Made a couple of additions to my site today. As you can see all of the titles to my sidebar items have corrosponding icons for them, gives it a splash of colour I guess. I’ve also brought the Moblog back after being on hiatus for a very long time. My old moblog was a completely independant PHP script that I wrote, but not having control of my web host’s PHP settings and wanting to enable certain features, I had to abandon it. This time round I’ve gone with a much more simple approach. This time I’m using Flickr to host my photos, I can send a picture message to my assigned flickr email address and it adds it to my photostream, I’m using a Wordpress plugin called Pflickr, which was designed to display a random image for a desired amount of time, I modified it slightly to not grab a random picture but to grab the latest picture added. It works very well and I’m pretty happy with how it works. Kudos to Christos for developing such a nice simple widget for me to mess with.

I’ve been reading all this hype about twitter, didn’t really have any idea what it was. As far as I can tell after signing up it’s pretty much just like the facebook status updates, but open to the public, which is kinda cool. The main thing that I like about it is updating your status with a simple text message, and it doesn’t charge you any extra for it, standard text message rates. It integrates really well into Wordpress, I’ve got my twitter status updates (or tweets, as they’re called) on my sidebar now. I can also setup twitter to work as a direct blog post, which, I’m not real keen on. I don’t really understand the hype at this point, being that it’s such a basic service.Β  Links below.

Twitter, Twitter Tools WP PluginΒ 

Having not done any web development in a while I think I’d forgotten why I hate IE so damn much. Stupid rendering issues of a WC3 compliant page, just so damn annoying. All I can say is, praise jebus for the <!–[if IE]> workaround

Wordpress is now my CMS of choice for any freelance work I do. Once you get the hang of developing themes for Wordpress, it’s incredibly easy, and you can pretty much lay it out however you want, my first theme was simply the one you’re looking at now, basic, but functional. I finished developing a theme for a school website I’m doing at the moment and I got it together as smooth as if I was building a static page. Usually when I’m designing a layout for a web page, I just mock the thing up in Fireworks first, get it looking how I want, that probably takes the longest, I have trouble getting a layout I feel good about. Once I’m happy I slice up the images I need and then go write the code (don’t worry I don’t export the Fireworks HTML, yuck!). I think the main thing I like about Wordpress is the pure simpleness of the administration section, it’s basic as you like, and should be easy to show not so savvy people how to use it. A lot of people I’ve shown the Joomla admin section to have looked at it a bit wide eyed, but Wordpress is a lot more straight forward. Until recently I thought it was just a blog application, but if you wanted to, you could ignore that altogether and just setup a site with editable static pages. I’m almost done with the current freelance Wordpress site I’m doing at the moment and I’ll plug it when I’m done.

If you want to learn how to develop your own Wordpress theme, I recommend the Cyberhackz tutorial, it’s straight forward and to the point, and honestly, once you’ve done one, you’re ready to go. One suggestion I’d have is to follow the tutorial with an XHTML layout already developed, and cut and past the segments you need from that into the segmented theme files, works quite well. After that, keep yourself a blank basic theme for reference.

SO I guess I’ve pretty much finished the layout. Just need to re-add my static content again. The sidebar widgets are bloody fantastic, you just drag your sidebar items where you want them. I also found a nice little menu plugin which allowed me to make the navigation menu at the top of the sidebar. Pretty happy with how smoothly it all happened, got 98% of the side done within a day… Ok so it’s 1am, but close enought.