be vis­i­ble, well-placed and leave space for the menu. Addi­tion­al­ly, they must not bloat or dis­tort the head­er area. And the way of inte­grat­ing them into the tem­plates should also allow us to use the fav­i­cons for the brows­er […]

I love ZEN pre­sen­ta­tions. For that, you need pic­tures. Many pic­tures. Good pic­tures. For­tu­nate­ly, it is tech­ni­cal­ly easy to inte­grate pho­tos from the inter­net into your own site. What is chal­leng­ing, how­ev­er, is to do it legal­ly.

I don’t buy images. Nev­er. I take my own pic­tures. Or I use free images released under a Cre­ative Com­mons License. Or in the ‘pub­lic domain’. Some image data­bas­es offer their pho­tographs under their own licens­es, equiv­a­lent to the free licens­es, as long as I do not make their images pub­licly avail­able through anoth­er image […]

Avoid­ing dis­tort­ed fea­tured images is pos­si­ble. We have shown that. How­ev­er, our method is not yet opti­mal: if we let Word­Press when upload­ing, also crop the medi­um-sized thumb­nails as squares, we give up what is com­mon­ly expect­ed. Maybe oth­er plu­g­ins need the ‘medi­um’ thumb­nails in the orig­i­nal aspect ratio after all. So it would be […]

bootScore — the Boot­s­trap-based Word­Press starter theme — can only be designed via CSS, PHP, and JS pro­gram­ming: If you want to fash­ion your web­site, you need to pro­gram. That’s the way how bootScore inte­grates boot­strap per­fect­ly: it leaves the unfin­ished look to the pro­gram­ming web design­ers.

In the case of Fan­cy Images, we show our read­er first a tiny image. And on her request — wants to say: click — also a larg­er ver­sion. For imple­ment­ing this fea­ture, I ini­tial­ly put the URL to the uploaded image in the href attribute of the fan­cy link and in the src attribute of […]

Last night, I could­n’t hold back any­more: I replaced Easy Foot­notes with Foot­notes Made Easy. Too sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly unat­trac­tive was the result of Easy Foot­notes.

Word­Press does not like Scal­able Vec­tor Graph­ics by default: SVGs con­sist of XML code. If loaded, it can — at least in prin­ci­ple — inject mali­cious code into the sys­tem. Using SVGs in tem­plates, how­ev­er, is not pre­vent­ed by Word­Press. On HTML lev­el, they can be embed­ded — as usu­al — in img tags. That’s […]

Large, promi­nent­ly placed images are eye-catch­ers. Word­Press even has a name for it: Fea­tured Image. The only prob­lem is: Start­ing every post again and again with a ‘fea­tured image’ is tir­ing. Even if our read­er has already decid­ed on an arti­cle, we force her to scroll. It would be bet­ter to give her direct­ly what […]

The small­er the screen, the greater the risk that long words destroy the read­ing image. With­out hyphen­ation, it becomes chop­py or fizzy on smart­phones. If a bootScore-based site — accord­ing to Respon­sive Design — wants to main­tain read­abil­i­ty by rear­rang­ing the text ele­ments, then it can­not do that with­out auto­mat­ed hyphen­ation.

Deep­er nest­ed menus are dis­played depend­ing on the size of the device. Stacked sub­menus on larg­er screens are unfriend­ly for the read­er. Peo­ple stum­ble over what’s under­neath. So let us soft­en the stack­ing a bit.

Exact­ly. After I crawled into the top­ic, I decid­ed against it. Fol­low­ing Ade­nauer’s apho­rism, What do I care about my gos­sip of yes­ter­day!

In my ‘pre­vi­ous’ Word­Plus life, I was rather slop­py with my menus. Let’s first agree on what we are talk­ing about: Word­Press knows key­words and cat­e­gories. Now we also need a name for the entries in nest­ed menus, which them­selves still have sub-entries. They can be regard­ed as cat­e­gories, too — because of their group­ing […]

Like Boot­strap, BootScore only knows menus with a depth of 2. Boot­strap because it wants to in prin­ci­ple. BootScore because it fol­lows its base as strict­ly as pos­si­ble. Lev­el 0 entries are list­ed hor­i­zon­tal­ly in the head­er, and the cor­re­spond­ing lev­el 1 entries are list­ed ver­ti­cal­ly below. Thus, the top-lev­­el entries group the entries below […]

Main­tain­ing a Word­­Press-based site often means work­ing with two instances — one for devel­op­ment and one for pro­duc­tion. Both have their own domain, a spe­cif­ic URL, used to link one site ele­ment to anoth­er. Man­u­al­ly or auto­mat­i­cal­ly. This implies that a woman has to replace this URL pre­fix with the oth­er one in all places […]

In the Euro­pean legal area, exploita­tion rights inher­ent­ly belong to the author of a work. She does not have to do any­thing else. In the Amer­i­can legal area, things are dif­fer­ent. There, every work falls into the ‘pub­lic domain’ by default. Only when the author active­ly claims her ‘copy­right’, the work belongs to her.

Yes­ter­day I was asked to doc­u­ment the tran­si­tion from the pure, sim­ple bootScore site to a fan­cy one. The lat­est ver­sion alone would not visu­al­ize its pre­de­ces­sors. True! To solve that issue, I should inte­grate a slid­er show­ing them as a series of images. And indeed, doing so would also be an oppor­tu­ni­ty to eval­u­ate […]

I had set up my old site, fodina.de bilin­gual. With the help of WP-Globus. As nice as this worked for years, at last WP-Globus got lost. Thor­ough­ly! When I edit­ed the Ger­man text, it made the Eng­lish dis­ap­pear. And vice ver­sa. Some­thing like that shall not hap­pen to me again. The restora­tion was com­plex and […]

A foot­er is an area for more off-beat ref­er­ences. They are more off­side inso­far as our read­ers expect to get access to what they came for — direct­ly after a page is loaded, direct­ly on top of it. At the bot­tom — where they first have to scroll — they are look­ing for minor aspects. […]

What is impor­tant is in the eye of the behold­er. A lawyer would per­haps include the imprint, the image cred­its, or the data pro­tec­tion con­cept. And not to for­get: the open source com­pli­ance arti­facts. The read­er, on the oth­er hand, would see it dif­fer­ent­ly! She wants con­tent. Enter­tain­ment. Real ‘con­tent’. Not this legal gob­bledy­gook.

Search engines don’t like gos­sipy key word­ing, but they love well-filled sitemaps. But they detest bro­ken links.