vapourtrails.ca

If you’ve ever visited before, you should immediately notice the new layout. I’ve been planning to rearrange this for some time and I’m very glad that it’s done. There are still a few rough spots here and there (and I have yet to test this in IE) but the wrinkles will get smoothed out shortly.

What’s new:

• Moved to TextDrive, who have graciously extended hosting to the LightPress project. These guys are great and I’ve never seen a hosting environment so free of restrictions. It makes my life a lot easier since I can actually do stuff when I log in.

• Upgraded to the latest version of LightPress (1.1.0-rc1). The upgrade was simple and I just had to update a few tags & template filenames that have changed since version 1.0. The new design would not be possible without the upgrade and would have been a PHP monstrosity in WordPress.

To get the new layout I’ve put into action the greatest new feature in LightPress 1.1: context-driven plugins. Whenever a page is loaded, LP checks the “context” (home page, category, single post, page, archives, etc.) and runs only the plugins that are active within that context. So my sidebar template is the same and lists all of the plugins I use, but what’s actually displayed will be different depending on the site context. I think it’s pretty cool.

Other notes:

• Using the new PostsDisplayed plugin, each context displays a different number of posts (limiting it to only 2 on the home page, for example).
• The Projects list is displayed by the TemplateInclude plugin. Tip: if you name your custom template “TemplateInclude” then it will disappear when the plugin is inactive.
• The Archives button on the top right is actually a custom plugin I wrote that just outputs the latest archive link. Plugins are ridiculously easy to write in LP: I wrote two last night in response to a support forum request and it took less than half an hour.
• Keywords are displayed using a new plugin which I will release soon. The tag cosmos is currently offline while I fix up the horrible code I was using before.
• I hope the colours are ok — while looking at an earlier version, Agnes asked me, “Are you colourblind?” Maybe I am.

Credits for design inspiration go to both Douglas Bowman’s Stopdesign and Keith D. Robinson’s Asterisk for their great use of context-driven content. I hope my poor design sense doesn’t reflect badly on them.