Justsayhi is for many users a dating site. But if you visit justsayhi.com/bb you will find a great and funny resource for blog widgets and quizzes for geeks. You can try out to see how many html elements can you type in five minutes or how many css properties you can type in 7 minutes. If you do not like web development you can test how much do you know about the internet or find out how much electricity does yout body produce.

Apart from the quizzes there are several quality badges to stick on your blog (most of them funny, like “the blogger is coffee addicted”) or find out how many germs live in your keyboard or whether you are an apple addicted or not! Geek quiz is nice too! There is also some crazy stuff there, like “take this quiz to find out your possibilities of surviving in a zombie apocalypse”!
The design of the site and its chicklets is cool and thats makes it different from such sites for me. I tend not to review web sites except when they are special or original and justsayhi is! Quizzes use AJAX which makes the pages fast-responding and professional-looking.

The badges you get after completing a quiz looks like this one below (and yeah the code given for sticking them on your blog validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional).

As you may have noticed, I have changed the Typpz Blog theme. Now I use Simpla theme. I choosed it because its light, clean with pal colors and meets my needs. The drawback of this theme is that it does not support sidebar widgets which means that it does not take advantage of WordPress 2.3 or older versions with the widget plugin installed. Although it is very easy to make it support widgets (widgetize it) and use it as every up-to-date WordPress theme. Lets see how (if you dont like the manual way you can download Simpla Theme widgetized at the end of this post).

Widgetizing the sidebar

Open the sidebar.php file located in simpla theme folder with you favorite editor on in WordPress admin panel, delete everything it has and paste the following code:

<div id="sidebar">
<ul>
<?php if ( !function_exists('dynamic_sidebar') || !dynamic_sidebar() ) : ?>
  <li id="pages">
    <h2>Pages</h2>
    <ul>
      <li><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/">Home</a></li>
      <?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li id="categories">
    <h2>Categories</h2>
    <ul>
    <?php wp_list_cats('sort_column=name&optioncount=1&hierarchical=0'); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
  <li id="links">
    <ul>
    <?php get_links_list(); ?>
    </ul>
  </li>
<?php endif; ?>
</ul>
</div>

Save sidebar.php and then create a new file, name it functions.php and paste the following code (be carefull, functions.php should contain only the code below):

<?php
if ( function_exists('register_sidebar') )
  register_sidebar();
?>

Your theme is now widgetized which means that in your WordPress admin panel, in presentation tab you can drag & drop widgets in your sidebar.
Widgetizing the sidebar caused a CSS probem with the doted lines used in the sidebar sections (there is an extra nested <ul>). You can easily fix it by modifying the following code in style.css file just after the #sidebar rules: Find the lines

#sidebar ul li{
    border-bottom:1px dotted #ddd;
    margin-bottom:0.3em;
    padding:0.3em;
}

and change them to:

#sidebar ul li{
  margin-bottom:0.3em;
  padding:0.3em;
}
#sidebar ul ul li{
  border-bottom:1px dotted #ddd;
}

Your theme is now ready to run and use every of the WordPress 2.3 features. I do not like the page titles used by Simpla (Typpz Blog>>Blog Archives>>Post Name). I want just the post name. To do that you have to open the header.php file, find the line with the following code:

<title>
<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?> <?php wp_title(); ?>
</title>

and change it into:

<title><?php if(is_home()) {
echo bloginfo('name'); } else { wp_title(''); } ?></title>

Adding a Header Image

To add a header image (like Typpz.com blog here) instead of the blog title, open header.php file, find the <div=header> section and change the code in it to:

<h1><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/"><img src="URL" alt="logo" border="0" /></a></h1>
<p class="description"><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></p>

where URL put the location of your header image!

Other fixes and addons

If you write long posts you probably need a “goto top” button at the end of your pages. Open index.php file, find the line <?php endif; ?> and paste the following just below that line:

<p align="right">
<a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>/#">TOP</a>
</p>

As I have posted you can display the WordPress tags under each post.

Download simpla theme widgetized! Simpla is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License, which means that you can use Simpla widgetized for free and just give a link back to Phu and me !
After you download the theme, you’ll need to extract it to your /wp-content/themes/ directory. Then log into WP and activate the theme from within your presentation panel. Both Simpla and Simpla Widgetized use valid XHTML and CSS!

Download Simpla Widgetized Theme

After nine months with this theme, I think its time for a CSS reboot. The new theme will be much simplier than this and much more light which means less javascript, cleaner and minimal look, stylish icons and less time to load. You can see some screenshots in the image above to take a look on how Typpz Blog will look in few days. The theme is customized, widgetized and ready to go, but I have to extremely check the plugins to ensure maximum compatibily before I launch it so I am patient .

Mozilla Sunbird™ is a standalone calendar application. Sunbird is being developed for some years. The latest version is 0.7 (far away from the milestone 1.0 which means that some bugs should probably be expected) which you can download here. Sunbird has small system requirments and runs smoothly without consuming much memory.

The interface is simple but usefull. You can view your calendar in day, week, multiweek or month mode. Toolbar is customisable as well (like in Firefox). Adding events is easy: Just click the “New Event” button on the upper left corner, fill in the details (duration, start time, end time), choose wether or not you want to be notified (Sunbird should be running for notifications to work) and click Save and Close. There is an option for repeating events too.

Next to the “New Event” button there is the “New Task” button. Pop-up window for task adding is the same with the event add, but after saving, tasks are listed in the lower left corner, giving you the ability to give them priority, fill the fullfilment percentage and tick the fullfiled ones.

For social people, Sunbird gives the option for exporting your calendar (or importing a calendar) and publishing your Calendar so it can be shared with others. Calendars can be password protected for more security.

In general Mozilla Sunbird™ offers the basics of a Calendar application and is suitable for the home user or users that do not need advanced features from their calendar app. I’ve been using Sunbird 0.7 for two weeks now and it is really stable (has never crashed) which should be considered to pros.

I visited today the digital technology expo (called dte) that takes place in Athens, Greece from 8-11 November. There were many IT companies stands including Microsoft, Cisco, HTC, EA, Google and LG alongside with some famous greek companies like Otenet and OTE. Although there were many absenses from large resselers like Apple product resselers, Sony resselers etc. Management was pretty good, but I would like to see more cutting edge technology stuff and not only products that are already shipped in the market.

Microsoft had the largest stand, giving out Visual Basic 2005 Express Edition packs, Visual C# 2008 beta cds and presenting the concept of digital home using Windows Home Server system. Xboxes were there too of course. HTC stand was large too, full of the latest palmtops and pdas, providing the ability of real time testing. Google stand was mainly about enterprise stuff like Google Mini and Adwords. The LG stand focused on notebooks and the company’s latest displays (the design of the new LGs is amazing) alongside with LCD tvs playing 1080p High-Definition video via a player that supports both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD media. Cisco featured some of the latest network switches and routers for large networks. Below you can see some photos from the exhibition. Images are also available in my Flickr account.

Many users have been using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin in their WordPress installation to have tag management in WordPress versions before the latest release 2.3. The problem is that version 2.3 does not support the UTW tags. There is an option though to import UTW tags in the built in tag system. Remember to import tags in parts of 1500 tags (if you have more than 5000 tags). After importing the tags you can add the tag cloud widget in your sidebar.

If you want to embed the tags in your theme, you need to modify index.php and single.php. Just copy the following code

<?php the_tags(‘title’, ‘separator’, ‘end’); ?>

and paste it under the <?php the_content(); ?>. Index.php is the main page of your blog. Modify single.php if you want tags to appear also when viewing single post pages. Where title, write what you want to appear before tags (in my blog that is Tags:), where separator write what you want between tags (here it is “,”) and where end write what you want to appear after tags (I’ve left it blank as I do not want a word after my tags).

In a previous post, I wrote a review about the social browser: Flock 0.9. Recently Flock reached version 1.0. The update to the final version is recommended for everyone who uses Flock. Many bugs are fixed, and many features are added:

• Flock 1.0 has added a “People” sidebar to support new service integration with Facebook and Twitter.
• Flickr and Youtube have been promoted to “People” services.
• Several performance and stability enhancements have been implemented and several memory leaks have been fixed.

Flock 1.0 has all Mozilla enhancements and security patches up to 2.0.0.8 (not 2.0.0.9 up to now, but a patch will be out soon I guess). You can read Shawn Hardin’s official announcement post here.

The interface is almost the same with version 0.9, except the splash screen which is changed as you see in the image and some addons on the navigation bar. Bug report button (which was placed on the upper right corner) is absent. Default search engine is again Yahoo, but that could be changed with a single click. The default “My World” page is also rebuilt and seems much more easy-to-read-and-manage now. If you would like to update your Flock installation or try Flock for the first time visit the official download page.

WordPress 2.3 is out for a while. For the past 4 months I have been using WordPress 2.1.3 for Typpz Blog. After extended back-ups (database export, contenet files etc) and plug-in deactivation, I updated the blog to WordPress 2.3.1! All plug-ins worked after reactivation, except the post listing plugin which is listed in the WordPress site as non-compatible with the latest version of the blogging platform and the ultimate tag warrior which in not needed as the new WordPress comes with built-in tag support. Tags were not imported as they should from Ultimate tag warrior, so I have to tag my posts again.

I have to say that the blog now corresponds much faster. I also liked the update notifications for new versions of the installed plugins. I recommend to everyone to upgrade to WordPress 2.3. Remember before upgrading: Backup, Backup, Backup (few clicks can save your blog in case something goes the wrong ).

I wrote a post in the past about the basics of XML structure and how to build a DTD to define your document type. DTDs describe well how elements are arranged in a document but say very little about the content in the document. Also any element in a document has to have a corresponding declaration in the DTD. These problems and limitations could be solved using schemas. Schemas support rules (and ability to define content) which should be followed in order for a document to be valid. For example lets say that you need to describe a city element. The schema code should look like this:

<xs:schema xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
   <xs:element name=”city” type=”xs:string”/>
</xs:schema>

The xs:element element acts like the !ELEMENT declaration in DTDs. Its name declares a name and its type attribute defines the data type. The xs:string describes the data type of the element “city”. Schemas provide many more features. For example lets say that you want to describe a date element. Date should have some restrictions, for example month should be filled with certain numbers (from 1 to 12) and so on. Enhancing these restrictions in a schema is very easy:

<xs:simpleType name="month"
  <xs:restriction base=”xs:integer”>
     <xs:minInclusive value=”1″/>
     <xs:maxInclusive value=”12″/>
  </xs:restriction>
</xs:simpleType>

To sum up, schemas are more powerfull than DTDs and allow more flexible data quality control. DTDs though are commonly used and more easy to structure.

There too many browsers there available for download (for free). Many of them are commonly used, like Firefox and Internet Explorer, and some others are dedicated to smaller user groups, like Shiira and Flock. Vote below for the browser you use! Poll will end on 29 November 2007.

Poll Results:
Firefox 71% (78 votes)
Safari 17% (22 votes)
Internet Explorer 10% (13 votes)
Opera 5% (6 votes)
Flock 3% (4 votes)
Camino 2% (2 votes)
Shiira 2% (2 votes)
Konqueror 1% (1 vote)