Blogging Roller

Believe it or not, I've never created an XHTML theme for Roller and I didn't even notice the XHTML declaration when I put my new theme (which I'm calling Fauxcoly) together. I did notice when I got over 400 validation errors from the HTML validator. So, I worked for a couple of hours last night to fix the errors both in my new theme and in my most recent weblog entries. I also had to fix a couple of Roller bugs, which need to be reported.

Now the main pages of my blog validate and I'm brave enough to put this in the theme's footer.

<img src="http://www.w3.org/Icons/valid-xhtml10-blue" alt="Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional" height="31" width="88" />

Having a theme that supports XHTML isn't enough, of course. You also have to ensure that each blog entry is well formed and comments too. Unfortunately, we don't have great infrastructure for that in Roller (yet).

I still plan to release the theme in packaged-theme form, but only after I XHTML-ize it too.

Happy New Year 2009 to one and all! I took a nice long break from work, complete with a Florida vacation, hot tubbing, theme parks and a mini-vacation to rest-up from the main vacation and now I'm back. I think I'm rested and ready to restart some things including work, of course, and this blog.

Restarting a blog is not easy, or so I've heard. Here's what I did. I drew a big diagram on the white board with multiple colors, circles and arrows. I did some calculations and eventually figured out that what I need is a new theme. A little bit of eye candy for the couple of folks who end up here after a search gone wrong or accidentally clicking through as they skim over my blog in Google Reader; that's just what will re-ignite my blogging activities. My problems all have technological solutions. Funny how that works.

So, if you've clicked through to my blog then you're looking at my new theme and newly restarted blog. Thrilling, huh? It's a simple faux-column deal like my old theme, but this time I'm taking advantage of Roller's new 'action' pages, I'm using YUI Grids CSS to define the layout and I'm including content from my other sites (Twitter, Flickr, Delicious, etc.) via aggregation. I'll provide some more details about the theme and it's features (and a download) in a subsequent post, after I've gotten some real work done.