Beware: As at March 16 2006 this site is potentially unstable. Lots of things are broke. If you are using Internet Explorer 6 or older please consider upgrading to a browser with better standards support, such as Firefox, Safari, or Opera.
bioneural.net has migrated from iBlog to WordPress.
How to migrate from iBlog
Coming... sometime.
Update 29.05.06: A step-by-step migration guide is now online, here.
Things to fix
- Weather Icon: WARNING: You forgot to make the cache directory writable. Please chmod 777 this folder. Should show icon + temp only; why is other data displaying?
- iStockPhoto feed is not displayed. Why?
Warning: fopen(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in /home/.ashea/bioneural/bioneural.net/wp-content/plugins/latestistockimages.php on line 50
Warning: fopen(http://www.istockphoto.com/istock_myfiles_rss.php?ID=430123): failed to open stream: no suitable wrapper could be found in /home/.ashea/bioneural/bioneural.net/wp-content/plugins/latestistockimages.php on line 50
Dreamhost Support say:
We've purposely disabled URL access to php system functions (such as copy() open() etc.) because of security and performance problems. We have replaced it with CURL:
http://wiki.dreamhost.com/index.php/CURL
Unfortunately, it's beyond the scope of our support as how to port your script to use CURL instead of the system calls, but we can definately say it would do the job. You may want to talk to the maker of the plug-in about converting in, since frankly no good PHP is written using fopen these days.
Solution may be SimplePie or reverting to JavaScript via Feed2JS?
I tried hacking the plug-in based on some CURL examples but this took the site down! SimplePie is not so simple; temporary reversion to Feed2JS completed solution currently in testing implemented (with help from Ryan)!
- Extended Live Archives: display problem in date view
- Asides (in sidebar) not counted for index page display (should show last 10 non-asides posts on homepage). Fixed using Sideblog plug-in instead of K2 Asides.
- Exclude asides from Latest Posts. I couldn't get this hack to work; actually not required since I display my all latest posts outside the sidebar (main entries) and in the sidebar (Quicklinks).
- Complete tagging as per Robin Lu's hack to make UTW work with ecto
- Complete "History" page
- Complete "Terms" page
- Implement Entry Footer
- Blog the migration process
- CSS validation
- XHTML validation For the most part; the odd page may generate an error, and my iStockPhoto photocast generates a number due to their poorly-formed feed.
- Revise "About" page
- Test layout under Windoze (serve alternative "minimal" version? PNG display fix?) Alert implemented to advise IE users to "upgrade" to Firefox.
- Discover what's the deal with "pingbacks"!. According to Wikipedia, WP supports "automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published." That explains why I get messages about "new comments" when posting an edit that cross-references another post of my own. Info on trackbacks and pingbacks in WP here.
- Add blogroll/ OPML export
- CSS image swap for "About" avatar
- Quicklinks (asides) category has no content on clicking the permalink. Fixed with this hack.
- Customize wp-rss2.php Now using FeedBurner for main feed.
- Add noscript CSS alert to indicate reduced functionality if JavaScript disabled
- Add list of categories with feeds to main page
- Add site preferences: type size, no CSS, alternative theme(s), soundtrack
- External links (rel="external") no longer open a new browser window. Why not? a JavaScript conflict? Fixed, then disabled. Why cheat the validator? Why not give the user the choice (external links are still indicated via CSS—except in IE but who cares!)
- Optimize XHTML + CSS code
- Implement print.css
- Consider incorporating bug fixes from current K2 version









Wow, I love the new layout! Very impressive. Some observations / questions:
* Did you do your own image set? All those cute little icons for the feeds, bugs, tags, etc. Nicely unified.
* I love the page tab styling. How'd you do their transparency on top of your banner?
* I like how you have some pages as the main tabs above, but others are just in your sidebar. Is that a plugin or is it all just hardcoded? I've been looking to do something similar, but my theme has a slick way of automatically putting pages into the header tab bar. Downside is that there's no way to exclude some pages (unless I hack my templates).
* Are you using AJAX stylings? Looks very polished
* I like what you did with the styling of your Tag Cloud on your archives page. The varying depth of black is a neat idea.
* Those drop shadows on the left and right of your page width looks awesome.
* Ok, I've seen this around lately and I love it -- how'd you do that little yellow notify thing at the top of this post? Neato!
Thanks for the feedback Rob :-)
I will be posting a "Credits" page when I get to it, but for now...
The icons are Silk Icons, a freeware set that happens to be the included in the K2 template my site is based on.
The transparency is unfortunately not valid CSS; it may have to go :-( It's done like this: ul.menu li a { background: #000; opacity: 0.8; }
In K2 when you create a page you get a tab; when you create a sub-page it is listed in the sidebar. Just how I want it!
AJAX? Yes, this site uses floor cleaner (lemon scent). K2 utilises the Prototype JavaScript library.
The tag clouds are done with plug-ins: UTW, Extended Live Archives on the Archives page, and UTW (differnet style using CSS) on the About page
I like the drop-shadows too; involved some trial-and-error and IE/Win doesn't play nice (surprise surprise!). The drop-shadow is just a background image for the body and the main container (page) has a background image layered on top to divide the primary content from the sidebar.
The "alert" is just CSS applied to p class="alert":
Cheers, Bruce
Ooo, one more thing I like: the styling of the visited links. Cute little check mark. Nice. :)
Hi Bruce,
I've got 5 letters for your new blog: G.R.E.A.T :-)
And of course: welcome to the WordPress community!
Too bad the "opacity" option is invalid CSS, because it's a perfect fit in your design. I was also wondering if you did all of the main design by yourself?! Everything just looks awesome - now if you only could squeeze those last little bugs?
Cheers,
Jasper.
Thanks Jasper. Migrating from iBlog proved to be a lot more work than I anticipated; something like 3 months of my "spare" time! This includes getting familiar with WordPress which of course goes well beyond the level of customization that was possible with iBlog. However, the "main" design is a K2 template rather than a build from scratch (I don't know nearly enough about PHP for that!). I think the K2 heritage is obvious, but hopefully the appearance is unique given my tweaks here and there, my choice of plug-ins, etc. To my eye the design is a little busy—especially next to your elegantly simple style—probably because I tried to incorporate the "best bits" from my iBlog template. I can clearly see that my thinking hasn't migrated as far as my content ;-)