Doc’s Blog
Pimping my kids and my students

OK, Done for the Moment

December 13th, 2011 — by docPiper

OK, I’m finished here, for the moment. I just wanted to get my feet wet. Now I’m working on the primary focus of my WP adventures, updating FlowerElectronics.com to a WP site (FlowerDevelopment ). That way, my daughter gets to have a rich-text editor available so that she can do her own updating. For some reason, sending me an email was too difficult. I think I understand the problem, actually. It’s very difficult to tell people what you want, because you don’t really know until you see it. I make stuff up as I go along all the time.

Whatever, I did come back here to  make a tweak in my updates. I just updated to WP 3.3 and to SuperCache 1.0. I also updated the built-in themes. I’m not sure why I did that since I don’t plan to use them. I’m using the one I made up.

Speaking of made up, after I got as far as you see here, I switched to working on my daughter’s site and pretty much reproduced this theme over there, albeit with a different color scheme, as is appropriate for that site.  However, I don’t like the balance of the layout over there. I tried making up columns, spacing, subdivisions, and such like based on golden ratio rules, i.e. 1.6 to 1, but it doesn’t look very good on Flower at the moment. I wish I had better design sensibilities and/or knowledge of same. Perhaps that should be my next trick, to learn some basics of design.

Slowly Making Progress

December 6th, 2011 — by docPiper

I’m slowly making progress. I just have to suck it up and focus on working from the ground up. I had hoped I could take some short cuts, but that’s not going to happen.

I thought I could essentially use the style sheet I’d made up previously, but it seems that it will require extensive revision. That actually means that I should be starting from scratch, but I’ve yet to do that.

WordPress adds tags that I’m not likely to want inside some of its functions, so I have to learn the functions so as to over ride those default choices. Eventually, we’ll get there, just not easily. I’ll cope.

Whatever, I’ve mostly got the index page done. Now it’s on to the single post/single page templates. With luck, those will be easier. We’ll soon see.

Update:
Weird, the default for the textarea element in the comments template said “100%”. I didn’t think per cent was allowed. I changed it to “44″, which is a number of characters and seems to look about right.

Update 2:
Well, I don’t know from whence that “100%” came. I inherited it from someone else’s theme at one time. It doesn’t appear to be part of the overall WP package. They give col="58".  So, it’s one of those mystery things, like why I still have a scroll bar on my main page, but not on any other ones. WTF?

Ah, I found it, it’s the monpage images in the second post I made. I guess I need to figure out how to shrink those puppies a tad, or else expand the base width a tad.

Yup, that fixed it, I cut the image width down to 450px, and it’s now all ducky. Ok, so now, I think I can safely move on to Jessica’s site. Well…once I get straight on making a boat-load of static pages, not just the one…also including the landing or index page (which WP will insist I name something else).

Update 3:
And now I know that  you can’t write html into the editor. Nope, you’ve gotta go to the html editor. Works either way in TxP.

Disaster…so far

December 2nd, 2011 — by docPiper

Well, my attempts have not been good so far. In part there is a motivation problem. In part, there is a problem that WP has its own way of doing things, which is different from mine. Back in olden times, I worked very hard to make up a design that would adjust itself to the visitor’s view port. So if he had a small screen, he would get a layout appropriate for that. My implementation of that idea for WP has not been good so far, so I think I’ll begin with a simple fixed width design. Fortunately, I worried about that problem last spring when I was idling away my time as receptionist at The Allegro School of Music on Friday afternoons.

My investigations at the time, i.e. last spring, indicated that virtually everyone has screen widths greater than 1024px, and most 1280px or greater. This is of course normal computers, the smart-phone set will be different, but I’ll address that once I get something simple working for regular. I’m going to design for a centered layout that is 970px wide. The sidebar on the left will comprise 370 px and the main content part, 600 px. The actual content will reside inside a 460px box centered within the 600px right column. My header will be 140px tall, and the footer, 90px. Something like that.

So, let’s hope this idea works.

Update:
So far, not so good. I got the basic layout working on a static page, but the WP tags keep trying to impost various classes on elements that I flat do not want. I shouldn’t have to put up with someone else’s lame ass nomenclature, especially when the a-hole hasn’t bothered documenting things adequately. TextPattern is a snap to set up and modify as one wishes. WordPress is a horror. WTF?

Update 2:
Well, this is a pain in the butt, but I’m finally getting somewhere. F*ng WP insists on all kinds of default class names and tags inside the damn WP functions. So you have to figure out what each one is and over ride it with arguments inside the function calls.  I guess it made sense to someone.

First Steps

November 15th, 2011 — by docPiper

The first steps, naturally, are to make sure everything is up to date, the WP installation and the plug-ins. The installation was the latest, 3.2.1 (I think it is). I only have two plug-ins, SuperCache and Akismet. Those two were due for very marginal updates, so I’ve implemented them. Now on to something that matters.

I’m of two minds about the theming. I could just take the standard, 2010, theme and change the CSS around that. Or I could start from scratch. The benefit of building around 2010 is that I could then, in theory use other people’s themes that have been built around 2010. The drawback, from my perspective, is that 2010 is full of extranneous tags/classes/ids which designers can use as hooks for fancy effects. I’m not particularly interested in having each and every tag given a dozen or so classes just in case I might need one or another of them to make a curly corner. I prefer plain, fast, and easy to comprehend. Thus, I’ll probably go with my standard design, something I made up back when I was starting out. Over the years, I’ve updated some of the names and ids a bit to make it more up to date. Perhaps I should go whole hog and turn this into a full HTML5 site, and let IE people go suck eggs. I’ll figure it all out in a bit.

So, as I understand it, my next steps are to impose my basic CSS design outline onto a few simple .php files in the WP canon, i.e. header.php, index.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, perhaps page.php. So, either I’ll be back in a few with a nifty (or not so nifty) new layout, or else I’ll disappear from the face of the blogosphere/interwebz.

update:

Seems I was wrong. about the theming/files thing. Each theme has it’s own directory and own set of .php files. So, there needs be no relationship between the 2010 theme and the lgp theme. I can go futz around with the .php files at will. Goody. Anyway, I’m off to edit a bunch of .php files and associated .css files. —l8rz

Time to Get Serious about WP Theming

November 15th, 2011 — by docPiper

So, it seems that I started this experiment something over two years ago.  Then I was learning to “migrate” a WP installation from one domain/server to another. I didn’t actually succeed all that well. I got the content moved, but screwed up with the theming. I lost that in the “migration” and subsequently lost it at the original location when I updated my WP installation. The problem was that I’d not done my original theming properly. I’d edited the default file, not created a new file. Thus, when I updated the installation, I was reverted to the default theme.

Anyway, now, my daughter is frantic for me to convert her web site to a CMS based affair. I started doing it in TextPattern, which I sort of prefer, but realized that she would be much happier with a rich-text editor than with having to learn Textile markup. So here I am.

Before fixing my daughter’s site, however, I’ve decided I should “practice” on this site, something no one would miss if I screwed up and lost everything. Stay tuned, I’ll be updating my adventures here. At least that’s the plan.

The Experiment Begins

August 26th, 2009 — by docPiper

I haven’t even fixed the things wrong on this site, and already I’m doing new things. At the moment, I’m in the process of learning to migrate this installation to a new location. The theory is that once I manage that, I’ll be able to help someone else do the same…and they’ll even give me a bit of cash for my efforts. I didn’t want to hit them up until I was sure I could do it. Static sites are trivial to migrate. My guess is this WP install won’t be much different. We’ll see.

The steps, as I see it are as follows:

1. back up the current site
2. create a new domain
3. install WP on the new domain
4. export the data base from the old domain to a file
5. import the old domain’s DB to the new domain
6. see if it all works.

That seems easy enough. We’ll see.

Well Crap!

May 13th, 2009 — by docPiper

If you’re looking at this site on anything other than Opera, you’ll notice it looks funny as hell. That’s because I tried to fix the look of things, so as to make this WP install look more-or-less like other sites I have made for myself. Trying to keep consistent self branding, so to speak. Basically, I’ve created a disaster.

The first problem is WP doesn’t seem to have any rational system of naming. Actually, I’m sure it does, but I like simple, so I’m not one to have classes embedded inside IDs embedded inside tags. If it gets hard, it sort of defeats the purpose of the whole exercise. At least to me it does.

The second problem is I don’t believe in fixed-pixel sizing for things. People need to have the flexibility to resize fonts and view ports.  Their preferences are none of my damn business. Perhaps they have a low resolution monitor, or weak eyesight. If I fix things with pixels, they can’t really do that. So, for some reason, what I called an em when I set things up in Opera, changed to something quite different in IE and Chrome and FF. WTF?

So, eventually, I’ll get around to fixing things, I presume. The major lesson from today, however, is how much easier it is to set things up and style them in TextPattern. I think I might stick with TxP after all.

Now, the New and Improved PopsBlog

October 2nd, 2008 — by docPiper

So, after lots of tribulations, I’ve finally managed to install caching for this WP installation.  The problem was that the site had virtually no content, but still behaved like a pig.  If you don’t believe me, look at the Monpage graph from yesterday:

For Comparison, here’s the same period of time for my TextPattern install, slothoughts:

Obviously, the TxP install is doing much better.  Both blogs sit on the same server that serves up several static sites, among them Flower Electronics.  Here’s the graph for Flower Electronics during the same time frame:

So, you see the problem is not the server, but the piggish WP install.

In a day or two, I’ll check back to see if installing caching on the WP install makes things oodles faster.  One can only hope.

Welcome to Pop’s Blog

August 28th, 2008 — by docPiper

To my kids, I’m known as pop.  I blame it all on Jessica, whose favorite book at one time was Hop on Pop by Dr. Seuss.  Anyway, I resisted the designation for quite some time, but have eventually embraced it.  Most fathers are called Dad or Daddy or even Father, but I’m pop.  So be it. I have über-cool kids, so that helps.

First we have Jessica, who is a sound musician, sound performance artist, electronics boutique entrapreneur, … also a student in engineering at UMass/Lowell, having figured out that a Master’s of Fine Arts doesn’t even pay for coffee.  Then there’s Justin, an amazing guitarist (jazz, blues, classical, rock, whatever).  And finally, Zach, who lived in Japan and does all manner of weird and creative things.