Web-Dev
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Running Browsersync with a Simple WordPress Theme
I’m working on another simple WordPress theme and Browsersync provides a great way to automatically refresh your browser whenever a change is made. Usually you would include a sync tool in the build tool of your choice (Gulp, Grunt, etc.) but this also works by itself. Open your Terminal, install Browsersync (
npm install -g browser-sync),cdinto your theme directory, and paste this line in for it to “watch” your theme folder. -
Daryl - A New Jekyll Theme
Daryl is a super simple Jekyll theme that recently hit its 1.0.0 release.
It’s purpose is to be highly-readable, performant, and simple. A 404 page is included, feed.xml is used for RSS, and it includes an Archive/Post-list page template.
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Running BrowserSync with Jekyll
BrowserSync is a tool for injecting changes when working on your local site project and then refreshing your site on save. Perfect for designers/devs who need one tool for one job.
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Moved to Jekyll
I recently converted this blog to Jekyll from WordPress and am now using GitHub Pages for hosting. I didn’t move over specifically because of problems with WordPress, but because of the following:
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A New Site
The first domain I bought was my previous site: andrewcodes.com. It started life as a static, HTML-and-CSS-only, one page, fixed-width site. And at that time, that first launch was glorious. It was very gratifying being able to release something to the Internet that I created. That first site started the ball rolling of my love of web design and creating for the web.
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Railtie Studio
My wife and I recently started a new project: Railtie Studio.
I had previously built sites for clients under my own name, but decided to make it official (and legit) by getting our business license. I also felt like having an official company name would make our business more appealing to other businesses and clients instead of just my name. So, Railtie Studio was born. We’re a custom web design studio that loves to build sites on the WordPress platform.
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Run Pace
Run Pace is my newly finished, super simple pace calculator site. Enter the data from your run (miles ran and the time you ran it in) and it will compute your average speed. I needed a site like this because I enter my average speed into the My Fitness Pal app which determines the calories I burned. However, I wanted a site that was visually minimalistic (in the same vein as my other side project, Minimal Tasks) and was really easy to use. There are a lot of pace calculator sites out there but I wanted one that was a lot more simple. Hopefully other people will find it useful as well!
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Podcasts for Front-End Developers and Designers
My daily commute to my job is forty-five minutes each way and on days that I don’t listen to music, I listen to podcasts. It’s nice to put that empty time to use by learning something new. Here are my favorite three podcasts that I listen to:
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Anatomy of a WordPress Theme
Great refresher on the “Anatomy of a WordPress theme”. Joost de Valk wrote a detailed breakdown of what each section does and included images as well.
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Complete HTML and PHP Form Walk-Through
I recently coded a landing/splash page for a client of mine that has a form the user fills out and then submits via email to the client. I have coded forms before, but had never learned how the actual submission of data happens via PHP on the server-side. I wanted to share how my simple form works and the code behind it.
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Done with Themes
I found the perfect solution for my theme-ing issues. No more using someone else’s code when I can write it myself and use my own, simpler design. I’m now using the Toolbox theme which is semantic, HTML5 code and then a very minimal amount of CSS leaving plenty of room for styling but still giving you a baseline to get started. Perfection.
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Checking In
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.
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CSS Reset vs. Normalize
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.
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Newsletters
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.
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Moving Day
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.
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Minimal Tasks Re-design
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.
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WordPress
I have finally made the jump to WordPress. And so far, I couldn’t be happier.
No longer will I have to create a blog post in HTML, then copy that post into it’s own page while making sure I link back to the main page and the CSS correctly. No longer will I have to deal with revisions upon revisions of my custom themes. No longer will I have to think about, “Okay, I saved my images here, but I’m in this post, so the file path to that image should be …”.
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Minimal Tasks and a Real Web Host
It took me awhile, but I now have a project entry on my Projects page! Minimal Tasks is a project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s a super-simple, no login required, task entry site. It uses the
localStorageattribute currently in-use using HTML5. So your tasks are all stored in the browser – no need for a server-side database and no need for logins as well. -
Re-design Euphoria
A disclaimer: this post has been in my drafts since about version 3 of this site. I’ve added them up (including the designs that never made it) and I’ve created about 27 variations of this site. Yes, 27.
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The Future
I cannot wait to get onto a real web host. StatiCloud is obviously nice since it’s free, easy to setup, free, and great for static sites (and free). But since starting this blog, I have a greater understanding of how crucial a CMS is.
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Faster
Everyone wants a faster loading website. One tip that I came across the other day is to move your scripts that you would normally include in the
headtag down to just above the closingbodytag. Since your website starts loading from the top of your code to the bottom, the extra scripts at the bottom will load last enabling your main, viewable content to be loaded faster.