Interview with a Princess

June 18, 2013 by Leave a Comment

So, a few weeks ago I had the great opportunity to chat to Josh Kinal and the gang at The Nudge Melbourne about the relationship between designers and developers. If you’re interested in such things, and perhaps curious what an Australian Kiwi accent sounds like… well, you can check it out here…

http://thenudge.com.au/episode5/

Before the interview I had put together a few thoughts by way of a wishlist from devs for designers on slideshare too… wade in with comments if you’ve anything to add or you think I got it horribly wrong! All (reasonable) opinions welcome!!

Filed Under: Geeking Out, Off the top of my head, Web Development Tagged With: , , ,

Moving away from multisite as a hosting platform.

June 3, 2013 by 1 Comment
Image courtesy of cobalt123

It seemed like a good idea at the time… setting up a multisite install on a dedicated VPS on a reputable host and sitting back to relax and watch those hosting dollars flow in…

And it was great, for a while… but getting bigger, adding more sites and users to the multisite install started to get really nerve wracking, and after a lot of thought and a deep breath, last month I started moving away from multisite, extricating all my sites from that network and putting them all into individual accounts on new reseller cloud hosting (yes, this is an affiliate link. I love these guys).

I am mightily relieved… and here’s why.

Filed Under: Hosting, WordPress

WordPress Template Hierarchy

May 29, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Screenshot_29_05_13_6_28_PM

If you’ve spent any time at all working with WordPress themes you’ll have no doubt found yourself navigating the dark corridors of the WordPress Template Hierarchy.

It took some time for me to get my head around which file to create when I’m making custom templates and the WordPress Codex has been invaluable in terms of figuring out what to put where.  The Codex’s diagram and my handy dandy little template code snippet that prints out which template I’m looking (below) at have been my ‘go to’ resources.

I came across a couple of alternatives today that I love!!  Thought you’d like to check them out too…

Filed Under: Web Development, WordPress

Backup Buddy has Removed Default Multisite Support

April 8, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Image Courtesy of jairoagua

I have a number of small sites that I host for clients and friends, and for the last couple of years I’ve been hosting them on a WordPress multisite, just to keep things like updating simpler. And for a long time it worked really well.

However, as clients got bigger, and their requirements got greater, well, running things on multisite started to get a little, well, sketchy and I’ve come to the conclusion that while you CAN run things like this, maybe there are times when you shouldn’t.

Filed Under: WordPress

WordPress Theme and Plugin Licensing

March 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

There has been a whole lot of talk in the WordPress Community in recent months about WordPress theme and plugin licensing and I bet your pretty pink boots if you’re making themes or sites for clients, it’s something you’ve barely given a thought about. Because most of the issues in the news have centered around distribution and don’t affect client work.

However, if you’re making things to distribute, you should think about it… because if you want to make some money out of your theme or your plugin and/or if you want a lot of people to know about your theme or plugin you have some decisions to make about just how you allow that software to be distributed or reused.

WordPress itself and the core of the whole story, is licensed under GPL (GNU Public License1). In short, this means that if you’re using WordPress you have the following four freedoms

the freedom to use the software for any purpose,
the freedom to change the software to suit your needs,
the freedom to share the software with your friends and neighbors, and
the freedom to share the changes you make.2
This is the essence of free software (free as in speech (libre) not to be confused with free as in beer, (gratis)3).

Filed Under: Intellectual Property, WordPress

Improving Code with CSS Specificity – a revision

January 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment
Social Sharing Menu

Following on from my last post giving away the free social media menu I was approached by Peter Wilson with an offer of alternate code that reduces the volume of CSS required to pull off exactly the same results. Improving code with CSS specificity is something Pete and I have talked about before, and to [...]

Filed Under: Freebies

Freebie Social Media Icon Menu

December 6, 2012 by 1 Comment
social_sprite

There are a few blogs I follow pretty closely, and one of them predictably is Brian Gardner’s (predictably because he’s behind Genesis and I’m a bit of a fan). A while back Brian put together a tutorial about making a social media icon menu – I took it on board, I like rolling my own [...]

Filed Under: Freebies, Genesis Theme Framework, Web Development, WordPress

This is a Test Page

October 26, 2012 by 4 Comments
Lighthouse
Filed Under: Uncategorized

Customize Meteor Slides with Advanced Custom Fields

August 1, 2012 by 14 Comments
WordPress › Meteor Slides « WordPress Plugins

I’ve spent a large block of time recently working on a project for a new client, intent on proving just how slick it is to build sites from a really solid, clean, FAST platform (Genesis – affiliate link). BUT I found myself stuck on an issue with the front page development and realised just how much of a handicap it can be when you get so welded to a ‘way of doing things’ that you forget just what else is out there.

Here’s the problem.

The site needs a paginated, slideshow for the front page (ok, not much of a problem, every site on the Internet*, has one of those…) whose images link to a specific URL and in which you can include a heading and descriptive text.

Filed Under: Genesis Theme Framework, Web Development, WordPress

WordCamp Sydney 2012

July 19, 2012 by Leave a Comment
WordCampSydney2012_onwhite

If you follow me on Twitter or Facebook you’ll be aware that most of my world, of late has been consumed by a wee event we call WordCamp, or, more precisely, WordCamp Sydney 2012. Basically, I like WordCamps and so decided to get a group together to make one of our very own. That was in November… so fast forward to today when it’s 2 days out from the event and I’m sitting here (with a list of things still to do as long as my arm) thinking about you, and what you’ll think of this little event we’ve pulled together.

I truly hope you have a blast, that you meet and make friends who you’ll spend the time between this WordCamp and the next tweeting, Skyping and supporting as you play together in the WordPress space. I hope you’ll get tools to make your WordPress experience better, either as a user or as a designer/developer. I hope you’ll meet people who will help you grow your business beyond anything you could have dreamed or imagined. And, above all, I hope you’ll do everything you can to get everything you can out of this event.

Filed Under: WordPress
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