So I thought about it a little and decided I had a couple good ones:

1. 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.
2. 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?

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.

Basically the Framework is getting come code rewritten and update which totally stopped what I was doing here because the updates are to the core of the Framework which kinda affects everything else. I’ve also been developing a branding strategy for a network of 3 other sites that are going to be coming soon enough.

So updates are just going to have a little bit of time between them until the framework code is fixed/finished up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

1. Create a new directory within your themes directory (/wp-content/themes/)
2. 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.
3. 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.

Everything right now as just been happening be hide the scenes. So here is the list of things that has been done even though it looks like nothing is really getting done:

• Site installation configured
• Set up and configuration of the base set of plugs that are use
• Testing of the theme framework that is getting use. Yes, I keep tease that… I’ll get to those details.
• Permalink structure
• Working out the starting design. It’s not going to be prefect but I’ll start there and improve it over time.

Again doesn’t sounds like a lot, and really it isn’t. My last big thing I’m going to get done because the design really kicks off is making sure that the WordPress post formats are working the way I want them to, which mean I’m going to have to redo the loop.php file from the framework that is being used.