I’ve installed the comment luv plugin. It’s pretty cool. When you leave a comment, it will add a link to the last post from your blog.
It’s a nifty little plugin, I must say.
I told you, the updates just keep comin’.
Ok, here’s the basics of my new site look. I was going to just have it professionally designed, but it was really cost prohibitive. I don’t make any money on this blog. I just blog to… blog.
While looking for designs, I found one that I was in love with, but it needed some changes to really fit me. I’ve made those changes.
It is by no means complete, I still have some tweaking to do, but the header works and that is the coolest part! Just move your mouse over the pictures and you can see the whole pic. It still has to be validated and many parts just plain changed to work the way I want them to.
It’s going to be a busy couple of weeks for me coming up. I have a very important deadline coming August 15 and one of my office staff is on vacation for a week. So it means more work and less time at home.
It also means I don’t know when I will be able to make some more changes. I am sure they will be made slowly, but surely.
I am going to try to get some pictures posted from this weekend.
In the meantime, let me know what you think about the site. Is it hard to read? Do you see any weird glitches (besides the spacing on the sidebar and the header going away - grr). To leave a comment you click on the comment indicator on the right. To get back home, just click on “crap-o-rama” at the top.
I like how that is set up, but I don’t like that you can’t see the header. Like I said, it still needs some work but I do like it better than my other theme.
I hope everyone had a great weekend… I know I did.
We are heading up north this weekend. We don’t have an Internet connection there. So I figured I would just upload my new page - little glitches and all. Especially since parts of the theme I’m using now is so … non-working.
But one of the major elements isn’t working right. And while I have been working on my perfectionist streak (it’s such a curse sometimes), there some things I just can’t get past. And a major element of my new page not working right… makes my eye twitch, so?
No new site yet.
The frustration comes from my test site works well. I’m running it on my portable drive. So I’m kinda baffled as to why it’s not working when I upload it live. But as anyone who does any kind of computer work knows, I just need to walk away for a minute and look at it fresh.
So fear not… there will be an unveiling and it will be worth the wait (I hope).
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Cindy - I was thinking going north puts us closer to you, but I checked a map… I think we are just about as far, just another direction. But maybe we can still meet in the middle some time. Of course you (and yours) are always welcome to the pad north - I’ll buy the wine.
Ok, so here’s a little peek into my thought process.
I do like my wordpress.com blog but there have been some limitations and I was really ready for a design change.
I checked godaddy.com and www.crap-o-rama.com was available. I had checked previously but it was not available. So I registered it and decided to sign up for a couple of months of hosting. I didn’t want to purchase a whole year in case I was biting off more than I could chew.
I do have some experience designing a couple of lame beginner sites but that was way back in the day and I coded them with html by hand. When I first moved over to my wp.com site I tried to make some changes and dabbled a bit into css, but not much.
I love to learn so I was excited about the thought of really being able to be me with my blog design. However, because time is such a valuable commodity, I knew it may not happen the way I wanted.
I bought Wordpress for Dummies to just get a quick overview of what I was getting into. But like most things I read for a quick lesson, there just wasn’t enough detail information.
At this point I decided I should just find a theme I like, throw some pics in the header and call it good. Through this whole process I was going through thousands and thousands of pictures playing with effects on them and looking for the right one(s) to use.
Then I found the current theme and loved that the template had spots for some pictures. So I spent last weekend getting everything set up and transferred over.
Then I ran across www.wpdesigner.com and a blog entry called “So you want to create a Wordpress themes, huh?” . What an amazingly written tutorial!!!!
The first sentence:
”Creating a WordPress theme from scratch is not hard. I’ll hold your hand through it.”
really gives you the essence of the tutorial set. It is very well written and if you follow along you should really get it. It is a 16 section tutorial that really just brings it all together. I have gone through the whole tutorial and the most important thing I realized?
My current theme is a cluster. Don’t you love the way there are 3 different fonts in this post. It’s the little stuff that makes me crazy! No offense to the person who created it, but it doesn’t handle widgets and it’s not very well organized. And actually some of the coding was wrong to the point that neither WP nor my statcounter account were able to track even the number of visitors. All my stats said 0 visitors, yet I had comments. I have fixed that… the font thing… not so much.
Now, I am in the process of creating a theme from scratch and I am very excited. It may be a while before you actually see the fruits of my labor, but you will see it.
June is a very busy month for me ( yea right, at this point, which one isn’t?). My nephew turned 18 and graduated. My 4th anniversary is on the 12th, Hunter turns 2 on the 14th, my best friends birthday is on the 15th plus that is Father’s Day and July 1 is a pretty important deadline at work and I am really trying to be on vacation that week.
On a sad note, about half way through the tutorial the blog author made an announcement that he has sold his site. $65,000!!! Holy shit. So far there haven’t been any major changes in design or content. Actually the new owner has made an introduction post but that’s it. Now there is spam and shitty comments littered through-out the site (there is a forum section that has virtually been rendered unusable because of a few @ssholes. But most importantly, the great content is still there.
If you have any interest at all in understanding designs behind WP, this is the place to go.
And to Small Potato: I am sorry that you are no longer the owner of www.wpdesigner.com, your ability to write clear concise tutorials is a gift and I truly hope you haven’t given it up for good.