By Erik Akers on February 15, 2012
Over the last couple weeks I’ve got into Git and GitHub. So I figured it was about time that I added something. So today I’ve publish the base files that I use in any new web development project that isn’t using WordPress.
Right now I’m calling it WebDevBase which really didn’t that great of name, but I’ll come up with something better, hopefully. Update – I’ve changed the name to Alphastone.
It’s very basic right now and I’ll be adding to it as it’s needed, but it’s the file structure that I’ve found works the base with all projects and it using SASS for CSS sheet creation. If you haven’t heard of SASS you should take a second to check it out.
Take a second and check it out.
Posted in Coding | Tagged css, Git, GitHub, SASS |
By Erik Akers on February 14, 2012
My goal was do have some kind of design up and done by the end of January, well I should qualify that, I wanted to have a header done by the end of January. Clearly there is not header.
Why not?
Glad you asked. First I think I have a bit of ADHD when it comes to designing something for my self, it never holds my attention and I always hate it. But that’s only a minor part of the reason.
For the last few months at work we’ve been developing using a TFS server for version control and then a 3 step deployment environment with development, staging and production brunches. Having really enjoyed that process and having version control over our files as been great.
My personal development hasn’t had anything close to that workflow, so I wanted to see what I could do creating a better versioning workflow on my personal projects.
First thing I did was set up a MAMP locally so that I can run a local version of WordPress and not have FTP files live on a server to a development WordPress install. Which was create but still created some errors when it came to uploading the changed files and still didn’t have any version control.
For version control I find a BeanStalk which uses git that give me version control and a history of file changes and then using Tower to commit local changes to my BeanStalk repository. One of the best things about BeanStalk is then when it sees a file has been changed it will automatically update/upload the file to your production web server.
As you’ll see I was doing some testing as the front page of the site read’s “Beanstalk Test” this was done in getting everything tested and setup with the system.
Chris Coyier did a screencast about this that really everyone should check out to see how everything works together.
Posted in Site | Tagged beanstalk, mamp, tower, version control, wordpress |
By Erik Akers on January 4, 2012
Well we’ve made it through another year. This year I had a few people ask what was going to be my New Year’s Resolutions and really I didn’t have any good ones other then the typical try to lost some weight, etc. type ones.
So I thought about it a little and decided I had a couple good ones:
- Spend at least 15 minutes a day working on my personal projects. Because normally I get so wrapped up in work that my personal stuff gets pushed to the side so I’m going to make it a point to focus on working on some of my personal stuff every day.
- Try to do more fine art like projects, like I want to try to focus more on some photography and other graphical projects, and this goes back to trying to spend at least 15 minutes working personal stuff.
So there we go, any one else have any good ones?
Posted in Design | Tagged design, fine art, photography, resolutions |
By Erik Akers on December 22, 2011
Well the quick answer would be no. After playing around with a couple of design ideas and then the lack of time to flush out the ideas 100%, THEN coming up with roughly a 100 other ideas I want to use I decided to step back and change everything back to completely basic.
So I’ve semi restarted with the Hybrid Theme Framework and I’m building on that. I’ve had a couple of other projects pop up in the last couple of months that I’ve moved my attention to and used Hybrid with those, so I felt that it would be good to start using it with on this site so that I can take some of the other development work I’ve done and easily use it here.
On top of all that I had my trusty old MacBook Pro died on me the weekend of Thanksgiving were I was hoping to get a lot of little things done and move and ended up sidelined for two weeks until I got a replace up and working, which I’m still in the process of almost 4 weeks later.
Posted in Site | Tagged design, hybrid theme, MacBook Pro, Site, wordpress |
By Erik Akers on August 2, 2011
Over the last few days I final got a design that I liked done and decided that it was going to be the header and then worked to get it coded into the site. I added a little background to it because that was something else I’ve been playing with.
I’m going to break down how each element was created and then coded in couple later posts. I still have a couple of things I may change and mess with before I call it good for now, so I want to wait until I get it to that point before I write-up how the files and coding was created and done. And as you should be able to see the menu is not completed yet and needs some styling to fix into the header better. Not that I have anything against big light gray menu buttons but that’s just not what I pictured for the site.
So if you check back in over the next couple of days, you’ll see me playing with some colors and other things to bring the header together a little bit.
I’m also trying out the @font-face CSS rules. I have a couple of projects that I would like to use that for and wanted to do a little testing. If you know anything about fonts you’ll see that I’ve picked some pretty common fonts, I’m going to change these at some point my goal here was to find a couple of free fonts with unlimited web licenses to try.
Posted in Site | Tagged @font-face, css, fonts |
By Erik Akers on July 20, 2011
If you read my post about the long weekend that ended with me basically starting the site back over with a totally fresh WordPress install, that did fix my problem I was having with the uploading images to the Media Gallery. Luckily all the sites I was running of this WordPress install were so minor in traffic that taking them down for a couple of days didn’t really matter.
Now sites with much more traffic that would be much harder to do. I still was never able to figure out what the problem was, I figured it was the .htaccess file and that if I rebuild that it would be fixed. Well that didn’t work.
Then I tried deactivating all the plug-ins I was using. Which is normally the first troubleshoot tip you get, and still no dice.
That’s what let me to take the extreme measure of reinstalling everything. My guess on what causes that bug? Something in the Upgrading process. The old install had been WordPress MU since before the 3.0 update that combined the cores of WordPress and WordPressMU into one. Just to be clear I have nothing to back that up with other than, everything worked perfectly on a fresh install and I was getting all kinds of errors on the upgraded install.
Posted in Wordpress | Tagged Media Gallery, wordpress, WPMU |
By Erik Akers on July 19, 2011
I was having some issues with the site in general over the week-end and still hadn’t been able to solve the Media Gallery issue that I posted about a few days ago. So I set out to figure all of those issues out before moving on to the next steps in getting the site design started.
Well to make a long story short I was never able to figure out a solution to the Media Gallery issue, which I thought was pretty major because how am I going to post pretty pictures and other things to jazz this place up a little. No matter what I did I was never able to get the gallery working correctly.
So I figured it was time to do something major to try to fix it. Well the major thing was I backup up everything and started with a fresh WordPress install. Since this installation is a multi-site installation it make that process I little more in-depth. But also because it was a multi-site installation I believe that was what was leading to the Media Gallery issue.
The good news that the fresh install fixed the Media Gallery issue. The not so good news is it took me a couple of days to get everything reconfigured back correctly (Which is why there haven’t been any updates in the last few days). There is an image post that I posted just before this just for testing and it’s testing two things, one making sure the Media Gallery works which clearly it does and two to test the image post format so I can do some simple styling around that.
This whole process gave me a couple more ideas about topics to cover in the setting up of a WordPress install. Which I think I’ll cover as time allows this week.
Posted in Site |
By Erik Akers on July 14, 2011
So you may, or may not, have noticed I was playing and testing a couple of things yesterday. First yesterdays post was just a test of the Post format system so I could play with the CSS and remove things like a Post Titles and Post Meta.
Second was I was testing and figuring out how I was going to handle multiple background via CSS. Which I have some thoughts that I’ll post up once I get more testing done. There was a couple of strange things that popped up that I haven’t found an answer for yet. Why my concept for how I wanted to handle the multiple background is working the way I want, I’m not happy with the code for it yet.
Any I’ll have a much more detailed write-up about it either later day or tomorrow as I get more testing done with it.
Posted in Site | Tagged background, css, post formats |
By Erik Akers on July 12, 2011
So I was going to try to spice up the looks of things around here as the design is slowly getting worked it. But I’m also trying to get everything done be hide the scenes done (like plugins installed and working, reporting and analytics tracking, etc.) before I really jumped into everything else. So I figured hey you know something I’ll add some pretty images to make things look a little better. So why are there no images?
Seems there is a bug in the WPMS image uploading system. The images upload through the ‘Add New Media’ tab just fine but if you try to include that image into a post you’re given the nasty Red X. What’s stranger is that if you try to manually navigate to the file location on the server via a web browser it returns a 404 error. (404 means the item doesn’t exist.) But if you FTP to that location sure enough the file is sitting there just like it should be. It’s pretty interesting problem, enough that a couple of topics about it on the WordPress Support forums have popped up.
So to sum up, no images for the time being until that problem solved. So I really hope you like the black and grey for the time being.
Posted in Wordpress |
By Erik Akers on July 11, 2011
As I’ve stated before the theme of the site is going to be a child theme of a WordPress theme framework. Why child theme are really easy to set up you have to remember to add the @import CSS class or you’ll be left trying to figure what when wrong when you first active the new child them because there will be no CSS applied to the theme. What do you have to do it create a child theme? Here are all the steps:
- Create a new directory within your themes directory (/wp-content/themes/)
- You need to have the framework or theme you are going to use as the base of the child theme already installed in this directory. And before any one freaks out, installed simply means the folder that has the parent theme files just needs to be uploaded to your theme directory.
- In the new child theme directory create a style.css file that uses the following code to define that it’s both a child theme and which parent theme it is going to use.
/*
Theme Name: ChildTheme Name
Theme URI: ChildTheme URL
Description: ChildTheme Description
Author: Author’s Name
Author URI: Author’s URL ie(http://example.com/about)
Template: Parent Theme Name
Version: Version Number
*/
@import url(“../parenttheme/style.css”);
IMPORTANT – Do not forget that @import CSS line or the child theme is going to think that you are going to what to write completely new CSS for the theme. Which if you want to do that just leave it out. But with the framework I’m using all of the CSS structure as already been coded so there is no reason for in this case in redo a bunch of stuff that’s already complete. Again the beauty of using frameworks or a theme like twentyeleven as a starting point for your designs a lot of CSS and coding is already completed thus saving you time.
One other side note. If you are using WordPress MultiSite be sure you active the theme through the network admin or you will not be able to active it on a subsite.
Posted in Wordpress |