New design

Written by thomas on November 21st, 2006

Hurray! My brand, spanking, shining new design is up and running. Hopefully, there won’t be too many bugs. Let me tell you, working around the heap of bugs that constitute the web browser called Internet Explorer, is not fun. In any case, the theme should look decent from IE 6 and up. IE 5.0 is just too broken to bother with, and no sane person should be running that anyway. I’ve tested the design in Opera 9, Firefox 2, Safari 2, ELinks 0.9.2, IE 5, IE 5.5, IE 6, and IE 7.

If you see something that looks like a theme bug, please let me know! Maybe I’ll release this theme some day, if people really want it, but for now, it feels good having a theme that nobody else has. ;-)

In dealing with my new theme, i found that I had to modify the LaTeX plugin somewhat. Here is the updated patch.

Mephisto LaTeX plugin patch

Written by thomas on November 7th, 2006

After a reinstall of Mephisto everything’s back up and running as it should. Now, back on topic.

When researching the available blogging softwares, I ran across Mephisto in an attempt of finding myself a Ruby on Rails based software. One of my primary wishes for my new blog was the ability to easily include [LaTeX] equations in my webpages. The only viable alternative which had LaTeX support was WordPress, which I’ve been told has quite a number of issues. After some inquiring in the #mephisto channel, somebody offered to code up a plugin, and a couple of days later the LatexRenderer plugin was born.

Excellent as it was, I still wanted more ;) A couple of versions later, the LatexRenderer patch was done. The original plugin takes the code as:

< filter : latex >
$x = \frac{-b\pm\sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}}{2a}$
< / filter : latex >

, minus the spaces that is, and renders the equation as an image.

What I added to the plugin was the ability to quickly show the underlying LaTeX source code. Rendering the above equation now gives us:

If you click on the equation, the image disappears and the source code appears. Click again, and you’ll get the image back.

I hope somebody will find this a useful feature, and hopefully Jan will include the patch in the official plugin.