Wordpress
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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. -
How to Setup CodeKit using Sass and Compass for WordPress
I’m a recent convert to writing my CSS using Sass and Compass through CodeKit. It took me a little while to figure out how to get started with CodeKit and building WordPress themes specifically, so I thought I’d share how I got it all configured. Setting up CodeKit for use with static files is very simple, but since we’re building with WordPress there are a few things to look out for.
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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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A Realignment
I’ve started to follow Matt Mullenweg’s blog (yes, the WordPress founder) and he does a great job of blogging things he cares about in his personal life as well as his professional life. The tone of the blog is very positive, interesting, and entertaining even for people that aren’t WordPress fans like myself. You get a great sense of the man behindthe site that I think some blogs are missing. I saw a link that he posted that went into depth about the idea of “owning our digital homes”. To go along with the idea of a “digital home”, I’m realigning my own blog. I want this blog to be useful to people and interesting, but also to serve as an archive and a record of my own data . This blog holds my data and it will retain my data for as long as I keep it running. I won’t be posting personal things that should be on something like Facebook, but I will be posting more links I find interesting like Martin Wolf does on his blog and that other people do as well.
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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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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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New Theme
I rolled out a nice upgrade to the site today by moving to the Yoko theme. Yoko is fully responsive and very minimal which is just what I wanted. Gone is the glossy Web 2.0 nav bar and other stylistic errors and replaced with a nice light texture, the Droid sans font (which I’m not completely sold on yet) and a simple nav bar. Yes, I’m still working on the logo.
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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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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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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.