You might have noticed dzone has just undergone a facelift. Looks great, but above all I love their new auto-pagination feature. Basically, once you scroll far enough down their list of developer links, it expands in place using an Ajax request. The end result is a bottomless pit of development links, and it’s so well executed, you might have never noticed it.

My question is, why haven’t I seen more of this?

See also: Endless Pageless: No More Next Page

Justin Hernandez and I just launched the Mephisto Theme Gallery, an unofficial showcase site for open-source themes and templates for the Mephisto blogging engine. Mephisto’s becoming increasingly popular, especially within the Rails community, so we thought it was about time it had a good and proper theme browser. This uninspiring wiki page just wasn’t cutting it anymore.

The app itself was developed using Rails in around 30-40 hours spread over 2 weeks. Neither of us are web designers per say, so we decided to work within an open source layout put together by Will Rossiter. We leveraged plugins wherever possible, and I implemented the image validation based on Chris Wanstrath’s recent captchator on Rails article. The end result? Not too shabby if I say so myself.

Anyways, please take a look, and let us know what you think.

Haml, the templating language created by fellow Torontonian Hampton Catlin, very quietly reached version 1.0 over the holidays. In case you’re not familiar …

Haml is a markup language that’s used to cleanly and simply describe the XHTML of any web document without the use of inline code. Haml functions as a replacement for inline page templating systems such PHP, ASP, and ERB, the templating language used in most Ruby on Rails applications. However, Haml avoids the need for explicitly coding XHTML into the template, because it iself is a description of the XHTML, with some code to generate dynamic content.

If you’re looking for more, John Philip Green wrote an introductory article about Haml back in September, and Xavier Shay has a good set of examples up at RHNH.

Happy Holidays everyone. It’s been nearly two weeks since I released Reddish, and there’s been nary a peep on this blog. Busy month. I’m really pleased to see that people are downloading the theme and giving it a try. I’ve been sneaking around, checking out people’s sites, and I’ve noticed a number of outstanding issues w/ Reddish that I’d like to fix asap.

• Modifying the default column widths breaks the shadows
• Numbered lists don’t have proper margins
• There’s no place for a blog sub-title
• Articles with expired comments still show ‘Post a comment’
• ‘Continue Reading …’ appears in both the article body and excerpt

Whoops. If you’ve found any others, please let me know!

Reddish is a simple, extendable Mephisto theme – and my former blog design!

Download

You can download the latest tarball (.tar.gz), or visit the project page on GitHub.

Installation

You’ll want to unpack this in /yourblog/themes/site-1/reddish, then enable the theme through Mephisto’s admin interface.

More

Reddish is a re-skinned version of Scribbish, an excellent blogging theme designed by packagethief and ported to Mephisto by DeLynn Berry. The CSS is almost totally redone (only the syntax highlighting remains), but the XHTML/Liquid templates are 80-90% the same. Really, hats off to those guys for making Scribbish so well organized and easy to work with.

Some other details, off the top of my head.

• MIT License
• Valid XHTML 1.0 (Strict)
• hAtom Microformat (check)

Reddish was last updated May 7th, 2007.

I plan to revise Reddish on a regular basis, so comments are always welcome.

Things have been a little slow as far as content goes, but that’s because I’ve been cooking up this new theme for the past week. It’s not 100% done – there’s still some scribbish code hanging around (like the green on black code blocks), and I’m still deciding between a few link styles and effects, but it’s getting close.

I’ve learned that putting a theme together isn’t trivial, so I can understand why there’s dozens of scribbish-themed blogs out there. When it’s all said and done, I’d like to package this up and distribute it with a creative commons license. There’s only a handful of public Mephisto themes available (4-5 by my count), the last of which was released months ago, so hopefully someone will find it useful.

Anyways, if anyone has any comments, I’d love to hear them.