Posts Tagged ‘blog’

New, extremely minimalist redesign

Thursday, February 18th, 2010

I’ve been working for a while on a single consistent theme and templating system for the entire website. A few months ago I finished everything but the blog (which was using the ClockWorkAir theme), because, being powered by WordPress, I wasn’t familiar with the theme system.

Anyways, I’ve finally implemented the new, extremely minimalist design everywhere. The plugin Theme Switch helped a bunch, because it allowed me to preview what I was working on without the general public seeing it. WordPress itself was a pain though, because I’m used to coding by hand and not using any kind of framework to generate HTML. I ended up doing some pretty silly things. For example, I first started by trying to get WordPress to simply call my custom templating files for the rest of the site. Following the logic of my system I did things like:

$title = wp_title();
//...
require('head.php'); //My custom templating system

Whenever I loaded the page there was a mysterious “Nomulous Blog” at the very top of my HTML source. This confused me at first, but I soon realized that (not having been designed to be processed, only displayed) the wp_title() function printed a value instead of returning one.

In the end I just went to my home page, copied most of the source, and modified the default WordPress theme to use that instead. Aha!

That was a Technorati verification post.

Sunday, September 13th, 2009

Apparently I should be in this great blogging database, Technorati, which actually kind of sucks because it forces you to make a post in order to verify that you own the blog. Now I have a random post with a few letters in it that might have been picked up by god knows how many RSS readers and what not. Why can’t they just let me put an HTML file somewhere or something easy and subtle like that? Maybe cause Google did it first? Fuck, I don’t wanna have to make a friggin’ post to verify that I own the blog. A lot of blogs even let people post who don’t own them. So what the hell is the advantage to that? Damn you, Technorati. </rant>