I was supposed to go on a photo shoot with Amber today but she emailed this morning saying she was tested positive for Strep throat. (Get well soon!)
I turned the situation into an opportunity for me to finally finish up some web work:
I wrapped up a website for my friend Alex with Eaton Investment Group.
I came to terms with the fact I wasn’t giving Minnesota Meow the attention it deserved and announced I won’t be updating it anymore. The good news is that I migrated all the cats to this site and will periodically post about cats here. I cleaned up my categories so if people are here just for the cats, they can have just the cats. I even have a cat category RSS feed!
The noticeable change if you’re reading this with a browser is that I finished migrating to another look here. I’m using blog.txt by Scott Allan Wallick. I like that it’s clean, simple, well coded and focuses so well on the content.
In previous iterations of this site I’ve taken an existing template and done dramatic editing to get it look exactly the way I want it. This time I wanted the challenge of seeing how few things I would manually edit and using WordPress 2.5’s widgets and plugins as much as possible instead. The blog.txt template is so well coded that it made the challenge possible.
I think I did well but unfortunately I eventually have to make some code changes. If you’re really curious, I have them listed below but honestly I’m posting these here so I remember what I changed:
Added tracking code in footer.php for Google Analytics.Update: Figured there might be a plugin for that and sure enough, there is. I reverted my code changes.- Added Flickr-specific CSS in style.css so it’s not embedded in the post every time I post directly from Flickr:
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }
.flickr-yourcomment { }
.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 10px 0 0 0; }
.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } - Commented out part of archives.php so I could use the SRG Clean Archives plug-in instead.
- Changed
< ?php the_excerpt(’<span class="more-link">’.__(’Continue Reading »’, ‘blogtxt’).”) ?>
to
< ?php the_content(); ?>
in search.php and archive.php to show the entire post when searching, browsing by category or looking through archives.
- Commented out the tag cloud in sidebar.php because I thought it was annoying and not very useful because only a small percentage of my posts have tags so far.
- Changed some margin values on lines 765-773 of functions.php so there wasn’t such a large amount of white space on the left and top:
if ( get_option(’blogtxt_layoutalignment’) == “” ) {
$layoutalignment = ‘body div#wrapper{margin:2em 0 0 2em;}’;
} elseif ( get_option(’blogtxt_layoutalignment’) ==”center” ) {
$layoutalignment = ‘body div#wrapper{margin:2em auto 0 auto;padding:0 1em;}’;
} elseif ( get_option(’blogtxt_layoutalignment’) ==”left” ) {
$layoutalignment = ‘body div#wrapper{margin:2em 0 0 2em;}’;
} elseif ( get_option(’blogtxt_layoutalignment’) ==”right” ) {
$layoutalignment = ‘body div#wrapper{margin:2em 3em 0 auto;}’;
};
Overall I’m pleased that those are the only things I had to manually edit (so far) to become pleased with the layout. I still have some things to work on with the site but it’s 5:45 P.M. Time to take a shower.
