samaxes

With the new year starting, I decided to try some changes here at samaxes.com.

First, I’ve changed the blog theme to a slightly modified Derek Punsalan’s Grid Focus.
Some of these modifications were mostly due to some complains about the size of the content column versus the sidebars columns on the previous theme. Since this is mainly a technical blog it makes it easily on the eye to have a wider content column.

Another visual change was the code syntax highlighting plugin. I was using the SyntaxHighlighter Plus and now I’m using WP-CodeBox.
SyntaxHighlighter Plus served me well in the past, but it has some disadvantages, such as:

• Escapes the code special characters, making it harder to edit code (also has a bug when escaping ‘&’ ampersand characters);
• Require that a lot of JavaScript files are sent to the client in order to style the code.

Although I’m using browser caching, 70-80% of this blog visitors are new visitors, so the cache won’t help them. This means that I should try to minimize the number of HTTP requests as much as I can.
WP-CodeBox is based on the GeSHi syntax highlighter. All the parsing is executed on the server side and it supports a lot more languages than the SyntaxHighlighter.
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For those who are tired of the JSCalendar available skins, check my JSCalendar white theme at Google Code Hosting.