I just changed hosts and the rewriting of URLs for WordPress stopped working. I assumed a .htaccess or mod_rewrite problem, but I have not had any problems with the other five blogs that I have set up on my Reseller Zoom account. So after scratching my head this morning. I got home, upgraded my version of WordPress to the latest version and fixed the problem.

Very few people make complaints about website accessibility in Australia. The Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission provide information on the complaints they deal with, and in the past six years since Maquire vs. SOCOG, HREOC indicated there has only been three complaints. All three were from people with visual impairments trying to access information that was significant to them. Most importantly all three were resolved to the satisfaction of the person lodging the complaint. Given the number of Australians with disabilities accessing the web and the number of inaccessible Australian websites, this number is very low.

So my advice for avoiding complaints about website accessibility in Australia is:

1. Build the most accessible website you can with the resources available;
2. Make sure the website works in a screen reader; you can get a demo version of JAWS to run on a USB stick.
3. Make sure if anybody has queries or problems about the website’s accessibility, be they clients, website visitors or anybody else. The can easily contact your “accessibility person”. A person in your organisation with great communication skills, who can identify what the problem is and arrange a solution.

The presentation slides are available, but without the podcast or transcript, they will little sense as they are just visual cues.

The only one I have found is if you try and use a flash file as a background (yes the header, header text and footer are all tiny .swf file, the text coming in at a whopping 3787 bytes, becauser of the multiple characters and stroke the shapes are less than 200 bytes), over laying other flash files (in the case of the header) or text (in the case of the footer) is flakey with either FF or Safari on the Mac. Don’t know on *nix, but seeing only version 7 of the flash plugin, you will not see the header text, because that requires version 8 flash player .

It is truly elastic, as long as your browser window is greater than 600 pixels, so stretch and what the page expand and contract. So have fun play and if you like it, look at the code underneath.

You should see some refinements in the next couple of weeks or until I get frustrated and create a more conservative template.

Go visit CSS Reboot and you can vote for me and any of the other 1500 rebooters.

tagged cssreboot css reboot elastic design

The club also wanted a forum, I thought about using Drupal for both the website and forum, but not wanting to have to learn Drupal from scratch, I chose phpBB, easy to install and getting running with a heap of templates to choose from. Everything was running smoothly until it came time to customise the forum and website to look seamless. Every phpBB template I looked at was table based. Which is a problem for me, because:

• The only time I have used tables for layouts in the last three years, was to convert a prototype I built with css to tables at the demand of the developer. It took me sixes times longer to convert the webpages to tables than it took to build the prototype.
• So much of the presentation is in each of the 40 odd template files, which means every minor change may need to be repeated in 40 odd TPL files instead of one CSS file

As this project is a favour for some friends, I had no intention of spending considerable time working out how phpBB is built and then spending more time doing changes just to do some simple customising. Fortunately I finally found a CSS based phpBB template. Sure it is quite different from what I had in mind and will require more work than I hoped, but at least I do not have to spend hours working with tables and changing 40 odd files.

End up spending far more time fixing little things I missed when I posted or made little changes to the blog, than the time taken to upload WP2 and upgrade.

So this weekend, if not earlier I will be moving up to WordPress 2.0 for this blog and it should be a short painless experience (much like getting your eyebrow pierced).

How it handles unicode will take some getting use to. For an em dash you type in — into the source code of any HTML editor and it renders as — and so it does with WordPress 2.0 . However, next time you look at the source code what you entered as — is now — and what will concern me more is that — which I am typing to shown in a browser as — is saved as — the first time and on the second save it becomes — . Even if it is wrapped in a pre or code element

It is also rather Mac unfriendly, after finding the panels on the create/edit a post page were not working due to a javascript error in FireFox 1.0.7 I upgraded to 1.5 only to have the Firefox crash everytime I tried to save a post in the HTML source editor. At least I got the rich text editor with Firefox in Safari 1.3 you only get the old editor.

Will I change to WordPress 2.0 next week, I am not sure. There are big improvements in some areas, I can survive using the old editor on the Mac, what happens with Unicode has me worried. Time to hack functions-formatting.php in the wp-includes folder.

Sunday will be the family thing, but seeing I will be in Kalamunda, I might as well throw the MTB into the car and take it for a spin around the Little Ovens Circuit. But the rest of the time, other than some prescribed gardening and housework, I will spending playing with the blog.

Found via Carson Systems Blog

Added 1420 hours 23 December, the HTML that Performancing adds is not perfect, it is valid XHTML as far as I can see, though I am not happy with how it does it.