Category Archives: WordPress
Developing a Website on the iPad
The iPad has a reputation as being only for media consumption. It wasn’t possible to really create with the device. Any serious computer work had to be done on your laptop or desktop. I needed to prove this wrong.
This write-up has some bias. I very much want my iPad to be a computer replacement, for battery life, size, and ease of use alone. I set out to see if I could develop and maintain a website using only the iPad.
The project chosen was Quotey.net. A WordPress based site filled with quotes, poems, and essays. To be clear this was created from scratch on the iPad. There was no previous version I was updating
WordPress 3.3 Beta 2
I am usually quick to try out new versions of WordPress, but I was a bit late to the party this time. I am finally updated to WordPress 3.3 Beta 2.
On first impression, this update is mostly cosmetic. The admin bar has been completely re-done. A welcome change, since I really disliked the old admin bar. The sidebar menu has been updated with fly-out styling sub-menus. It makes overall for a much cleaner look and much more enjoyable user experience.
WordPress has always been my favorite platform for building websites (both personal and business) because of it’s functionality and flexibility. My biggest complaint was the extra work needed to simplify the Admin side for clients and other users of the sites. WordPress 3.3 is a big step in the right direction for changing all of that. I think the default set-up of 3.3 is simple enough for anyone to start using right away.
Limit Login Attempts
Limit Login Attempts is a must have plugin for any WordPress installation. It’s always one of the first plugins I install. It’s one of those plugins you don’t even realize is running until something goes wrong (and I mean that in a very good way).
Someone recently tried to guess my password or hack into this website. Luckily I had Limit Login Attempts active. After three failed attempts the user’s IP was logged, blocked for 24 hours, and an incident report was email to me. I was able to see that the IP address was from no one I knew or any of my computer (it was from Russia) so it was put and kept on the permanent lock out list.
A great little system that I forget about until something like this actually happens. You can also review a log of all the lockouts that have occurred within the plugin settings. I highly recommend installing this plugin on any of your WordPress installation, who couldn’t use a little extra security.
New Website Theme (6.0)
I’ve been working on a new theme for the past month or so (well pretending to work). I wanted to a do a complete overall. There were lots of new features I wanted to add in, but maintain the general simplistic look of the entire site. I had a few good designs I was playing around with, then I stumbled across the Sight Theme by wpshower (if you haven’t checked out wpshower before, I highly recommend it for WordPress themes).
This theme had many of the features I was already looking to build into my theme, and was built with minimalism in mind. An unobtrusive sidebar, ajax post loading, multiple ways to view posts… it was a great starting point.
In the span of a couple of days, I was able to build on this great framework already in place and make the design tailored just for my needs. As you can tell I changed the navigation location, and did a couple tweaks to the post formatting. I also added in the WordPress Post Format feature that was introduced in version 3.1. Right now I am only using the ‘quote’ format for the quotes on the site, but built-in support to use the image, gallery, and link formats in the future. So look for a few more changes in the near future.
I’m very pleased with the final result. More work certainly needs to be done, but this is by far the most drastic change this website has undergone since starting it. Let me know what you think or if you find any problems with it in the comments.
Simple Slate – WordPress Theme
Simple Slate is a WordPress theme based on the 2nd version of this blog. It uses many of the features added in WordPress 3.0 including…
1. Custom Backgrounds
2. Custom Menus and Primary Menu
3. Featured Images on pages and posts
4. Custom sidebar content for home, pages, and posts
5. @FontFace Post Titles – Josefin Sans Std Light
6. Share on Twitter button with wp_shortlink
7. Widget ready sidebar
8. Feature Images show up in the posts admin section of your blog (see image below). If there is a feature image for a post, it will be displayed within your admin section. This is great for people that tend to associate posts with pictures, as I often do.
This would be the first WordPress theme I have released into the public. It is released under the GNU General Public License, as is with most WordPress content. The theme is made to be pretty minimal. Personally, I don’t think it looks/works well with many widgets. There is lots of room for customizing though. The code has some comments in it. If you have any questions leave a comment here or on twitter.
New Website Theme (5.0)
In what is certainly the shortest run of a theme I’ve ever had, I have upgraded from version 4.0 to 5.0 in less than two weeks. I never even got a chance to write a post in version 4.0 (except for the one announcing it).
So why the rapid change?
First, version 4.0 was good on paper but not in practice. In mock-ups and localhost testing, it was a nice minimalist theme built with longer text posts in mind. It didn’t work well with all the content on this site. I still think the theme has potential, and will continue to work on it for a public release farther down the road.
Second, WordPress has released a beta (now on beta2) of WordPress 3.1. I use this site as a testing ground and upgrade to beta releases as soon as they are available. I like testing all the new features, and 3.1 brings some great ones (post formats being a big one, also here). So with the new features, I needed a new theme that would let me test all this stuff. Version 5.0 theme was built on WordPress 3.1, with many of the upcoming features enabled and ready for testing.
And last, I just really like the overall look of this theme much better. It was built from scratch, as all the others. It was a design that just came together nicely. I’ve liked it since I first drew a mock up. This theme should be here to stay for some time.
New Website Theme (Version 4.0)
So tonight I launched version 4.0 of stephenwoicik.com. The transition was about as not smooth as possible. This is one of the more drastic changes I’ve done. Past themes had a lot of flexibility and were built for all kinds of posts. I’ve changing that now. The new theme is much more text heavy. Made for reading longer written posts (by far the most popular ones on the site, and the one I need the most practice at). By making the theme based around this, I’m forcing myself to practice writing longer and better posts. Don’t expect many more photo heave posts, they’ll end up going somewhere else. However, the quotes will always remain.
If you are on the site tonight, I’m well aware of the problems on the homepage. This site was built with permalinks in mind, and as a result, I neglected some of other pages (index, archive, etc…). Over the next few days expect to see some changes as I slowly update everything and transition the theme from being on my localhost to a live site.
As with my past designs. I’ll release a version of this site as a free theme for anyone interested. Look for a post on that in a week or so.
New Website Theme (version 3.0)
Today’s rendition of stephenwoicik.com marks version 3.0. This version isn’t completely done but I wanted to launch it live to see how it worked with some of the content I already had on here. I’ll be making minor changes throughout the rest of the week and should have everything finalized by the end of the weekend. If you find any problems on your own don’t hesitate to leave a comment or grab my attention on twitter.
This new theme is a lot cleaner visually (no more splash page) and coding wise. Many of the new functions of WordPress 3.0 are utilized, including feature images, custom menus, and custom post types. I will be using the custom post types for quotes and phots in the future, hopefully bringing better organization to the site. There is also a more dynamic sidebar. All together, it achieves a more custom feel to each page without doing multiple page templates. Simple is better.
I’ve given some thought about releasing the theme as a generic WordPress 3.0 theme. I’ll have to test it, make sure I didn’t leave any custom links in the template files. But if you are interested I can send you what I have for the theme, just shoot me a message.
New Site Design and How to Add Fonts to Your Website
I’ve been wanting to update the look of this site for quite some time. The three day Memorial Day weekend provided the perfect time.
The Home, About, and Project pages are static HTML. The Blog and Contact pages are WordPress (eventually the entire site needs to be moved to WordPress). The background for each page is a different picture I took. They load somewhat slow at the moment. I’m working on speeding that up.
I also started playing around with @font-face and the Google Font Directory. I’m using the Josefin Sans Std Light font by Santiago Orozco for all the header fonts on the site. It was surprisingly easy to set up and use. One line of code anywhere in the header about the </head>
<link href=’http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Josefin+Sans+Std+Light’ rel=’stylesheet’ type=’text/css’>
Then call the font in your CSS document:
h2 {font-family: ‘Josefin Sans Std Light’, arial, serif; font-size:2.8em; font-weight:700;}
The future of text on the web will be interesting as a result.
The hardest part of the site redesign was the about page. Learned first hand how hard it is to write/design an about page. The one up there now won’t be the final design, but I didn’t want that one page to stop me from updating the entire site.
Now Running WordPress 3.0
I’ve been testing out WordPress 3.0 Beta on my localhost since it first got released. I finally felt it was stable enough to start testing it on a live site, so this domain is now running on 3.0. It’s mostly just an administration change. I’m going to start testing more of the features out. I’m pretty excited with what I’ve seen so far. WordPress is really moving to be a platform you can built your entire website or network off of. And it’s becoming simple enough to use that its what I suggest most our clients at Rivik Media use for content management. (more…)