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Responsive, Part II.

12 days ago
Tuesday January 24th, 2012

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Over the last couple of days I’ve been looking at responsive WordPress themes. Since “responsive” is just beginning to gain momentum among WordPress theme magicians, the number of available themes is low compared to old-fashioned, non-response themes. I eventually gave up on finding a nice, free theme and realized that I probably had to go premium for the first time since I started to use WordPress to run this site. There are a lot of very talented designers and developers who sell premium themes on the interwebs, but they are somewhat hard to find: Many of them work out of their mum’s basement, as freelance contractors. Or at least it’s like that in my head.

Thankfully, there are sites like ThemeForest. ThemeForest works as an aggregator for all those people trapped in basements around the world and enables them to sell their creations on a secure market place. Not unlike how all other market places work. Many theme artists make good money on ThemeForest as well, having sold for a million USD or more. I’m guessing that the creators of ThemeForest also laugh a little when they go to bed at night.

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Responsive.

17 days ago
Thursday January 19th, 2012

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Redesign, Site News, WordPress

It’s been a few days now since WordCamp and everything has begun to sink in a little. Here are my main bullet points from the event:

WordPress is huge.
It’s no longer a pain in the ass to run on Windows.
Responsive web design is the way to go.
Plugin development is something I’d like to dive deeper into.
I discovered the distraction free writing feature.

In the short term, responsive web design was the presentation that triggered me the most. I’m familiar with response web design and use a lot of responsive sites. Even this site is somewhat responsive, it’ll remove some white space on a device with a smaller screen, for instance a tablet device. Now I want to make the site’s design even more responsive and better looking on mobile devices. WPtouch is a great plugin, but when it’s possible to get the site to look familiar even on small screen, there’s really no need to use it.

One option would be to make the current theme more responsive, but that will probably be a lot of work for someone like me. Also, from past attempts to do my own redesign from scratch, I know my limitations. So my best bet is what I always do: Find a nice looking, free theme and hack away!

I’ve been looking around a little, and at this point Renova seems like a good option. But I’d prefer to have two columns, not just one. That can probably be arranged, though. It might take a while, but I’m positive the next design will be responsive. For more responsive goodness, have a look at the Media Queries showcase.

A Trip to the Cloud.

49 days ago
Sunday December 18th, 2011

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Personal, Site News

Ah, December. The social month; with dinners, parties and all kinds of get-togethers. This, in addition to some unscheduled overtime at work have left very little time in terms of spreading the word on the interweb. And just to top it off, vbox went tits up in the early hours after this year’s Christmas party at work. My trusty vbox hosts this site and seeing it offline of course broke my geeky heart, but I was too busy laying in bed in fetal position, trying to remember my name and how to speak to really care at the time.

But as soon as the worst of the after-party aftermath had passed, I set to work on getting everything back online. Unfortunately, it proved to be hard as the embedded network card had decided that it just didn’t want play anymore. With the network card enabled, Ubuntu (and several other distributions) simply refused to boot. With the network card disabled, everything booted just fine, but not having a network card kind of makes it hard to host anything. The motherboard had to be returned for repairs. Hallvard later suggested that I could just get a USB network card, and this would have solved my problems in a matter of hours. Too bad my mind really wasn’t working very well at the time. And now the ASUS motherboard has been returned for repairs anyway.

I’ve got a Google Apps account for vegard.net, so moving my e-mail was as simple as changing the MX records for the domain. But what to do with the site? I didn’t really want to move it to a shared host after the struggle I had with GreenGeeks two years ago. Also, I would certainly miss the joy of tinkering with my own server, even if it was just temporary.

One of this year’s more dominant internet buzzwords, The Cloud, in the form of Amazon EC2, came to the rescue.

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Google Rich Snippets.

84 days ago
Sunday November 13th, 2011

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Internet, Site News

For a while now, Google have been enriching their search results with metadata from the sites they display links to. Search for reviews, for instance, and you will get a review summary, complete with stars and everything in the search result. No real need to read the actual review, but of course you still should. Searches that result in blog entry hits have started to display author information with picture in the search result, which is great for people who want to build a personal brand. Like this:

Since I wouldn’t mind making money by sitting at home surfing the interwebs all day while writing the occasional rant, I decided to add the necessary information Google needs to display both review and author information every time a search result contains a link to my site. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t just start to index the new information automatically, you have to fill out a form and submit your site for manual addition to the sites they display metadata for. But as soon as everything is configured, I can just sit back, relax and watch the money come flowing in.

Great stuff. In other site-related news, I’ve fixed the last.fm information in the footer so that it looks good not only in IE and Opera, but also in Chrome and Firefox. People have told me these are popular browsers. The number of views per entry has also been reintroduced, after I discovered the functionality could be combined with WP Super Cache. I’m not sure how well it works, though, because the numbers I see in Google Analytics and the views recorded by WP-PostViews are not the same. And on top of all this, a nice set of stars are displayed on every review I write.

I spend way too much time tinker with this site.

July One-liners.

218 days ago
Saturday July 2nd, 2011

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One comment

One-liners, Site News

For July I’ve wrapped up some nice one-liners by people on J. Lots of Johns for some reason. Enjoy.

“A friend is someone who gives you total freedom to be yourself.” — Jim Morrison
“Whoever controls the media controls the mind.” — Jim Morrison
“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments.” — Jim Rohn
“Either you run the day or the day runs you.” — Jim Rohn
“If you are not willing to risk the unusual, you will have to settle for the ordinary.” — Jim Rohn
“Knowledge speaks, but wisdom listens.” — Jimi Hendrix
“Fear is the foundation of most governments.” — John Adams
“Forgive you enemies, but never forget their names.” — John F. Kennedy
“Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.” — John Lennon
“Life is hard; it’s harder if you’re stupid.” — John Wayne
“Don’t let making a living prevent you from making a life.” — John Wooden
“Don’t mistake activity for achievement.” — John Wooden
“Listen if you want to be heard.” — John Wooden
“The true test of a man’s character is what he does when no one is watching.” — John Wooden
“Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” — Joseph Addison
“History has shown there are no invincible armies.” — Joseph Stalin
“Those who vote decide nothing. Those who count the vote decide everything.” — Joseph Stalin

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Responsive, Part II.

Responsive.

A Trip to the Cloud.

Google Rich Snippets.

July One-liners.

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