The black theme looks too black for summer, must find something better.

Hopefully some PIKANTO-building posts as well as new features and ideas for opencamlib (which nobody reads?) in store for July.

Stay tuned.

Anyway, I seem to have a steady stream of 2-300 daily readers, so thanks for stopping by! And keep commenting and emailing – it helps to know someone actually reads or views these pages!

The upgrade went smoothly, with the usual tweaks to style.css for the ever changing header image and to put the blog title in the left upper corner.

I’ve started tagging my posts, and there’s a new tag-cloud at the top of the sidebar. I’ll use it as a way of sub-categorizing posts without actually creating new categories. Once it’s been in use for a while it will be useful for searching too.

Another recent update to the site is the list of WWW-links in the sidebar (“Anders’ Web tips”). It’s an RSS feed of the links I mark as ‘shared’ in google reader. Hope you like them!

This seems like something so central to wordpress that it should come with the default install?

I’ve been browsing through a lot of scientific papers lately, and was struck by just how bad Nature’s doi resolving sometime is. Try this for example: http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature04268
You get to a page with the article title, the authors, and the reference. But no sign of a link to the abstract, the HTML article, or the pdf article!?

I’ve also found a discussion on various pdf/paper archiving services. I’d like something that integrates well with EndNote, any ideas?

I had to switch to the new default theme that comes with 2.2, but after the usual mods the look of the site is back to normal.

I’m also experimenting with MiniPosts to create a side-blog, or Asides, for short comments/links.

In the future I’d like to include a tag-cloud and maybe some stats-listing in the sidebar.

Hopefully everything works as before.

Funnily, the biggest new thing (besides ‘boring’ security fixes) advertized with 2.1 is a new visual editor for posts. But to my surprise I found it was not enabled by default! In the admin panel you need to go Users/Your Profile and check the “Use the visual editor when writing” tickbox to get the new and improved editor.

There’s also a new spell-checker, but for me it errors out with a cryptic message “Could not execute AJAX call, server didn’t return valid a XML.”

For some reason I also needed to replace my <code>.htaccess</code> file for everything to work.

Update: I’m still finding it quite annoying that WordPress creates posts with no ALT tag when I insert images and don’t bother to include some text in the ALT field. This results in errors when doing XHTML validation. So I’ve filed a WordPress bug report. Let’s see what happens!

To get a header image that ‘rotates’ i.e. is updated with a new random picture each time the page is loaded, I used Matt Mullenweg’s simple rotate script. I named it rotate.php and placed it in wp-content/header-images/

I then placed the images I want as headers into wp-content/header-images/ and modified the CSS stylesheet for my theme:

#header {

background: #73a0c5 url('http://www.anderswallin.net/wp-content/header-images/rotate.php') no-repeat  center;

}

Note that some browsers (Firefox!) are smart enough to cache the header image, so if you want to see a new header pic simply pressing the ‘reload’ button won’t do – you need to do a full reload of the page by pressing Ctrl-F5. This is not necessary using Internet Explorer

Also, from the default layout of 4em size and centered alignment, my blog title is now a bit smaller and positioned in the top left corner (so as not to obstruct the nice header pic!):

h1 {

font-size: 3em;

position: absolute;

text-align: left;

bottom: 150px;

text-indent: 0.8em

}

Update: I’ve made a Photo page with all the banner images and short descriptions.