Archive for the ‘general’ Category

« Older Entries

2009

Wednesday, December 31st, 2008

Now that 2009 is very nearly upon us, I thought I’d scribble down some things I’m hoping to do in the coming year:

Work and related stuff

  • Get a few more Plone 3 sites under my belt
  • Finish off my User Interface Design and Evaluation course (well, I’ve got to do this, I’ve not got a huge amount of choice in the matter) and really get to grips with all those HCI concepts
  • Roll up my sleeves with Flash again
  • Get another theme or two out for the Out of the Box Plone themes project
  • Go to the Plone conference in Budapest this year

Non-work stuff

  • Do my ‘52 photos’ project — a photo a week for 2009
  • Maybe release Hamnavoe or any other Plone theme I design for Wordpress
  • Get better at Photoshop
  • Get through my German course
  • Do some more writing in some form or other

Posted in general, non-plone, web design, web development | No Comments »

Tidying up

Tuesday, December 30th, 2008

I’ve had a bit of time to tidy up my site over Christmas. Not just in terms of the design, but I’ve also given some thought to how I manage my content feeds. As I’ve recently been blogging about my work with Plone theming, I got my site listed on Planet Plone. This aggregates posts from Plone-related blogs on one site. However, I don’t just blog about Plone but pretty much whatever I feel like at the time. This causes a bit of a problem in that I could be sending non-Plone noise over to Planet Plone which isn’t ideal. The odd post isn’t too much of a problem — in fact in can be interesting to see what other Plone people are up to on their days off from Plone. However, I’ve got a number of non-Plone posts planned for next year so it could get potentially quite annoying and distracting.

I tried setting up a redirect from my main Wordpress feed so it pointed to the Plone-specific feed but I couldn’t get this to work for some reason (maybe to do with the limitations of my through the web redirect editor, maybe something to do with the “virtual” directory structure in Wordpress). However, I came across this Wordpress plugin which seems to have done the job very well: Redirection by Urban Giraffe. This has a good range of functions to support redirecting, including the ability to match on regular expressions.

For now I’ve set my main site feed to point to the Plone category and will work on creating another feed for all other stuff. I’ll keep my eye on Planet Plone — if this post comes through then it’s back to the drawing board. If so, I’m open to other suggestions on how to sort this out!

As an addendum, I’ve just checked the Planet Plone site and my blog’s RSS feed is already listed as pointing to my Plone and Zope categories, so I’m not sure why it’s picking up non-Plone stuff.

Posted in blog, general, non-plone, rss, systems administration, wordpress | No Comments »

New look site!

Sunday, July 6th, 2008

After being a bit dissatisfied with my site for a while and not having the time to redesign it, I’ve decided to overhaul it with a minimum amount of work, namely:

  • Making Wordpress my site’s CMS and moving away from “static” PHP pages that had to be edited via Dreamweaver
  • Installing an existing Wordpress theme for my site’s design

I’m pleased with the result I have to say. It will make it much easier for me to edit content on the site which means it’s much less likely to get out of date.

I like the theme I’m using: Cutline. It’s nice and clean and the kind of thing I had in mind when I was thinking about a redesign. I haven’t done anything to customise it, save putting in a few of my own images but I’m pretty much happy with it as it is.

I’ve got a few things planned, particularly with the new “Offline” section which I’ll use to highlight my non-web interests. I’m working on producing a nice Flash-based photo gallery to supercede my old PHP Flickr one but it might take a while to get going as it’s not a very high priority for me at the moment.

A few redirects means that old pages should redirect to their newer equivalents. I’m keeping my “new” site in a separate subfolder so I can still have directories outside of Wordpress to play around with various things.

The version of Wordpress I’m using is 2.5.1 and whilst I didn’t find all of it immediately intuitive, I’ve managed to get the site up and running with reasonably little effort. Compare that to the amount of work it takes to get a Plone site working! Well, Wordpress and Plone are two very different beasts, but I think Plone could learn a lesson or two from how much easier it is to theme Wordpress.

Another thing I like about the newer Wordpress is the page editor: bar some minor annoyances, it was pretty good in the older version I was using but the new one has buttons for embedding media which means no more resorting to hacking in the HTML then losing it next time you edit the page. Nice one.

Posted in blog, general, non-plone, web design | No Comments »

« Older Entries