Web design and development musings from a mad man.
Last week I wrote a post about what I was doing to speed up my website. While that post is an informative, well-written piece of literary genius, it didn’t go into a whole lot of detail. That detail is in this post, because two posts are better than one. I’ve tweaked, found problems, fixed a few problems, and learned a thing or two. I also learned there is a lot to learn.
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Yes you all know by now that Wordpress 2.5 is out, and it is great. I have been using the beta as a test platform for my newest premium theme and I have to say it is a great platform.
The admin area takes a bit of getting used to but is ultimately much better than the previous versions. The media handling is much improved and I absolutely love the new write panel.
For developers there are a few new goodies and options, but I think the greatest feature is that of quicktags and galleries. I plan on taking full advantage of this in the near future and I can imagine most theme developers are already playing with new ideas.
The commented code is also huge for developers, as you no longer have to google functions to know what they do, or read a lot of code to guess it’s use.
All in all I will have to say 2.5 is a great upgrade and the guys at Automattic are really pushing wordpress.
I was planning on posting part two of “Speed Up Your Website” but unfortunately I need to move to a new web host. I won’t go into the details but I am leaving Dreamhost for a more reliable host at Eleven2.
More tutorials, and goodies after the move to come, including the launch of Checkmate.
Update: The move to the new host has gone smoothly and everything should be back to normal except no downtime.
I told you a surprise was coming, and this is it. A free theme! I’ve named it Solid, why? Because it was the first word that came to mind when making the theme AND I believe its a pretty solid theme. While looking around at some blogs I started noticing some really nice simple blogs (design wise). These were the blogs I was stopping at and actually looking at the content. I decided to design my own theme in this fashion and this is the result.
A few days ago I posted about a new premium theme, today I show you screen shots of that theme. It’s name is Checkmate and it is a departure from all the magazine and news type themes. The theme will be in two parts a business theme and a blog theme, more details on that later.
The shots below are of the blog theme, which has entered the testing and polishing phase. Checkmate will come in several color themes, has many of theme options, is easily customized, and comes with built in widgets and ad management! The design is simple and professional but is very modern.
I also will have another wordpress related surprise coming very soon.
Part two of this article is now up with a lot more tips and tricks on how to speed up your website!
When I first designed curtishenson.com I took into no consideration the speed that it loaded. OK, that isn’t entirely true. I compressed my images…a little, some of my javascript was compressed, and my CSS is compressed(but only because I was trying out the new Blueprint CSS compressor). So when my site actually got content on it, everything started grinding to a halt. I tried speeding it up with WP_Cache, then Super_Cache, then phpSpeedy. But I still had problems. I was planning on starting to advertise more, release a new premium theme and my site really needed to be faster Continue Reading
I’m developing yet another premium Wordpress theme(Check out Chocolate if you haven’t seen it). The theme is still in it’s infancy so I don’t want to show too much, but I will tell you it has already entered the coding phase.
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While re-aligning my website I realized I was writing a lot of redundant code. Some page templates were nearly exactly the same like the category and tags pages, the only difference was one word! Copying and pasting that one template seemed like a big waste of time, and it was.
I read somewhere that good programmers are lazy programmers. Not in the sense that they don’t fix their own code when they find a better way to do it…but that they don’t repeat code, over and over and over again. Not only does it take longer to repeat code, but it is a royal pain when you need to update(like when a CSS framework gets updated and drops a class name…).
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Looking around the site you may notice graphics that look like stickers or old worn paper and cloth. These are getting more and more popular as grunge starts taking over the shiny web2.0 look, and they are really easy to make. Now turn on some good music and lets get started. Continue Reading
It was a long weekend for me, to make a long story short I’ve got a fresh new install of OS X and a lot more cars in Forza 2. Not that anything went wrong, just needed to update my desktop machine to the 21rst century and relax a bit from all my coding and designing. About the time I was installing MySQL I thought I should share my development environment. While it isn’t perfect for everyone, it is a solid environment that will work for most people. Continue Reading
