I was sick all of last week, and have spent all my free time so far this week working on finishing Hahlo4 for it’s September 9 release. But I would like to share a couple of redesigns that went live in the last week. Matt Brett launched the latest incarnation of his blog/portfolio, similar dark brown/chocolate colour scheme as previous designs, but with a rejigged layout — very nice, as usual. And Tim Van Damme launched the redesign of his blog, Maxvoltar, lots of nice things in this one including the use of @font-face, the jQuery ‘masonry’ plugin for the positioning on the notes on the homepage, and on individual entries theres a magic static sidebar that appears from underneath the header as you scroll down. Very cool.
redesign Tag Archive
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And then it was redesigned
Surely I’m not the only one with this ‘problem’, I can’t sit on one design for too long, personally I think I’ve done well to hold out for nearly 7 months this time. If you’re reading this in your favourite feedreader, then you’re missing out on the interesting bit, you can’t see my *awesome* redesign unless you’re reading this in a browser, so, hop to it.
Surely I’m not the only one with this ‘problem’, I can’t sit on one design for too long, personally I think I’ve done well to hold out for nearly 7 months this time. If you’re reading this in your favourite feedreader, then you’re missing out on the interesting bit, you can’t see my *awesome* redesign unless you’re reading this in a browser, so, hop to it.
Wait
Isn’t it only like 6 weeks since you last redesigned? No, the last redesign went live the week after Christmas last year, which means its over 6 months since I’ve redesigned. So there :P
Why
I’ve gotten into a habit of redesigning (or at least refreshing) around the time that I upgrade to the latest and great version of WordPress. This time around I knew 2.8 was just around the corner and planned to go live with redesign while I was upgrading. That didn’t happen.
I also needed to do something to escape/take my mind off/avoid certain other things, and a redesign is great for that. Only problem that brought was that I didn’t have as much time to dedicate to the redesign as I normally would.
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The One Week Redesign
Like most of the “redesigns” that I’ve done this year, this one is again just an evolution of the previous design. And like the last evolution this too was just about a complete ground-up rebuild. I’ve tried a few different things this time, with the use of post summaries, more variation in typography, revised single post view and many other bits and pieces. Lets say its same same but different…
Why another redesign?
Two reasons really, firstly I can’t help myself, I just always have this need to change something. Secondly, I needed to upgrade to WordPress 2.7 and I wanted to make sure I could make use of all the new features it brings, this meant I either had to update large portions of my existing theme, or build a new one. Oh, and did I mention that I only started work on this design on December 23rd, so really its the “less than one week” redesign.
What’s different?
The basics of the site haven’t changed very much at all, I’ve just rearranged things a bit, and gone crazy with some fancy CSS in areas like the post excerpts (CSS dropcaps FTW). The layouts of the reviews, archives and downloads pages remain largely untouched (because I was actually happy with how they looked). The single post view has received a bit of a revamp, with the excerpt added, a revised sidebar and updated comments display that makes use of the threaded comments functionality built in to WP2.7.
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Sunrise, sunset
Although this theme may have been re-written from the ground up leaving few remnants of the “zipper” theme that I’ve been running for the last 7 months (its had a few touch-ups during that time), I’m not thinking of this as a complete redesign, its more of a refinement or evolution with some tricks thrown in. And hopefully its going to be a bit quicker too, since I’ve spent a fair amount of time cleaning things up to try and reduce load times.
Keep reading to find out how and why I made some of the bigger changes, as well as a few things that I still haven’t completely finished. I might even let you know about some other things I’m working on
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Redesigned — something completely different
So what do you think? Its just a little different the last iteration. Following on from the two dark themes that have clothed this site for the past year, I figured it was time to try something new. Something lighter, with less lines dividing it all up. Besides there were a few thing that I never really got around to finishing on my last design, and there were a few things that didn’t work out as well as I had hoped.
Lets get the bad out of the way. Initially I really liked my homepage, with the focus on a single post, some downloads and a couple of sidenotes, but I felt like the less recent stuff was being missed by new visitors, and I noticed I wasn’t receiving the same number of comments as I had previously. Long before I started work on this design I knew that I would be switching back to showing the last ten or so posts on the homepage. I’ve also switched back to a more conventional sidebar, instead of the combination of sidebar and bottom block arrangement that I had with the last design.
Behind the scenes I’ve fiddled with the structure of the site a little, mainly the ‘Projects’ section which replaces the ‘WordPress’ section. All the old links should still work, but there is a chance that I’ll break them so don’t use them, use the NEW links. The switch to a “projects” section was mainly due to the fact that I do more than just WordPress themes and plugins and wanted one section to cover everything.
There still bits and pieces that I haven’t finished entirely, but the goal was to get all the major functionality finished, then get it online and see what I’ve missed (theres always something). So over the coming weeks I’ll be finishing off the little bits here and there. Its not like there are huge sections left, but I’ve changed how some things are displayed which requires me to go through and edit a whole heap of posts…not really looking forward to that.
So have a look around, if you find something that looks out of place, or broken please let me know so that I can check it out. All feedback is welcome.
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Hey Presto!
Ok, so that didn’t go anywhere as bad as I thought it might.
So, everything is different isn’t it. New colours, new layout, new plugins, pretty much everything is new in some way. I was expecting bad things to happen when I changed over to this new theme, but quite amazingly most of it seems ok.
There are still several things that I haven’t quite finished, or will need to tweak now that the theme is live, but thats the fun part. I’m just glad that after about 4 months I can finally show this to the world.
I won’t go into detail about some of the changes and improvements I’ve made, I’ll save that for a bit later, for now I’ll leave it to you to look through the posts and pages and see for yourself.
Now I want to know what you all think, what you like, what you don’t (hopefully not too much in this column). I’m open to suggestions, so suggest away, keep in mind though that I’m now in “live redesign” mode, so things will keep changing around for a little while longer, but then again a good design is never finished…is it?
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A change is a brewing
Followers of my twitter status may have noticed that I (finally) upgraded my WordPress install earlier tonight, why? Well apart from the fact that I probably should have done it a while ago, it is an important step in my redesign process. Ok, maybe not super important but its best if my ‘live’ blog matches my ‘development’ blog.
You will probably also notice a bunch of things seem to have disappeared, don’t worry most of them will be returning soon. Tags are gone, as is the big cloud of all tags that was in the sidebar, the reason for this is I’ve switched from Ultimate Tag Warrior to Simple Tagging and as yet Redoable doesn’t have support for Simple Tagging built in. I’m really liking the features in Simple Tagging, and I’ll probably knock together a post soon to talk abit about why I changed.
Also gone are the category cloud, latest comments, live archives, noteworthy, related posts, recent links. Yes I know that seems like a lot of important things that have just been shuffled to the side, but all will be good in a couple of days (fingers crossed).
Why am I doing all this, well… I’ve been working on my redesign for about four months (time got away…) and I think its ready for me to move from development to what Ben Gray calls “live redesign”. In other words my redesign is not complete, its very close, and the best way to work out what I haven’t done is to shove it out and see what does and doesn’t work. Sounds stupid doesn’t it…
So there you have it I’ve cleared out some plugins (some which I didn’t even know I was using) and made some changes behind the scenes in preparation for a planned launch (or at least the beginning of one) tomorrow. Stay tuned, the fun begins in a few hours. (For the impatient few you can sneak a peak at some bits of my redesign on flickr.)
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iPhone development and blog neglect
Its always the same. I almost always find that I try and do too many things at once. As a result some things get neglected.
Hahlo
The last time I posted anything here was when I launched Hahlo, and that was almost three weeks ago. Since then I’ve spent a lot of time chasing bugs, and trying to improve it. You have no idea how much I wish I could get my hands on an iPhone, beause trying o develop for a device that you can’t get near is very difficult.
Who knows exactly when they will release the iPhone in Australia, but I don’t see it arriving until mid next year. I’m kind of hoping that we might benefit from the delay by getting an updated version. Even better would be if they release new iPods with similiar functionality (obviously without the phone bit).
Following the launch of Hahlo, I asked for (useful) feedback. I got a little bit, but for the most part it wasn’t too useful. I also did some searching (yes I googled my own app) and found plenty of ‘interesting’ comments. One person who shall remain nameless made a less than complimentary comment about Hahlo and its design… I’ll keep what I think about one of their iPhone app designs to myself…
Due to the rushed nature of Hahlo’s development there were some areas where I kind of coded myself into a corner, with no way out other than to start again. To a certain extent thats what I’ve started to do. Using the super nifty iUI library developed by Joe Hewitt I’ve started work on what will be Hahlo 2.0. A simple thing like switching to processing the JSON feed server-side has allowed me to easily add a couple of the things I had originally wanted in my original version, such as parsing url’s in tweets so they become clickable links. you can have a look at the new bea here: http://beta.hahlo.com/iui
Other iPhone related stuffs
I couldn’t stop at just one iPhone ‘app’, so I started work on another. This time I thought of something that would be truly useful on the iPhone, a mobile interface for Lighthouse App. If you’re looking for a simple online bug tracking app then Lighthouse is really worth a look. I haven’t made a huge amount of progress on it as yet, but I will eventually find some time to spend on it.
A couple of days ago Steven Frank (from Panic) released a super simple wiki designed specifically with the iPhone in mind. W2 has the basics, you can create and edit your wiki pages, you can even use markdown for formatting. Theres no login management at the moment, so everyone will have access. but if thats a problem you could always just use htaccess to restrict it.
I spent a couple of hours last night mashing together the W2 wiki with the iUI library to make a wiki that looked like the rest of the iPhone interface. Theres a few buggy bits but overall it works ok. I had to play around with the W2 source code a little, but nothing too complex. You can have a play with my work-in-progress version here: http://beta.hahlo.com/wiki/
Keep in mind that the wiki is designed to work best on the iPhone (although I can’t test that…) or Safari. However… it looks completely different in Safari 3 to what it looks like in the latest Webkit build. Check this out. I’ll have to look into why exactly that is.
Blog neglect
I’m still working on my redesign, its along time coming, but like everything else I will eventually get it finished. I’ve got all the major parts done (I think) but its all the fine tuning that takes time, and I want to get it just right before I make it live.
Also in the works is my entry for the sandbox design comp. Again the major bits are done, I just need to sit down and finish it off. Entries close in a little under two weeks time, so I guess I should get onto that pretty soon.
Well, thats probably the longest blog entry I’ve written in a while. And its probably a good indication that I should post more often.
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Custom fields in WordPress
In my spare time I’ve been working on the second incarnation of deanjrobinson.com and I planning on making it more than a fresh skin over the same underbelly. First time around I was trying to build my site AND make the theme ‘releaseable’ at the same time, which meant I didn’t want to mess with the way certain things worked (yes, I know there were still some “weird” things that got through).
This time I’m building just for me, so I’ve been thinkin of new ways to go about some things, and to better use some of the functionality that WordPress provides. One such feature is the custom fields that you can attach to posts and pages. Currently I use a few plugins that make use of them such as post ratings and post views, but I’m looking at using them more in ways that will speed up my posting and make updating certain content items much simpler. This is what I’ve got in mind.
I’m using the wordpress download manager plugin to track my downloads, and at the moment I have to add the download link, counter etc using there supplied quicktags whenever I include a download in a post. What I’m planning to do (and I already have this working in my local test) is to build the download ‘block’ into my templates, and just store the id of the download in a custom field.
So if a page has a download ‘associated’ with it the block will be displayed, if theres no download, theres no block, simple as that. This removes the need for me to remember the little block of code that I’ve been using to display the download links, and all I need to put in is the id of the download. I think its pretty neat.
An early example of what the output of the download ‘block’ might look like.
So that was the first thing I thought of and tried, then I got to thinking what else I could use these custom fields for. So far these are a few of the other ideas that could potentially be very useful to me.
- Storing the link to a support thread/topic for relevant posts
- Storing the link to the related ‘project’ page for things like Redoable and Twitt-Twoo
- Storing the link for the external url for my sidenotes
Not only will these changes make things a little quicker and simpler in the long run, they will also give me a little more flexibility in how I display the content of my posts and pages.
Does anyone else using these custom fields in strange/interesting/useful ways, if you do, it would be great to see what you’ve done.
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