You know that over-clocking experiment?

We had an interesting failure recently. The server for one of our larger clients, who have their own high-spec dedicated server arranged, went down. We got the alert by text, and swung into action.

Well, more accurately we had called the hosting providers and told them to fix it.

They gave no solid reason or explanation as to why the server had died, but within in an hour things were normal enough.

Or so we thought…

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Very quietly we’ve been building something quite special for WordPress. Let’s just say that we’re not the first with the concept, nor, I’m sure, the last. But it’s going to be about the most professional set-up. And we’ve done almost all of it with WordPress based technology.

What is it, exactly?

Well, just at this moment, we’re not saying. There’s been hints out there, and it’s not a huge secret, but we’re not ready to make any big announcements just yet. Look out for clues in our forum posts around the place, and in some of our work.

Really I had to post simply to explain why we’ve posted nothing on the blog for over a month. There’s been that internal project, but also some very interesting projects for clients. All of which has conspired to keep us with our noses on the grindstone. Soon we’ll look up and return to normal. Maybe.

I just read an interesting article in A List Apart about how browsers that are forgiving of bad markup and css are bad for the web.

And I totally get it.

In fact, a failure of how standards apply to web pages is one of the reasons why, until really quite recently, I’d avoided having anything to do with Web Design. I hated it. I hated that even if you structured your code correctly it would look right only in half the browsers you tested in.

Well, this is going to change over the coming five years. Standards will become far more important, and odd hacks will slowly fade into the background. Browsers, my friends, are going to have to become a whole lot less forgiving.

And there lies the rub - with tougher browsers, building websites will become a lot harder for non-technical types. In fact, it could become near impossible. On the upside, tools like WordPress will be able to offer more choices to the user because the code will know that what it outputs to the browser will work.

So the internet’s going to get a lot better in the coming years… but if you’re not prepared to work hard at it then becoming a web developer or designer is going to become far tougher.

I was working with a client recently on their own, customised installation of WordPress… and it was driving me potty.  It was a pretty tiring day, given that our normal training covers concepts such as drafts.  On their installation, you pressed save and the page (no posts on that one) would immediately appear on the navigation.  Not only that, but changing a page order had no effect on the javascript based menu system they’d implemented. Read more

For those of you who are fans of our Anvil WordPress Theme, a new version - 1.3 has just been released and is now available to download.  I’ve been testing it out on my own blog (at least, at the date of writing - that may change in the future) and it’s still one of our favourites.  It’s flexible, powerful, and easy to customise.

To download it, simply go to the official Anvil Demo Site and get it from there.  The site also has plenty of information on the theme’s features.

If you change a slug in WordPress it will automatically generate a 301 redirect - helping keep your search engine juice nice and rich.

Try it with the following link - it shouldn’t work, and I’ve not done anything manually.  Yet it does:

http://www.interconnectit.com/wordpress-course-7th-8th-february-2008/

Some nice tricks inside WordPress.  Keep up the good work lads!

Please Note - This version of the guide is now obsolete and been superceded by our WordPress 2.6 User Guide which can be downloaded from Spectacu.la

One of the things lacking, in the free downloads world, so far as we could see, was a simple, easy to follow WordPress guide designed for non-techie WordPress users.

There are two versions available - the latest which is for WordPress 2.6, and the previous version for WordPress 2.3 - the latest is only available from our Spectacu.la WordPress Themes Club.

To download the NEW WordPress User Guide follow this link to Spectacu.la

Download the OLD! WordPress User Guide Version 2 beta for WP 2.3

I think the document still needs work, but I would greatly appreciate any feedback, comments, or even offers of assistance. It would be quite nice to GPL this but we haven’t done so yet and I personally am 50/50 about it. What do you think?

If you want to help popularise this guide, please digg it, or add it to your favourite social bookmarking system - it would be much appreciated!

Two hot topics, in one post. WordPress is the hot blogging tool right now, and the iPhone is one of the hot mobile phones too.

So it’s a shame that they don’t work that well together. In this article I go through the following:

• Posting to WordPress.com from the iPhone
• Posting to a self hosted version of WordPress using the Mobile Admin plugin
• Posting to WordPress from the iPhone and including images with the post

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We finally built GPL theme for hosted versions of WordPress! And very pretty it is too…

We’ve been writing custom themes for clients for quite some time now, and felt it was time to give a little something back to the WordPress community.

So we did a fully GPL theme, complete with a Fireworks png, all sliced up and ready to be re-exported in such a way that you can completely change the site’s design without ever touching a line of code. You have to work within the limitations of the graphical elements, but there’s no doubt there’s a lot you can do.

You’ll see variants of the theme in use around the place - on the satirical motoring site Sniff Petrol on Dave Coveney’s site, and in a few other places soon we hope. We have high hopes for the underlying platform of this theme - it brings with it a navigation widget to give you fine control of an elegantly styled sidebar, an easy to customise contact form page template, and much much more. It’s a theme for people who like to expand what they can do with WordPress. It’s also, of course, xhtml 1.0 transition, works on every browser we tested on, and the work of a dedicated team of professionals.

Anvil Theme Official Demo and Download Page