Plugin for removing <meta name="generator" content="WordPress…" /> in WordPress blogs

A while ago I wrote a short post about an easy way to remove the following code from the HEAD of a WordPress blog:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress [version number]" />

This included only the modification of the functions.php file in your theme. But then it occurred to me that there should be now even an easier way — via a plugin. And there is such a plugin, indeed!

Remove-Generator-Meta-Tag WordPress Plugin

It’s very simple (one line of code, actually) and easy to activate & use. Simply upload to your ‘wp-content/plugins/’ directory and activate it via the WP Admin interface.

There are probably other similar plugins, but this one is the simplest I could find!

Enjoy! :-)

Anonymous Pro – an interesting font for coders

If you write code (HTML, XHTML, CSS, JS, PHP, etc.), then the Anonymous Pro monospaced font may be of some interest to you. It’s intended for coders and developers/designers (the 0, of course, is crossed;-) and it includes Cyrillic characters.

Anonymous Pro font

You can download it for free from here:

www.ms-studio.com/FontSales/anonymouspro.html

But my personal preference for a monospaced font is Consolas. As far as I know, this new font by Microsoft can be downloaded for free, too; Consolas is readable and suitable for all kinds of code — in my case, I most often see XHTML and CSS code blocks in it:)

“Jeffrey Zeldman is now following you on Twitter”

…or how Twitter can be actually of some use;-)

{ Some drafts in my blog were hidden really deep, so… ;-) }

{ This story developed somewhere in July 2009… }

Twitter is an amazing… media? Social network? Means for ultra-fast transfer of news, wisdom, stupid things and “important” things like “I am drinking coffee now”? Something like IRC, but with an option for SMS, filtering, search, etc.?

Twitter is all of this simultaneously! :-)

Jeffrey Zeldman's hat…I am a Web designer and (partially) a geek, so it was very interesting for me to follow the discussion in two of the latest publications of Jeffrey Zeldman:

www.zeldman.com/2009/07/02/xhtml-wtf/
www.zeldman.com/2009/07/07/in-defense-of-web-developers/

…where the consequences of discontinuing the work on the XHTML 2 standard, and what will happen with XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01, as well as with the new HTML 5, were passionately discussed.

At some point, in the Zeldman’s website, a strange bug appeared (in Firefox 3/Win): somewhere around 3/4 of the page with his last post and the numerous comments below, the content suddenly was disappearing (screenshot). Without a reason. The page itself was validating perfectly and there were no problems with the encoding or the HTML/CSS code.

Jeffrey noticed the problem, too, and was trying to solve it for quite a long time. The assumption that a problematic pingback with UTF-16 encoding was the culprit, was not confirmed.

I tried to investigate, too, out of curiosity, without any positive results, though.

Finally, I assumed that there’s a CSS bug in the rendering engine of Firefox/Win which (maybe) can be fixed with some new CSS rule. One of the readers of Zeldman’s blog mentioned that he tried to check something with Firebug, so I quickly made a test page + CSS file with the rule which (supposedly) was fixing this issue; then I tested in Firefox 3.0.11/WinXP. The problem was gone! :-)

Only one line fixed the problem for Firefox:

div#wrapper {
overflow: visible;
}

Then I’ve spent some more time to test in detail if the change did not affect any other popular browser (Opera 9.6, Safari 4, Chrome 2, IE7, IE6) and finally, I wrote to Zeldman, proposing him the fix for Firefox.

Zeldman replied:

@optimiced Will try as soon as I’m back on my feet. Thanks wise one.

Soon after that, Zeldman implemented the fix, and the design was fixed! :-)

Unfortunately, the fix introduced a new bug — the background of the page was “flashing” for a second or two on each page load because overflow: visible caused the background of the element #wrapper to load with a little delay (before: overflow: auto).

Well, after some more thought invested, I and another reader suggested two additional simple CSS solutions, which at a later stage proved to play very well together and fixed the “flashing problem” in all browsers — Firefox and Safari included! :-)

Last (but not least), I would like to say that Jeffrey Zeldman is a cool dude! After the whole story with the CSS bugs in Firefox and the red background flash was over, Jeffrey thanked me personally and added me to his Twitter list, and then promised to send me the new (third) edition of his popular book about Web Standards, as a present! (I think that somewhere in the CSS on zeldman.com there are some more acknowledgments hidden;-)

It’s always nice to communicate with such people, even if with messages only 140 characters long! ;-)

So, I am pleased to say, too: “Jeffrey, thank you!” :-)

* * *

Ah, and finally, why did I start this blog post with the question, what exactly is Twitter?

Because, after using Twitter for at least a few years, I can say that Twitter allows quick, precise communication in a new way. Comments in blogs, feedback forms, emails, allow us to communicate, too, but Twitter is something different. Something, which I cannot define precisely, but something, which fulfills its purpose and is also fun!

This is why you can (still) find me on Twitter (but you won’t probably find me on Facebook)… and, you can find me on my personal blog, of course! ;-p

Why Fireworks?*

Sometimes I hear “Adobe Fireworks? What it is for?” or “Why should I use Fireworks, if I use Photoshop/Illustrator?”.

Instead of answering that question, I’d like to show you the following illustration:

Mercedes SLA, drawn in Adobe Fireworks
— this vector illustration was created with Fireworks in 2005, by Fred Michel (unfortunately, I couldn’t find more information about its author) [download PNG editable file].

Or:

A compass, by David Hogue
— this illustration is by David Hogue, it was created a couple of days ago as a try to use similar technique as in an Illustrator tutorial [download PNG editable file].

Not bad results, eh? Especially for a program that is looked upon (by some) as an inferior alternative to Ai/Ps;-)

With Fireworks you can create some magical things or simple color effects. This is the ideal program for graphics for Web/screen — it combines the best of the bitmap and vector world. Fireworks is easier to use than Illustrator, it is even more easier than Photoshop. No, it is not free, but it is not expensive, either (it’s approximately 3 times less expensive than Photoshop, if I must be exact).

Some prefer GIMP. Others — Inkscape. Some creative professionals use only Illustrator and Photoshop. I remain a true fan of Fireworks and I would be happy, if Adobe will continue with its successful development…

My personal opinion is that for Web graphics and all graphic design tasks intended for use on screen (RGB/RGBa), Fireworks is the perfect tool! :-)

UPDATE (2009/Sep/23):

Illustration by Ryan Hicks, drawn in Fireworks
— I also forgot to show this excellent illustration by Ryan Hicks [download PNG editable file] (thanks, Jim!:-).
________________________
*Why Fireworks?
— a popular article by designer Stéphane Bergeron, published in Adobe Devnet.

Wild strawberry, in color and b&w (Fireworks)

Is it easy to color only some parts of an image/photograph?

Yes.

Is it easy in Adobe Fireworks?

It’s even easier than you may think! :-)

wild strawberry
(original photo by Ani, CC)

The image above was edited by me in less than 5 minutes, and yet, the final effect is quite impressive!

How it is done?

There are probably more than five ways to achieve a similar effect, but here’s how I proceeded:

1) Open a digital photograph in Fireworks;
2) ctrl+shift+D (cmd+shift+D on a Mac) to clone the layer with the photo;
3) In the Layers panel you now have 2 identical layers, both of them in color;
4) Select the lower layer, “lock” it in the Layers panel;
5) Select the upper layer, use menu Commands > Creative > Convert to Grayscale to convert it to black & white;
6) Now you have a b&w layer above a color layer;
7) From now on, it is easy: simply delete (use Marquee Tool, Eraser Tool, or a combination of both) parts of the upper, b&w layer, and the color parts will start to show through! Done! :-)

This technique can be quite effective, if applied to the right kind of image. In this case the original is very good for this purpose, as color is almost missing from it.

You can try to play with colors in GIMP, Fireworks, Photoshop — I don’t think there will be much difference in any contemporary graphics pogram:)

Finally, thanks to Geri, who inspired me to try this effect in Fireworks! ;-)

The flower from Africa :)

Thinking of Africa, I remembered also this flower:

South Africa flower

I’ve seen these flowers a couple of times, in South Africa, approx. 5 years ago, in October 2004…

I don’t know how they’re called, even today…

One of them I took with me and after 3 airports and 10’000+ kilometres, it came to Ani, as a present… :-)

The flower withered in a beautiful way. There were some seeds from it, we tried to plant it, but unsuccessfully — it’s too cold in Europe, I guess…

Today, in this rainy day of Autumn, I’d like to give this flower again to Ani… I can’t really do it, but I have it on picture, at least. With its bright colors, maybe it will make the day brighter, more colorful, too?… :-)))