Like many Wordpress designers and developers I’ve been guilty of the plugin bloat that comes with maintaining a Wordpress site. There are just so many cool things out there that I want to try, but sooner or later you start to have huge download times, and JavaScript libraries start misbehaving. Sometimes I imagine the libraries having a dance off to determine who is the coolest with the best moves.

Then again maybe that just me watching too many cheesy dance movies.

When I tried a few of the plugins out there, the JavaScript libraries started conflicting, my site stopped loading and it was just a huge headache trying to troubleshoot someone else’s code. After some research I came across this lovely little HTML snippet provided by Twitter. It allows you to pull in your tweets by including a couple of JavaScript files that are added just above the closing body tag, and a small amount of code that you place wherever you want your tweets to show up. It’s pretty simple. In fact it’s taken me much longer to write this post then to add my Twitter updates to the site.

Once you have your twitter updates working on your site, don’t forget to spend a little bit of time making it unique. You could always incorporate one of the interesting sets of twitter icons and buttons that are out there.

Good luck and if you have any questions I’ll do my best to help.

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A lot has changed in the last 9 months.  No, I haven’t popped out a kid, but Gary and I did get engaged in April, right before a trip to New York City.  We’ve set the date for September 19, 2009.  I may or may not share my horror stories experiences of the wedding planning.  I haven’t quite decided on that one yet since I seem to be missing the girly wedding gene.

A new website means a new look and feel and I’ve decided to go with a 1940’s pulp novel aesthetic.  I’m really digging the new look, it’s a lot more graphical then anything I’ve done in the past.  You can really see how Gary has influenced me.

I have some big ideas for this site, many of which include more of a slant towards the geeky but we’ll have to see.  I always say shit like that and then it never happens.  Now that the site is live, I have a reason to start going through a years worth of photos and start posting those suckers online.  I love the layout of my new Photo Gallery so you should check it out.

If you’ve followed me from Digital Masquerade or LiveJournal, I’d like to thank you for your patience.  Hopefully another nine months of silence is not in the cards for the future.

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I also uploaded the pictures from Gary’s birthday party last month. I had them up on Facebook but I thought I would share them here as well.

I’d include links to the photos but my WPG2 image chooser is not working and I’m too lazy to troubleshoot it right now. Besides they are currently developing an updated version that will support Lightbox…sure I could modify it now but why duplicate work that perfectly amazing developers are already doing? It’s not because I’m lazy *ahem*.

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3. Wordpress 2.2 has issues with K2

I’ve installed this plugin for now, but I think I’ll be working on upgrading my K2 theme or creating my own from scratch that will support native widgets. Looks like I found my Sunday afternoon project. Nothing more satisfying then updating the plumbing when it starts to leak.

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For those of you on LiveJournal you can check out the site at Digital Masquerade.

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It’s at times like this that I pull up my trusty del.icio.us account and click on my “inspiration” tag to present the following three sites on my screen. They almost always give me a jump start, and while I rarely actually use the colour sets they have created, it gives me a chance to think outside of my comfort zone.

• Kuler
  kuler helps you explore, create and share color themes for your creative projects. Use it as an on-line application or download themes to use with Adobe Create Suite 2 applications.
• Daily Color Scheme
  dailycolorscheme.com is your daily color resource. A new scheme every day, with lots of schemes in the archive.
• Colr
  This site isn’t as slick looking as the other two but it allows you to tag colours and submit to them with RSS feeds.

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1. Well it seems that I was wrong
2. Razz My Berries!!
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INSPIRATION
So what’s a girl to do when she wants different looks for her site, but not the work of doing a complete redesign two or three times a year? I took inspiration from David Shea’s site Mezzoblue and his Fountain re-design. With Fountain, he has grouped his postings into collections, and each of those collections has a colour scheme and photo associated with it. When I first saw this I almost wet myself! Now I just had to figure out how to do something similar using WordPress and my inadequate PHP/JavaScript skills. While I was at it, I thought, I may as well also figure out how to implement something similar to Dooce’s photo of the day in my sidebar that would show up in my RSS feed and cross post easily to my Livejournal account.

DESIGN
If you know me, you know I love the 50’s style, especially the gorgeous pinup girls. Instead of using photographs for my collections, I decided to use a different Alberto Vargas pin-up girl as the inspiration for each collection colour scheme. At first I thought that I would run out of girls so instead of four, three month collections a year, I created three, four month collections. Now that I look at my Archives page, however, I will be changing that and adding an additional girl for each year.

I created the background and icons on the site using are a mixture of dingbats and images I created on my own. The look I was going for was a nuclear, 50’s era style.

One thing that I have yet to do is make the PNG transparency work properly in IE 6. I was having some problems getting the hacks to work. I’ll get it done eventually but in the meantime, I would like to take this moment to let the IE 6 people know that IE 7 is out and you should probably upgrade for the security features alone. Better yet you could use FireFox 2 but IE 7 is better then nothing. How do you know if you’re using IE6? This site has horrible gray backgrounds behind the pinups, behind the links or on the sides of the white content area.

WORDPRESS THEME & PLUGINS
In attempting to create this layout, I think I combed through hundreds of other of layouts and about two hundred plugin possibilities. Nothing was ever exactly what I needed, though, and to achieve my goal I had to do a bit of coding myself. I’m not that fluent in PHP and JavaScript so it was quite a struggle for me. I probably spent about 200 hours looking through the WordPress support forums and documentation.

I don’t want to bore you with detailed code on how I created the site, I’m just going to highlight some key points and likely expand on them in later tutorial posts if there is a desire to learn more about them.

• Theme
  My starting point was the K2 theme. I liked the Ajax features of the theme, including the rolling archives and comments. I still give credit to K2 but the theme has been heavily modified. For example I removed the rolling archives from all pages with the exception of the front page because I found it made it difficult to navigate through search results, tag pages and archives.
• Collections as Categories
  Each collection is actually a category. I know that there are quite a few plugins that allow you to have a different look for each category the ones I found early on just didn’t work for me. So I ended up creating my own type of category driven look formula. It’s messy and if I can find a plugin that does it better, I will likely implement it. For now it works.
• Tags vs Categories
  I never liked the idea of creating a zillion categories for my WordPress entries. Instead I’ve installed the Ultimate Tag Warrior and use that to tag my posts. I’m undecided if I want the tag cloud in my sidebar or not. If you have a preference let me know.
• Archives
  This was probably the trickiest part of the whole process, creating a WordPress archive page that was driven by Categories and not date. The closest plugin I could find that did what I wanted was the KG Archives plugin. It’s a great little plugin and does a fairly decent job for what I wanted. I did, however have to heavily modify the plugin and use CSS to control the output quite a bit. I’m still unhappy with the end result, however, as I would like to be able to page through the years. If anyone has any idea on how to do this, please share!
• “Dooce” Photo of the Day
  I achieved this little baby by creating a Sidebar PHP module that pulls in the excerpt of the last item posted in the Daily Photos category. Each post in that category has a thumbnail linked to the image page as its excerpt and that is what is displayed in the sidebar. I also suppressed all daily photo entries from appearing on the home page or on my archives page so that it was not redundant to the user.
• Gallery2
  I still user Gallery2 and the WPG2 plugin that embeds Gallery2 into my WordPress layout for all photos other than my daily photos. Photos from events like birthday parties, festivals etc will be put in there. One off images will likely be uploaded only into WordPress because it drives me a little bit crazy having one off images in Gallery2. I’m anal about how things are organized.

Other Plugins

• Akismet – Catches all my annoying comment spam
• Lightbox 2.02 Plugin – If I post a thumbnail in my post it will open up in lightbox. I still need to figure out how to make it work with images that I post using the WPG2 plugin that pulls my images from Gallery2.
• Livejournal Crossposter – I’ve had a LiveJournal since 2001 I think and to make it easy for friends there to stay up to date with my life I use the LJ Crossposter to automatically cross post my entries. Saves me time from having to copy and paste in two places.
• Wordpress Database Backup – On-demand backup of your WordPress database. Do it often kiddies, especially before you upgrade.
• WP–ContactForm – WP Contact Form is a drop in form for users to contact you. It can be implemented on a page or a post.
• Wp-ShortStat – Allows me to check my blog stats pretty religiously.

I hope that you enjoy the site redesign, I know I prefer it and find it a bit easier on the eyes to read. Let me know what you think and of course if it’s broken somewhere feel fee to shout at me.

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2. Wordpress 2.2 has issues with K2
3. Very nerdy day

It was as if the skies had parted and a single ray of sunshine was beaming benevolently upon my upturned face.

Or, maybe not.

While I love my family, this unexpected gift of a free weekend made me plain ole giddy. Gary and I watched a lot of movies, we made yummy pasta, drank about 20 magic bullet fruit smoothies and I worked on my site almost all weekend. In fact I don’t think I even left the apartment, Gary was the one to go and fetch food because otherwise I would have starved

Of course you can’t expect me to work on a site all weekend and not have this overwhelming desire to geek out and post about everything I did on my site. I’m going to wait until the site has launched (and it doesn’t’ suddenly break) before I begin documenting what I did. Hopefully, if all goes well that should be around the end of January. I need to edit the existing category structure before I implement it.

One thing that I can mention before the site is launched is that I *adore* WAMP. I love the fact that I can do development work right on my desktop without having to FTP everything up to a test server every three seconds. Seriously, if you develop WordPress templates, or just want to mess around with PHP, I recommend you install it. In fact Lifehacker has a few tutorials on how to install WAMP and host your own WordPress Blog, Gallery2 or Personal Wikipedia site on your home computer. I still need to install Gallery2 and customize it to fit in with the new WordPress template but that will be another weekend project.

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I just need to learn to love tagging…be one with tagging… tagging is my friend.

I still hate tagging, it drives me nuts! I need more structure…I weep when I look at my del.icio,us account because with all the tags I actually find it harder to find things at times.

Egad! I didn’t mean to start rambling about that, in fact I had a whole other reason for my entry, but now I’ve gone and forgotten.

Oh well, in other news, Rue Morgue just launched their new Blog called “The Abattoir” that I coded. If it breaks, let me know and I’ll fix it.

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I also got to spend some time with a few of my friends I’ve been neglecting and some quality time with Gary. Overall I can’t complain about this week, it’s left me feeling warm and loved.

Right now we’re getting ready to head over to my Mom’s for our Christmas Eve tradition where we gather at my grandmother’s with the whole extended family and talk about our lives. Really, we are all silently judging one another and Gary and I will be the token “freaks” that baffle the family with the fact that we are successful in our chosen careers. I’ve gotten past the point of caring, and am just pleased to be able to be able to spend time with my Mom, sisters, grandmother, the aunts, uncles and cousins that I do adore.

Christmas Day will be an early dinner with my sisters and Dad and then we head over to London to spend the week there. We’ll be back on Friday night, just in time to get ready for my 31st birthday on Saturday.

That was strange seeing my age in writing. I thought when I reached my 30’s I’d be wearing ill fitting pants, knee high nylons, a bad floral shirt and would have teased hair. Thankfully that hasn’t happened…yet.

Have a wonderful holiday everyone…spend time with the people you love and try eat as much holiday baking as you can, because it only happens once a year.

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