{ height: 1%; } - Ruby on Rails and User Interface Design

Brighthouse ported to WordPress

Posted by Richard White Sat, 29 Jul 2006 19:07:50 GMT

Thanks go to Max Limpag for porting Brighthouse over to WordPress. Now if there was just a conversion tool for posts and comments I’d port this blog over to WordPress, Typo sucks.

Brighthouse 1.2.2 released

Posted by Richard White Thu, 13 Apr 2006 02:39:23 GMT

This it folks, the fabled trifecta: three releases in one day. Starting with AjaxScaffold 3.0.0 release, then the addition of RSS and iCAL feed consumption to Kiko and finally a refresh of Brighthouse. I’m pooped so lets get on with the, mostly minor, changes:

• Overrode the live/search.rhtml in the theme directory. You no longer have to overwrite files in the Typo codebase for Brighthouse to work.
• Changed the right sidebar to be absolutely positioned so that text overflows in the content area (like from long text in <pre> tags) wouldn’t wrap the sidebar to the bottom in IE.
• Made the footer only span the content pane since the layout is no longer floated
• Styled the older pages links at the bottom and some other sundries that I’ve since forgotten
• Styled static pages to have the same headers as blog posts

Not really exciting stuff, especially compared to what else has gone on today, but there it is. As always you can download the latest from the Brighthouse page. Goodnight!

Brighthouse 1.2.1 released

Posted by Richard White Thu, 02 Mar 2006 18:55:00 GMT

The tweaking and tinkering will end soon I promise, its really more realigning more than anything. All that said, I’ve put out a new Brighthouse release with the following small changes:

• The standard font size is smaller. The 14px font was cool to me at first and good for short posts with lots of images, but now its just making my eyes bleed. Its been toned down to a more pedestrian 12px.
• Preformatted text is now more sublime. Gone are the big black boxes with the bright green text. I always liked that it looked like my preferred terminal setup but on a blog it just is too forceful of a color combo. It’s now a more subdued dark grey on white with a slightly different serif font.

As always you can get download links and instructions from the Brighthouse page. Thanks and enjoy.

Brighthouse 1.2.0 released

Posted by Richard White Wed, 01 Mar 2006 01:31:00 GMT

If you were paying attention you noticed this blog received some loving today with an updated look and feel. I’ve updated the Brighthouse theme with all sorts of new goodies:

• Live search has been significantly modified. It’s now in the upper right hand corner and the results show up over the page instead of inline. The original style was hastily done and I thought it looked a bit heavy. I also hated how it put the results inline and moved the page around, so being the perfectionist I am, I was compelled to change it. Unfortunately this change requires modification of the Typo view for search. You’ll find exactly what needs to be done in the ‘about’ text (you just copy in a version that I’ve provided over your existing one). There’s also an apology for making you have to go through such an ordeal but there was really no other way to do it.
• The ‘about’ box has been removed from the template and is now something you can create optionally using a static sidebar element.
• Tested in IE 6, FF 1.0 and Safari 10.4. I never did any of that before so I don’t know if this fixes anything. Regardless, it’s all working now.
• Edit/Nuke links on comments and articles are no longer placed inline. This was pushing down the comments when you moused over, which was annoying.
• The textarea for comments smaller. That thing was ginormous and annoyed me every time I had to scroll the page to hit submit.
• Styles now apply to pages, not just articles. Enough said.

I’ve also made a page that will house the how-to and download links for Brighthouse henceforth. Enjoy and let me know if you have any problems.

Brighthouse updated and I'm off

Posted by Richard White Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:08:00 GMT

Just a quick note that I have now added a version to the link to the Brighthouse theme on sidebar. Considering I rapidly threw together this theme yesterday morning it was bound to go through a couple iterations throughout the day. Let me know if you like it and definently send me a link to your blog if you’re using it, one person already has.

I’m also running out the door as we speak to catch a flight up to Boston to join the rest of the Kiko team. We’ll be making our final push to 2.0 (as in version 2.0 not web 2.0) this week, I’ll give you more updates on that as we get closer

Typo Migration and Brighthouse Theme

Posted by Richard White Mon, 20 Feb 2006 17:46:00 GMT

I spent the better half of yesterday migrating this blog to Typo and bringing the associated articles on the old one over. I was originally just using a Blogger account that was being SFTP’d to my web server. That was a decent solution for a blog when you want a quick and dirty way to get started. But it was time to move to something with a little more flexibility and credibility(?). It also forced me to learn how to configure lighttpd to handle multiple Rails applications on the same domain (what other apps are on this domain you say? you’ll see, you’ll see).

In the process of converting to Typo I needed to migrate my look and feel. In Typo it was easy enough to do this by creating a new theme, which is exactly what I did and I named her Brighthouse. You can download the theme from the resources link on your right. I’ll go ahead and include my short configuration instructions here so they’ll be easier to find (you can also find them in about.markdown which is what shows up when you import the theme into Typo.

Unfortunately I cannot find any good sites that keep a list of Type themes. I found this page on the Typo trac, but it looks like it hasn’t been updated lately. There is also TypoGarden that recently put on a theme contest. There are some themes on there but you have to search back through their post archives and there appears to be no concise list or way to upload new themes. Let me know if you know of any Typo theme sites.

Getting Started with Brighthouse

1. Download the zip file and extract it into your themes directory in Typo
2. Add your personal information to the about box in /themes/brighthouse/layouts/default.rhtml
3. Add your headshot photo into /themes/brighthouse/images/headshot.gif_(of course you can change that url in the default.rhtml)

Optionally you can create static sidebar lists with specialized list icons using <ul class="resources"> and <ul class="feeds">