In an effort to start better blogging habits, I made a decision last night. For the next 30 days I will be posting on theKiesch at least once a day for the next month.
Blogging has felt much more like a chore lately and because of that I’m not as motivated to blog. It’s a catch 22. I hardly get any traffic because I don’t post very often, but I don’t feel like posting because of a lack of traffic. So in an effort to end that, I am making a commitment today.
I’ve also sort of held back when it comes to posting certain things. I’ve thought: well no one that reads my blog currently will find that interesting, or: there are tons of people blogging about that already. So, I’ve also decided that for the 30 days I’m going to be writing anything and everything I can think of. I’m not sure where that will go just yet, but after the 30 days I will not only have a better feel for blogging but I would imagine I would know a lot more about myself.
I will probably take some of those interests and branch off into blogs of their own and keep theKiesch for personal thoughts still, but we will see.
As icing on the cake, I’m also making another commitment. I’ve always wanted to build a custom theme for this blog, but usually just gave up when I couldn’t get what I wanted in one day. So by the end of the month, theKiesch will have a super-duper cool new theme!
A recent client of mine had a flash site that they wanted to be able to edit the content for. There are several tutorials found throughout the webverse on importing content into flash from a text file, xml, or other types of external media. You can even import HTML and use CSS to style the content which is cool but is still fairly limiting in what you can do.
One of the reasons for building a content management system is to make things easier. Well, having to work with flash’s limiting uses of HTML and needing to use a WYSIWYG editor presented some problems. The main problem was that the HTML that flash uses is still the old-school non-semantic way of doing things (b tags for bold, i tags for italics, etc) and most of the current WYSIWYG editors use the XHTML standards that are recommended for use today.
The following are the steps I took to get this all working together. My actionscript fu is fairly rusty, but it works.
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I got this in the mail from AT&T for my new DSL service (the reason is for another blog post.) I’m glad to see that their QA team is doing their jobs!
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that when on the phone with customer support, it took me 5 minutes to explain the fact that there was “no error on the screen” and that the FAILED was a physical sticker on the device I got in the mail.
I’ve been home a few hours after WordCamp 2008. It was a wonderful time of listening to other bloggers speak about their experiences and share tips with the rest of us. They spoke on almost everything from building an audience to search optimization.
To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what to expect before going. I have really never been to a conference like this and was a little scared to be honest. Mainly because I wasn’t sure what would be expected of me. Had I been given the choice to do this weekend all over again, I would have definitely still gone.
I learned a few very important things that I think apply to all aspects of business that I am interested in:
- Network Network Network!
- Nothing bad comes from just stepping out and trying.
The conference was an excellent chance for me to really step out of my comfort zone and meet a lot of new people. The people I talked with were all over the board as far as experience goes. Some people were newer to blogging than me, while others were making a full time job off of blogging. Among those people was Matt Mullenweg whom I didn’t really know what to say to, but I made sure to say hi, shake his hand, and thank him for coming out for the conference.
Overall, I was very inspired and definitely hoping they have the conference next year.
I am also posting a few photos I took at the conference to use the new gallery feature. I’m not sure what it will do to with the current theme I have, but here goes:
It was a fairly exciting day for me. I went to my very first conference which was quite a new experience.
I had the chance to listen to Matt Mullenweg, founder of the WordPress, as he announced the release of the new version of the platform. He talked about some of the new features as well as plans for the future.
Of course Matt wasn’t the only one speaking. I also heard some great tips from John Pozadzides, Jonathan Bailey, Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell, Liz Strauss, and Lorelle VanFossen.
I’ll be out tomorrow at the conference as well. I am really looking forward to it. I took a few photos with my phone and will hopefully get some new ones tomorrow. Sounds like a great excuse to try the new gallery feature in 2.5! 
Blogging hasn’t been a real priority for me in the past. It is only recently that I’ve tried to keep up with my own as well as do my share of contributing / reading other blogs.
Just a few hours ago, I found out about WordCamp Dallas. I live so close, it seems like a great opportunity to pick up several tips from the best, so my wife and I have registered (registration was only $20) and we will be attending this weekend.
I’m looking forward to learning a lot and meeting new people!
It may be a little too late in the game now that everyone is sick of Facebook apps but I’ve been wanting to build one for quite some time. Many of the applications on Facebook are pure crap. They’re a sorry excuse for serving ads and collecting marketing information and it’s unfortunate for people like me who want to put out something with a little more quality. Thankfully Facebook seems to have heard the cries from users and is really cracking down on privacy and how many invitations applications can send.
There is another problem I must overcome though: Needing the answers to all of the unknowns. Needing all my questions answered before I start. The funny thing is, that everything I’m not sure about at this time is something that won’t even be an issue until later on. I can’t plan for every situation that will come up. I can’t make an app and have it run perfectly the first time. I’m going to make mistakes. There, I said it.
That is probably my biggest fear. It’s the huge factor in deciding whether I finish a project, or if it gets added to my never-ending list of ideas that I’ve had and dropped. So today I’m making a decision to just start. No more reading countless tutorials and blogs to make sure I am doing things the best way possible; I can always refactor later. No more buying every book I can find on a topic so that I can know every possible angle on the subject. While these things are fairly healthy to an extent, they’ve always given me enough time to talk myself out of a project.
Hopefully this more agile approach will at least get me to the point of being able to know if something will work or not. We’ll see.
I’ve got a few sites that I’m working on and probably going to try and use WordPress for. One of the first steps would usually be to start with the default Kubrick theme but it’s full of non-semantic (X)HTML and got a few deprecated WordPress Template Tags in various places.
So rather than start from that, I figured I would take all of the cruft out of it once and use it as a base for my own themes. I am still new to building themes (this is my first complete one) so there may have been a lot more that I could have taken out, but I’m happy with this I think. Keep in mind that this is not meant to be the final result, but something to start from when building your own designs.
I’ve named the theme “Got Blue?” One thing I am including is the Bluepring CSS framework which should also give anyone a head start on design. Their layout syntax is based on a 24 column grid, so you use span-# for your class, replacing the # with the number of columns you want to use. So if you want a column to take up half of the page you would use class=”column span-12″. If the column is on the far right you’ll also need to add the “last” class there.
Like I said this is the first time I have done a complete theme, so feedback would be appreciated. Enjoy:
Got Blue?
It never fails. Any time I am taking a long trip in the car, at some point I get stuck behind someone who forgets that the speed limit is actually 10 miles over the speed that they are going. “Why does this always happen to me??” is almost always the first thing out of my mouth.
It always feels like I just happen to pick the wrong lane, or let the wrong person over. I noticed something this morning though. After switching lanes during my drive to work this morning, I actually picked a good one. I actually picked a lane where I wasn’t behind the slowest person on the road.
After pondering my good luck, it made me think a little deeper. How many other times had I picked the right lane.
Yes, deciding what lane to drive on is trivial, and yes, it might not be the greatest metaphor in the world, but it still spoke to me. How many times has something good happened or how many times have I actually made a good decision and not noticed? When the good things go unnoticed, yes, bad things do always happen to you.
I’ve been spending a lot of time in the WordPress Codex trying to grasp a better understanding on how their templates work.
While looking through all of the files provided in the default theme, there were two that bugged me. archives.php and links.php. For the life of me, I could not figure out how they were used and how someone would get to a file that used those templates. I was about to just ignore them because I just figured they would never be used.
Well, by default, they aren’t used, but if you do use them, they can be pretty cool.
archives.php is basically an index to the entire blog. Sometimes the archives on your sidebar can get fairly long, which isn’t cool, so you have the option of putting the archive on it’s own page.
links.php is a page containing all of your links. It’s an unordered list of categories, with a child list of all of the links in that category.
Like I mentioned, these aren’t used by default. You have to “activate” them. Here’s how:
- Go to the “Write” section of the WordPress backend.
- Select “Write Page”.
- Give it the title you want (Something like “Archives” or “Links”). Leave the content area blank. If you put something in here, it won’t show up.
- In the options on the side, select the “Page Template” bar to reveal a dropdown menu.
- Select the right template for the page you are creating.
That’s it. You’ll now have your special pages set up.
The cool thing is that you can create more of these special pages with different functionality like that. All you have to do is create a new php file in your themes folder and make sure something like this is at the top:
< ?php
/*
Template Name: My Special Template
*/
?>
You can put any HTML or PHP code you want, which is really cool!
