The year in retrospect
2009 was a year of struggle; workers struggling to find a new place after losing their jobs as a result of the recession, companies struggling to stay afloat, and people struggling to find solace from the loss of their beloved celebrities. To me, it was a struggle to find my place in the world outside of my Northern mining town. Unfortunately, I was unable to forge my path due to many reasons, one of which was thinking ahead. I let my emotions guide my way, and as a result, I was unprepared for the harshness of the outside world.
The year in projection
2010 is going to be the year I change all that (well, obviously, I can’t solve the world’s problems, but I can affect my own). Starting with my own name, I’ve decided to create a new personal brand identity, along with rebranding for ChickenBall Design itself. What does this mean? It means that the way I present myself and my one-man design firm is going to change.
Change forward, not backward
Who I am, my thoughts, and my blurbs about life are going to be separated from what I represent, the services I offer, and my portfolio. Speaking of my portfolio, I’m planning to build one. I may be inexperienced and just starting out, but I plan to hit the ground running after exercising my legs with figurative walking. I want to prove my worth not just to people and potential clients, but to myself. I’ve never felt so passionate about web design than I have while doing computer repair. My life as it is at this time of writing is unfulfilling, so I’m filling it fully.
In Conclusion
My English teachers warned me against using “in conclusion” to conclude an argument, but I’ve always been one to challenge the rules, and this is exactly what I’m doing.
Seeing as how my de facto web framework of choice is WordPress, I thought I would share some blog posts detailing configuration, usability, and hacks. I even plan to implement many of these tips in my own site.
How to use WordPress as a Truly Customized CMS – A short tutorial on making WordPress less of a blog and more of a CMS.
How to Use WordPress Revisions to Go Back in Time – A handy usage guide on how to manage posts with multiple authors or edits.
5 Useful And Creative Ways To Use WordPress Widgets – Take a step further to bring widgets into the forefront of your WordPress blog with this nifty guide.
10 Killer WordPress Hacks – Anybody who seriously wants some custom options utilizing the power of PHP without actually knowing PHP can benefit from this post.
10 Steps To Protect The Admin Area In WordPress – Don’t take any chances with your admin panel’s security being compromised – follow these steps!!
Mastering WordPress Shortcodes – A handy way to embed simple or complex functions into your posts and pages, thus controlling exactly where they appear in your site without having to hardcode them into your themes.
10 Exceptional WordPress Hacks – More like X hacks. I find that the first hack for TinyURLs is useless to somebody like me who thinks that the URL should be transparent to the average end user. Why bother with something like this when it’s more work for the same end result in the viewport? Other than that, there are a lot of useful hacks here, especially #2, #6, and #9.
Custom Fields Hacks For WordPress – Ever wonder what those Custom Fields are for in WordPress when you create a new post? Well, wonder no more! More hackerisms exclusively using Custom Fields to control post behavior individually.
10 Useful WordPress Loop Hacks -While I would only use a couple of these hacks, they pertain to the Loop and are very useful for those who want to hardcode hacks into the template itself, as opposed to the Custom Fields hacks.
Power Tips For WordPress Template Developers – Some general tips on how to achieve common WordPress CMS functionality that isn’t built into the system, but can be unlocked with a bit of hacking.
Wordpress Theme Development Frameworks – Even with all the versatility that most users see as unique, designers mostly do repetitive work to obtain that individual look on each of their projects. Why repeat all the boring stuff when you can get a theme framework instead?
When I’m working on a task like web design or blogging, I always turn to music to provide inspiration for creativity. The genres I find myself turning to depend on what kind of work I’m producing.
For example, I turn to hard rock or heavy metal when I’m working on something edgy. I immerse myself in action movie scores when I need to set a tone of epic proportions. Pop music for hip and modern, electronica for futuristic and experimental, and the list goes on.
I’m into a number of artists, but most recently, I’ve gotten into the latest from Michael Giacchino (who composed the score for the new Star Trek movie), Halestorm, Lacuna Coil, Linkin Park’s New Divide, and the Battlefield single from Jordin Sparks. Even though they’re not as recent, Bullet For My Valentine’s Scream Aim Fire and In This Moment’s The Dream still rotate in my playlists.
Do you also use music as inspiration? If so, who do you usually listen to? If not, what do you use?
I admit that with an infinitesimal amount of geeky ways to go about surfing the web, even I lag behind from time to time. In this case, I’ve fallen by the wayside when it comes to RSS feeds, which I’ve recently discovered. I’ve always known about feed readers, but never knew just how useful they were until I got my BlackBerry. Now I can get my favorite blog updates on the go, which saves me from having to buy reading material for the bus ride to work everyday. I currently use Viigo, which lets me aggregate my Google Reader subscriptions. Cool beans!
This is where the fantasy ends and harsh reality begins. I found out that a number of blogs only provide excerpts or summaries of feeds. This means that in order to read full articles, you have to click through to visit the actual blog. This is what one would call ‘a bad thing’ because of the following reasons:
(1) Time and bandwidth is used up in visiting a site that may or may not be optimized for a mobile viewing experience.
(2) End users like myself who have an amount of feed subscriptions numbering in the double digits may be discouraged from even reading the full article at all.
(3) Frustrations may even escalate to a complete unsubscription of the offending blog and possible boycott.
(4) It’s just not cool, dood.
So, after learning about this setback, I found out that I was also guilty of this treasonous act – my feeds were set to summarized. That changed immediately, so now my blog feeds are the full enchiladas, complete with salsa (hot or mild choices available).
I know that the reason for summarizing your feeds is to generate more traffic for your blog. However, if you use services like FeedBurner, which also tracks your feed statistics, you shouldn’t need to cripple your feeds anymore. Gimmicky tactics to lure people to your site are tacky. Besides, that’s what money is for.
The trackback: http://www.webdesignerwall.com/tutorials/20-wordpress-recipes-codes/
There are some interesting PHP code snippets here that make life easier as a WordPress designer, especially if you want to use the framework to its fullest potential. In fact, with the power of PHP, plugins, and templates, the number of things you can achieve with WP is almost limitless!
Even though staying at Ian’s place has been a bit of an inconvenience for both parties involved, Ian and I have always shared similar interests, and web design is definitely one of them. He recently introduced me to the Carrington CMS theme framework, which is a theme for WordPress that is more than meets the eye (shameless plug for the upcoming 2nd Transformers movie). It’s boasts a more complicated but logically structured framework that allows for easier modification without much hacking. I’ve been playing around with a couple of Chris Pearson’s themes, namely Neoclassical and Copyblogger (nay, a more accurate substitution for playing would be fighting), and they have not been easy to modify, because Pearson’s markup is horrendous and unstructured from a coder’s point of view. However, you can’t fault the guy, since he is primarily a designer and not a coder. Fortunately, I’ve developed habits during my coding years that I can’t shake even now. For example, compare the following snippets of CSS markup:
div#content { margin: 0; padding: 10px; font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; background: #FFFFFF; }
div#content {
margin: 0;
padding: 10px;
font-family: Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
background: #FFFFFF;
}
Which one looks more structured and easier to navigate to you? Obviously the second one. But, I digress; this post was not to critique Pearson’s markup habits but to spread the word about Carrington. You can get Carrington already pre-built into two templates called Blog and Text. If you design for a mobile platform, there’s even a Mobile theme available. However, if you want complete control over how your site will look while still taking advantage of the framework, you’ll want JAM (Just Add Markup). Check out the Carrington themes here.
I installed the JAM theme on my Beta site and as of this writing, it currently looks like the screenshot below.
I’ll admit it. I’m an advocate of corporations and companies that I believe provide the best product and/or service this side of our universal dimension. In this case, I am promoting SitePoint, which also has quite a robust community.
A new book was released recently – Sexy Web Design by Elliot Jay Stocks. Wait a second – this isn’t just another web design book about CSS and XHTML standards compliancy, this is an honest-to-goodness, aesthetically pleasing, design book! Well, shiver me timbers, arr!
Sorry, pardon the pirate talk.
The last design oriented book published by SitePoint was The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design, which got me into SitePoint in the first place, but was more of an appetizer book than a main course. Once I saw this new book, I bought it immediately (with 34% off for my previous patronage, w00t!) and even tossed in the PDF for good measure. After downloading the PDF and flipping through it, I realized that I was looking at one heck of a book, detailing the entire design process from concept to production. How exquisite!
So, buy Sexy Web Design now. I highly recommend it. Not only that, but SitePoint finally employed a protection scheme to protect your purchases – each PDF you buy is encrypted according to your account details. Nifty. While you’re there, buy more books from them, join their community, and read through their articles. Even if you don’t buy books from them right away, if you’re serious about web design or development and spend more time on their website, you’ll be buying from them soon enough.
To think, I bought The Principles Of Beautiful Web Design on a whim from Amazon. Lucky me.
I discovered a bug in Modmat’s sandbox.php when following the article, Giving WordPress Its Own Directory, where clicking Home will take you to the URL listed in Settings > General > WordPress address (URL), which may not display your WordPress homepage properly.
Locate the following code in wp-content/themes/modmat/functions/sandbox.php:
echo '><a href="' . get_settings('siteurl') . '">Home</a>';
And replace it with this line:
echo '><a href="' . get_option('home') . '">Home</a>';
I’m currently using a modified version of Modmat as my theme, but as part of my WordPress CMS update project, I will slowly phase that out and develop my own theme from scratch. However, the theme I create will be extremely modular and generic, so that it will be easy to theme over and over again later for my clients.
So, if you haven’t figured it out, I changed my WordPress installation so that it will run from the root directory, without having to actually have the files cluttering the root directory. This means that I can separate my site from my business while making it all appear seamless. This information should actually be a part of my WordPress CMS Update entry series, but it’s a minor update and doesn’t justify creating a whole entry just for that, although I’ll include that change in the next update (for my own personal tracking purposes).
And so it began…
I forgot where that quote was from, but I remember the ominous voice that spoke it.
I started a project to convert my WordPress installation into a CMS by going through every single entry and reassigning the categories and tags associated with them. As a result, I cut out a lot of the fat and I’m now down to just three categories. Eventually, I’ll be consolidating my pages and categories together so that they will look seamless. This will involve some major hacking of my theme, which will become the basis for my theme templates and framework.
As a result of my site content, I decided to rename my NSFW content to Prawns (because prawns just sounds cooler and more inconspicuous), and then I excluded that content from the Loop of the frontpage and Archives. As a result, you actually have to filter the exact category if you want to view that content. Later on, I’ll be coding some AJAX dialogs to warn users of NSFW content. Also, each page and category will have a slightly different site design. Perhaps different color schemes? It might work if I carefully choose my color themes. Thank goodness for kuler.
As this project progresses, I should become more experienced with doing this kind of coding. Once that’s done, I’ll be working on the design portion, which will be the coup de grace. I can hardly wait!
I didn’t get much tangibly done this weekend, but I learned a lot. I finished reading one of the new books I ordered online – The Principles of Successful Freelancing. Great book. After reading it once through, I had a better understanding of what I was getting into, how I want to pursue it, and what goals I wish to accomplish by doing so. To summarize, I want to freelance outside the boundaries of corporate red tape in Winnipeg, taking as many projects as I can reasonably handle, and then eventually improving my design skills enough that I might become exclusive enough to pick and choose my clients. I see so many creatively designed sites that I want to eventually be able to design in my own style. As a Chinese artist, I will be expected to represent by including some sort of a symbol in all my works, kind of like how John Woo puts doves in all his movies.
I started my master plan by going through the book again, this time trying to put down what I specifically need to do on paper (virtual paper, that is). I already put together my SWOT analysis and the makings of a business plan (the old one was just too dry and complicated for my needs).
The second thing I did was join the SitePoint Forums. Hopefully, I will be able to put some time aside for participation, as I will need to pool as many resources as I can if I want to be able to ask for help in the future.
I found a couple of new CMS frameworks – MODx and ExpressionEngine. MODx is interesting and looks simple to use, but ExpressionEngine didn’t seem as such. Regardless, I installed MODx and was already quite impressed at the default theme and dashboard. I’ll poke around a bit before deciding further. My issues with Joomla and Drupal left a bitter taste in my mouth about CMS frameworks in general. How are my clients going to figure out how to administer such a labyrinth of unnecessary terminology? Still, if there’s a better way to follow the CMS path, I will find it.
Although I designed a logo for my company, something has been missing from it, and after perusing several articles about logo design and applying the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle, I also came across Lealea Designs, which turned out to be a godsend for corporate branding DIYers. Also, Lea is quite cute in her writing style (and she’s also quite cute in person), so her “blogblog” is fun to read.