09. 12. 08
WordPress
As even the occasional visitor to these pages will notice, I have switched to WordPress. We use that programme at SpiekermannPartners, so I could enlist the help of Marcus Scheller who imported most of the old content and built the site. Some of the formatting needs a polish, and all the downloads have disappeared into the ether for now. The ether, in this case, is our server, so it only (!) requires me to find the stuff and re-load it.
As it has taken more than half a year to get this far, don’t hold your breath. I am hoping that the inevitable break at the end of the year will allow me to sort this out and also learn more about WordPress features.
It is still the only blog I know that gets written by one person in two languages. Or is it?
by erik
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17 Responses to “WordPress”:
1
Congratulations with the move, I hope that it will inspire you to write “whatever comes to your mind”, as you promised in a older post.
Esben Thomsen
December 10th, 2008 at 00:58 am
2
cool change!
wp is great…
i added a rss feed to my facebook page of your 2 language blog
http://es-la.facebook.com/pages/USTED/34030801509
spanish could be the 3rd : p
wp is really easy to embed pictures via picasa and videos via youtube,
and of course, publications via issuu…
there are many pluggins for whatever…
good luck and keep sharing (sorry for my english)
best
felipe
felipe
December 10th, 2008 at 03:29 am
3
It’s not so easy to adapt more than one language to wp. I often use plugin called Gengo (like here http://www.minimo.fi)
The blog looks nice, good job!
- pasi
Pasi Tiisanoja
December 17th, 2008 at 16:57 pm
4
Lovely, Mr. Spiekermann.
Somehow we consistently enter the topic of multi-lingual cms and blog systems and would love to somehow get all of our results onto one page for people to use as a referential resource. Perhaps that’ll happen, but I’m probably not qualified to write such a post.
A+ for effort, though!
Luke Dorny
February 13th, 2009 at 10:46 am
5
I usually don
Rachel
March 5th, 2009 at 06:38 am
6
i hope this will come out like constructive criticism ‚it is certainly meant
like that.
for starters: minor html warning: the meta tags are not closed properly
(for this doctype).
then, the style sheet falls apart in opera…
not really a requirement per se, it just shows that it is not robust enough…
and finally, i am somewhat embarassed and surprised to ask about the
basic(?) typographical “mistakes” in the articles, like the lack of whitespace
around pictures embedded in articles (e.g. Unit Rounded), the lack of “proper” subheadings (e.g. the Mr. Univers article), and while lamenting the loss of
the apostrophe (in San Francisco walks, 3.), some articles use one quotation
mark both for opening and closing… also while the indented paragprahs
work really well on paper, i think they translate poorly to the screen (but this is
getting into the territory of “matter of taste” i guess).
it is one thing to read blogs, articles from all fields of life where people ignorant
of typography use inverted apostrophes in place of apostrophe’s and regularly
commit other typographical crimes, but i feel a kind of despair when coming
to such a professional’s blog and see similar mistakes. i am sorry…
please forgive an old TeX user the impertinence to come up with this…
minusf
May 17th, 2009 at 21:50 pm
7
sigh, this comment editing box is hell for longer texts..
please ignore the whitespace in front of the comma and the incorrect line breaks…
minusf
May 17th, 2009 at 21:54 pm
8
Well, you’ve caught some of the obvious shortcomings.
1. I ”simply“ moved the old content over to WP from MT, and a lot of content and pictures just didn’t fit. And my friend Marcus, who wrote the CSS for the new blog, gave up half way through, so a lot of things are not finished while I don’t dare touch his work.
2. Nobody proof-reads this, and I have to write everything in two languages. So there are typos and the occasional wrong apostrophe because I get mixed up between German and US usage.
3. Space around pictures is an issue that needs addressing in the CSS. It will never be totally even, but should be more. For now, I insert a linespace in new posts, but will not go back over all the old stuff.
4. What does ”proper“ subheadings mean? The Univers article had exactly those subheads, and I simply brought them over into the blog. They are two levels of hierarchy above the text – all that is needed.
5. English is not my first language and some of my typographic styles are deliberately European.
6. Thank you for your very constructive contribution. As you say, some of it is a matter of taste, but some of it needs fixing.
erik
May 17th, 2009 at 22:32 pm
9
PS:
which article uses one quotation mark for opening and closing? Perhaps that is intentional?
erik
May 17th, 2009 at 22:34 pm
10
if you get back to your clients this fast, i’d like to work with you :] amazing.
btw i am also from europe so i am familiar with some of the more
well known european typographic conventions, that was not my
issue at all, no problems there as far as i can tell :]
the mismatched quotation mark is also in the Mr. Univers article:
”that’s not bad, but I would have done it differently”, but it seems
like i have found an exception rather than the rule. mea culpa.
the subheadings (in Mr. Univers) are simply short paragprahs in bold…
i don’t know, perhaps that was the intention… i was thought by my
excellent teachers to break up articles semantically using headers
(h2 — h6) and unless part of some artistic experiment use stylistic
and typographic devices to separate from the normal flow of the text
(different font face and whitespace). but most of the entries in this
blog are really short so it’s not really an issue i guess…
(it would be nice to have a preview button for the comments, but
i think i have used up all my contribution points for now
thank you for your attention.
minusf
May 17th, 2009 at 23:35 pm
11
the subheadings (in Mr. Univers) are simply short paragprahs in bold…
No, they’re not. They are incomplete sentences, without a full point at the end. That does not qualify as a paragraph. Or maybe you’re looking at a different stylesheet than the one I see in Safari and Firefox.
erik
May 17th, 2009 at 23:49 pm
12
sorry, i should have been more explicit what paragraph i meant: in html context.
in the html code, the “sub-headings” are made of paragprahs,
thus semantically identical to the “normal text” of the article…
(i am sorry, without preview i have no idea how this example looks)
“Adrian as a colleague”
minusf
May 17th, 2009 at 23:59 pm
13
oh, the comments do not filter out html, that can be even dangerous…
you might want to consider turning filtering on…
here is the same but replaced the angled brackets with [ ]
[p][strong]Adrian as a colleague[/strong][/p]
minusf
May 18th, 2009 at 00:02 am
14
Semantically yes, but visually not. They are above the text, indented and bold. That qualifies as sufficient distinction as headings to the paras they preceed.
erik
May 18th, 2009 at 00:03 am
15
oops: precede.
Time for bed (1am)
erik
May 18th, 2009 at 00:03 am
16
well, i was thought not to indent headings :]
but i dont like where this is going, me lecturing a well respected professional,
that was never my intention. who am i to talk anyway :]
sorry for the noise.
minusf
May 18th, 2009 at 00:06 am
17
There are hardly any ”never“ rules. I have been writing books about rules for long enough now that I can afford to break some of them. You are not supposed to indent the first line of a new chapter (i.e. the first para in that chapter or section), only the paras following in order to distinguish the beginning of a new section or chapter.
I think that indenting the subheads and the first lines makes a nice rhythm without too much noise. A linespace would be too disruptive with such short paras and relatively long lines. Indents may not be web-like, but they work well to indicate a new para. Why invent new conventions when the old ones work well?
erik
May 18th, 2009 at 00:12 am
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