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I’ve updated Tolarski, my variable-width Tarski theme, to work with Tarski 3.1.2 and WordPress 3.2.x. This version is also downloadable as a ZIP file, and can be installed through the WordPress GUI.

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Update 2011-09-18: This post is out of date. See the latest release here.

I’ve been maintaining my own hacked-up theme based on Tarski for several years now. This required modifying the theme source, which meant that every update to Tarski would overwrite my customisations. The better way to do this is to write a child theme.

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When I starting using WordPress on tolaris.com, I noticed an innocuous link in the admin interface entitled “Turbo”. This feature uses Google Gears to speed up working with the blog, and to work offline (!) by storing data (html, images, javascript) in my firefox profile and running javascript in the background. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t release Gears for 64-bit architectures.

Today I discovered that someone has patched Gears to work with Firefox 64-bit, and released a precompiled installer. Warning: after installation, when Firefox restarts, you will see a warning that the plugin could not be installed (‘”Google Gears” could not be installed because it is not compatible with your Firefox build type (Linux_x86_64-gcc3). Please contact the author of this item about the problem.’). However, it is installed and works just fine. Unfortunately this message is repeated each time Firefox restarts.

I can now browse my admin page with Firefox in offline mode. Sniffing proves that not a byte is passing. Now I can write blog posts on planes, without having to use an offline text editor.

Update 2009-05-29: My old colleague from my days at Greenpeace, Niels Peen, now provides the latest version (5.21.0) with proper build tagging. So you will no longer see the warning about Linux_x86_64-gcc3 being the wrong build type. Thanks, Niels!

Update 2009-07-24: 5.31.0 and 5.32.0 are now available here, also with build instructions so you can do it yourself!

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Update 2011-09-18: This post is out of date. See the latest release here.

You may have noticed the slick new header images on tolaris.com. Try resizing your browser. The site’s theme and header images will resize to match, sliding apart as needed while maintaining the right depth.

The artwork was done by my talented friend Josh Smith. Several of his photographs grace the walls of my home, and his daughter – in convincing us that breeding may be pretty neat after all – is incidentally responsible for the existence of my own child. I commissioned Josh to replace the boring old header image (and its limiting static width) with a sliding array of images late last year. I am extremely pleased with the work. From time to time, I may change the command-line text (currently using dpkg to install “Hello World”), just for fun.

The resizing and sliding is accomplished by using CSS. I am using a modified form of the Tarski WordPress template. I love Tarski’s options and clean design, but fixed-pixel-width websites are dumb. So I’ve overridden many of the Tarski theme’s settings to use percentages rather than pixel widths.

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Update 2009-02-12: This bug appears to have been resolved with WordPress 2.7.1.

I noticed when reviewing a recent post that WordPress was “helpfully” replacing two hyphens with emdash, three dots with ellipsis, apostrophe with curly apostrophe, etc. It does this even between <code> tags – on the second line and beyond. I appreciate that WordPress does this when I’m writing in a journalistic style, but I’m also a programmer and engineer, which means it hinders as often as it helps.

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