Free Me

Another little project that I’d worked on last year. You all know the Creative Commons spin of Fedora right? Well that’s basically what Free Me was, but it didn’t just include Creative Commons media but pieces that fell under other licenses too: this ranged from books to pictures to movies to music to software – both for GNU/Linux and for Windows/Mac OSX. The really cool thing about it was that it played the movies in your standalone DVD player, so even the technophobic people out there could benefit; worked as a Live CD in a computer and also took advantage of autorun in Windows to make all of the media available without rebooting into the Live CD.

The project got amazing artwork thanks to Benjamin and Christoph, two guys from Lafkon who’d produced that awesome video about trusted computing, and pretty good text content from me (even if I do say so myself!). The website’s look and feel, besides the header, were also down to me and a hacked K2 themed WordPress install – I’d still recommend people take a look around as I feel it’s not a bad introduction to free culture.

It actually picked up quite a bit of momentum for a whlie, getting Boing Boinged, interest from the Open Rights Group and I even got to give a talk at the first London Creative Commons Salon which was super fun! Sadly due to a combination of factors I had to stop work on it: my main reason for it was that I didn’t have the technical ability to put the polish on it that was needed for it to suceed at its ultimate goals (to find funding to get the discs sent to MPs and jounralists as an introduction to the free culture movement), but also Creative Commons came along with theirs about 6 months after I started and they were clearly going to be able to pick up more momentum than I. Saying that, I think Free Me actually had many benefits and wider reaching goals when compared to the Creative Commons effort – kind of wish they’d been more receptive to co-operating

Jon’s Simple Theme 0.2

It’s for my simple mind…

So my theme still has a lot of work that needs doing to it, to be ready for public consumption that is. The likely hood of me ever completing this work is low however, but I would like to release it, so…

…here it is. My theme. It’s under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 license. Maybe the GPL would have been better? I’ll consider relicensing it if anybody tells me this as I’ve never released anything like this before!

Would be great if I saw somebody using it; would be even cooler if somebody downloaded it and tidied it up a bit Feedback and updates are welcome! I did get a lot of help from one particular website, but I can no longer find a link to it. If you recognise some of the code I used as yours please let me know and I’ll credit you or whatever you desire!

Fixed

I’ve just spent the last few hours reworking this design from scratch (it’s amazing how little time it took, now I know more about WordPress), and have fixed several of the worst issues with Internet Explorer. Version 7 looks almost identical to Firefox 2 on Fedora 7 – except for fonts, which look way better on GNU/Linux; version 6 hasn’t pushed the content to the right hand side of the page as I intended, but this is only a minor problem; version 5 hasn’t been considered yet, but I expect it’s similar to version 6.

I’ve also made it possible to add a page navigation bar to the top, but the design doesn’t look quite right yet and this is going to need some more thought.

I’ll investigate licensing/uploads soon, and hopefully release it for anybody to use or modify later on today. Oh, and if anybody’s interested, the theme is called Simple – for my simple mind.

Internet Explorer, *sigh*

On my to do list was test this design in Internet Explorer; I’ve finally managed to do this, thanks to a useful web site that I can’t remember the name of for now, and discovered that my design doesn’t render correctly in any version of Internet Explorer.

IE 6 or earlier is simply ugly. IE7 isn’t too bad, the only problem being that all the content in the sidebar has been shifted up, and the sidebar narrowed, forcing some categories and post headings on to two lines. I might, in fact I probably will try and fix this, but I have a piece of advise for any body who happens to stumble upon this page: use Firefox! It’s quite likely you’ll have success with Konqueror/Safari and Opera as well but I haven’t tested these yet.

Not going to get around to thinking about this for a while though. Any solutions people have are welcome

WordPress 101

This is my first attempt at designing a theme for WordPress. I’m kind of excited because I think it looks cool, but would love feedback about what people think of the design: colours etc. Leave a comment on this post (yes, I’ve got them working now too!).

It’s still very much a work in progress, here’s a list of things I still need to do to it:

• Add a header
• Add a footer
• Enable comments
• Style all post elements (bullet points, quotes, bold etc)
• Test in other browsers (IE, Opera) – If you use one of these drop a comment!

I will be releasing it for free use soon (GPL?), but I think I’ll move it along a little bit more before I do that.