Yesterday and today my learning curve has jumped significantly. I’ve admittedly been out of the loop regarding WordPress development and have missed a few significant things.
WordPress.com
For all you folks on blogspot you’ll seriously want to consider going to WordPress.com. Why?
- It’s free
- “All the cool kids are“
- The comment spam protection is light years ahead of blogger thanks to Akismet being standard on all WordPress blogs
- The templates are far prettier
- You can import all your blogger entries to WordPress.com…and it’s REALLY easy to do
- The community surrounding WordPress is superb
The only thing that used to make a free blogspot blog better than a free WordPress blog was the ability to have complete HTML and CSS control on blogspot. All that has changed though, since WordPress.com has introduced a payed service which lets you style your CSS however you want. Oh, and it’s only $15 a year! No, you don’t get to mod your HTML, but you don’t need to. Why you ask? Because of the Sandbox theme by Scott. To show just what can be accomplished with Sandbox Adam has made an unsleepable skin for it which is, in most ways, superior to the original unsleepable theme. So as you can see, there’s no pressing need to tweak your HTML, almost anything’s possible with Sandbox + CSS.
Sandbox
Which brings me to my next point, Sandbox. Sweet, sweet theme. It’s a themer’s theme (widget friendly of course,) ready to be styled however you desire. It’s what I’m currently running here. Simply speaking it’s all the HTML you’ll need for any WordPress blog and has minimal (read: virtually none) styling; there’s also an option to have no styling whatsoever. To style it you simply select a “skin” which is basically a CSS style sheet. Sandbox comes standard with a Kubrick skin, which is what I’m using here with minor modifications. I think there will be a lot more Sandbox skins showing up soon.
You may ask yourself, “I wonder why Ben’s using the Sandbox theme, which looks just like Kubrick? Why doesn’t he just use Kubrick?” Answer: hAtom.
hAtom
As Adam pointed out, Chris Messina explains it best:
…because the Sandbox theme is marked up with hAtom in its HTML, there?s no need to supply an alternative link to RSS or ATOM because the page itself is able to be read by newsreaders.
How cool is that?! There’s a possibility that for one reason or another hAtom won’t replace RSS or ATOM as the standard feed source. But, as Matt points out, even if hAtom doesn’t catch on as the preferred subscription method, it provides a great basis for consistent semantic markup. Now, perhaps that doesn’t tickle you the way it does me; and maybe you, like me, have no idea how this will work, but it sure sounds like a step in the right direction. I admit that I still don’t know exactly what hAtom is, or how it will all play out on the Net but I do think that it will likely play a part in blog design and coding in the coming years.
So, as you can see, I’ve been learning a lot in the past couple days. Hopefully at least a few of you have learned something new as a result of my experiences.
