Not too much activity here on the ol’ blog, but I’ve been plenty busy. I’ve been working on the launch of a web app for a mortgage firm writing up the front-end code and assisting with some design aspects as well. Very, very challenging but I’m loving the work.

On a personal level, 2012 has been the year that I get myself back in shape. To do that, I’ve been running during my lunch hour at work which is usually the time that I get to code. So my personal coding has slowed down some, but it’ll be worth it in the end. Feel free to email me if you’d like more details about my ongoing running/fitness tale.

And if you’re not following CSS Wizardry yet, you should. Harry has been putting out some amazing content for CSS (and HTML) aficionado’s alike. I’m reading through all the archives and loving it. Good stuff.

Also, here’s a little inspirational wallpaper I whipped up just for fun:

I was listening to the Shop Talk show to the other day and they had Paul Irish as a guest. If you don’t know who Paul is, he’s the one who created the HTML5 Boilerplate, CSS3Please, and various other tool-type sites that are awesome and super useful.

Paul mentioned that they’ve switched to normalize.css on the latest version of the HTML5 Boilerplate instead of using reset.css. normalize.css has some reset functions but also keeps some default styling intact as well.

I tried using normalize.css on a project the other day but realized I still like Eric Meyer’s reset.css a lot more. Using a reset gives you a clean slate to build your CSS which is my favorite part about it. However, creating your own “boilerplate” is even more valuable. If you find yourself re-writing code because your reset already cleared it, you should then modify your reset to fit your own needs. I like to take code, em, pre, and strong, out of the normal reset flow because I always use one or all of those tags in my projects.

If you’re like me, your Google Reader is filled with tons of subscriptions to various Web Dev, Design, and Web Technology-related news. While those subscriptions are valuable, sometimes it’s helpful to just get a summary of all the noteworthy news you might have missed during the week.

Enter “E-mail Newsletters”.

While it’s definitely an old-school way of distributing news, the newsletter seems to be making a comeback. Here are my picks:

HTML5DEV is a great resource for all-things HTML5 and browser technology.

Tom McFarlin writes a great software/web development newsletter.

And for the web designers, Web Design Weekly generates a great newsletter as well.

For a novice like myself, I find that the more resources and learning materials that I have, the better I get at coding websites.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about setting up my landing page. A “landing” or “personal-brand” page explains in a summary of who you are and what you do. I had thought about just setting up an “About” page link on my blog, but ended up moving my blog to blog.andrewcodes.com and my landing page to the top domain andrewcodes.com.

Moving WordPress

I’ve never created a sub-domain before or a landing page, so I wanted to jot down my steps on how I did that:

• I went to my cPanel on my host and setup a new subdomain, blog.andrewcodes.com. Just a few clicks and it was done.

• If you are using WordPress, you’ll definitely want to follow the Moving WordPress guide.

• The key points from the Moving WordPress guide are to change your Site Address and WordPress address before moving your actual site. If you don’t, you won’t be able to get into your Dashboard.

• After changing the URL’s, move the files and folders that hold everything related to WordPress to its new location. For me, that meant creating a folder called “blog” on my host and then moving the files and folders over (don’t forget to move index.php).

• And that’s about it! Once you’ve gone through the steps, you’ll need to wait a little while for your host to update all the changes. It took mine about five minutes.

After I walked through those steps, I was able to upload my landing page to my host and got it up and running with no problems.

Landing Page

I got a lot of inspiration (and the background) for my current landing page from one of John Saddington’s early designs. Check out his other designs as well to get a good idea of how to create your own or use one of his that he’s released.

Other great landing pages:

Phil Coffman

Michael Novotny

Jon Raasch

Moving to WordPress has giving me more time to work on a new re-design of Minimal Tasks which is definitely needed. I’m also cleaning up the code as well to make the actual size of the site as small as possible. Many thanks to Harold at Overcommitted for helping me out with my lack of design skills.

If you like and use Minimal Tasks, please feel free to leave a comment or reach out to andrew at this domain with any feedback you may have. Thanks!