November 8, 2006: Registered domain and got hosting. Laid some basic foundation work, such as installing WordPress and SPGM. Conceptualized a design, then began creating the look of the site in Photoshop.
November 9, 2006: Finalized design, imported to ImageReady, then sliced and diced. Exported to web. Exported the menu system to its own file, to use as an ‘include.’ Spent time integrating SPGM, resizing pictures and uploading
November 10, 2006: Continued integrating features; decided to keep the SPGM colors, but customized one picture to make it ‘icy.’ Resume now links to the appropriate Word file, Projects page required creating a page, then finding and customizing PHP code and an SQL query so it would give me a listing of all the WordPress entries in the Projects group.
November 16, 2006: Captioned and resized the Beaver Island pictures. Attempted to add the SPGM-Vid extension to the SPGM gallery, so that it would support me including the Beaver Island videos, but it didn’t play well. Reversed my changes and began the 100MB upload of the pictures.
November 17, 2006: Wrote a very long project report on the Beaver Island Spudgun. Tweaked it until I was happy. Realized I wasn’t happy with the default WordPress theme, so I went about locating one I liked better. Realized that there’s a bug in WordPress that seemed to crop up when I inserted pictures into a post that caused certain elements of the page to display wrong. I eventually found a theme that did not exhibit these issues, and had a design I liked. Incorporated it and made some minor edits, such as replacing the banner graphic. I also edited the top menus to clean them up and added an archive page and associated plugin. None of this affects the main page, but when people deal with WordPress, it would become noticeable.
November 18, 2006: I went through a few years worth of pictures and captioned and resized those which would work well on the site. Attempted to get a password set up on the gallery, but haven’t had much luck yet.
November 20, 2006: Attempted to password-protect the photo gallery by using Apache’s .htaccess functionality in combination with the mod_auth_mysql package so that users could register via WordPress and still use their usernames and passwords to access photos. I made several attempts at code to do this before realizing that mod_auth_mysql may not be included in the server setup. A fact which dismays me, and completely halts what would otherwise be a very slick setup. After firing off an e-mail to the hosting support asking about this, I experimented with a different route. I got the Gallery2 photo manager and a WordPress plugin to share the user database. After a two-hour adventure to install Gallery2, the necessary modules, and the WordPress plugin, I found that it was technically capable of doing what it advertised. Unfortunately for me, Gallery2 looks like crap and works even worse. It’s a nightmare to navigate through, having options scattered everywhere. Except for the options I want, which are nowhere to be found. I made a test gallery, the steps of which were rather unintuitive, and attempted to replicate a typical gallery. In doing so, I had to create a designated upload folder to put the pictures in, then tell Gallery2 to retrieve them and make thumbnails. It failed to import them properly three times (after which I gave up). If the Gallery is incapable of importing 17 photos, it serves no use to display the thousands I’ll be asking of it. The process is more complicated, it doesn’t look nearly as good, and it doesn’t work nearly as well as SPGM. Gallery2 will have to go. That still leaves me in a pickle as to how to get SPGM password-protected, however.
November 21, 2006: I was finally able to get a password on the gallery by calling some WordPress login stuff. So, that’s a real relief. To commemorate this momentous occasion, I uploaded a plethora of photos today, bringing the gallery up to over 1300 pictures already.
November 23, 2006: Happy Thanksgiving!
November 24, 2006: Today I decided I wasn’t quite happy with the way things looked, and I liked the WordPress theme I picked out a bit better. So I threw things into Photoshop and started tweaking. This is essentially a re-build of the HTML/images of the site, so I could essentially call this Version 2.0 already. It now has a slicker look, with some rounded corners and two panes. I like it a lot better, and it matches well with the WordPress back-end. Unfortunately, because of the corners, I had to devise a way to make the random pic fit in. It looked out of place as it was. After much thinking and trial and error, I set the random pic as the background of the cell, and as the picture in the cell a special PNG overlay (since PNG supports transparency). This only adds 1KB to the overall size and overlays some rounded corners on the pictures so they fit in again.
November 28, 2006: I was able to tweak the projects page so that it displays the excerpt below the title now. This allows for a short, convenient description for my projects. Naturally, I updated all of the projects to have useful excerpts next. Following this, I decided that the main page was getting a bit out of hand with the length project posts, so I used the More tag functionality to split them into more convenient chunks.
November 29, 2006: Signed up for Google Analytics and created and set up a Google Sitemap. This should let Google know about my site so it can scan it, and Analytics should give me some neat statistics about my viewers. Fun fact: When I was uploading googleanalytics.php and had the Google Analytics site open, Windows kept abbreviating it to “googleanal…” or “Google Anal…” Perhaps they should call it “Analytics by Google.” I also did the project write-up for The Waterbox today.
December 1, 2006: Did the project write-up for the DiamondBox today and found a script called Random Title Pro which lets me put in some random titles that will appear on the main pages. It seems like a slick system. Tom and I brainstormed for a few minutes to come up with 10 to start off with. Later on, I got my first ‘random’ user. He registered an account, which I was notified of immediately by e-mail. I couldn’t figure out who he was, so I kick-started my plans to try to restrict pictures to only the accounts I verify. After much research/testing/frustration, I finally found the code to do it. It involves the PHP require_once for the WordPress stuff, and calls a function to get the current user’s info, including level. Then an if-statement checks to see if that level is 0 (default, lowest level) and if so, sends the user to an error saying to wait while I verify his or her identity. It works great!
December 6, 2006: I found a problem with the menu system that probably cropped up when I changed the design. So I fixed that to correctly call to the menu.html file instead of what it was doing. I also finished off the resume page by taking my latest version and converting it to PNG (and then to GIF) and to PDF, so now all of the links and doo-dads on that page work.
January 24, 2007: A new version of WordPress was recently released, bringing it up to 2.1. While I’ve upgraded it in the past (2.0.5 -> 2.0.6 -> 2.0.7), this is more of a major release. If the version number were any indication, which it’s not, it would be an order of magnitude more significant. And, with many significant changes, this one caused problems: the WordPress theme, Wucoco would not adapt to the changes in WordPress. It works perfectly in Internet Explorer, but fails miserably in Firefox and Opera. While IE covers the majority of the market, “mostly working” is not what I consider acceptable…especially when I’m one of the Firefox users. This requires further investigation…or at least a patch by the author.
February 7, 2007: I tried out Dreamweaver today to make some PHP edits and an HTML edit. I hated it. Granted, FrontPage may not be the most in-depth tool, and I’m sure it doesn’t make the greatest code, but at least it’ll perform the job I ask it to. I have my methodologies structured pretty minimally, so I don’t rely on FrontPage for a whole lot anyway; it’s there for quick edits. I’ll try another tool soon, but for now I’m stuck with FrontPage (and it’s stuck with me). In other news, I was able to get Wucoco working, finally! There was actually no patch required; the guy who made it upgraded to WP 2.1 without any issues. This told me it should work, somehow, so I downloaded the theme again and removed my existing one completely, replacing it with the new (untouched) one. It worked. So I replicated the changes I’d made before, and it continued to work. I was in business. And one final project for the night will be getting the About Me page working. I set up the menu to link to a WordPress About page, and need to put the content on it now. Later on, I want to do the full PHP code so that it shows in window.
March 2, 2007: I decided to overhaul the menu/header design tonight. Basically I started playing around in Photoshop and came up with something I liked. So I began the arduous task of slicing, exporting, and all of that stuff. It was even worse this time because I had to try to integrate the changes I’ve made over time to new pages. I ended up doing the design stuff from scratch, and just copying out the relevant PHP code. There is still a weird bug that occurs at the bottom of the pages, and I’d like to do some more optimization (I used PNGs for the images this time as an experiment, but I think I would like to use GIF for the simple ones). Anyway, the new page is very similar to the previous one at first glance. I changed the main logo to something cleaner looking–I was never totally happy with the other one. And I dropped the menu down to its own row, which reduces the clutter where the menu used to run into the random image, and it gives me more menu room for expansion. As a side bonus, it let me separate out the header and menu into their own files, and the pages simply call them via PHP includes (the menu was set up like this before, but the header was not). This should modularize things and make editing easier and possibly page loads faster. If only it wasn’t so much work to do it all….
March 3, 2007: Ugh! I just spent a lot more time trying to tweak things than I should have. It started when I set out to fix the bug mentioned yesterday, where the corners weren’t being placed properly and the side of the content window weren’t extending all the way down. I ended up re-slicing that section of the image in Photoshop in a better way, then re-integrating things again. This all went fairly well. Then I decided I wanted to do the trick I used before, where I set the image as the cell background instead of simply an image in the cell. This has the effect of making it a nonselectable element of the page. Firefox and Opera respond fine to this, but IE seems to choke on the edge elements now. I’ll have to figure out which direction I want to go with this now. A positive side effect is that I’ve pretty much tore through the table pretty well now, and it’s nice and clean. It was when I decided to try to tackle W3C compliance that things just got ugly. I know compliance is good and all, but it totally screwed things up. So…my page isn’t compliant. And I’ll worry about making it compliant when more than 9 people visit in a day. I’m cutting this corner.
April 16, 2007: I’ve been tossing around the idea of switching the site to a custom WordPress theme. This would entail customizing the current one greatly. I took one “simple” step towards this today, by creating the projects page. Now, http://liquidnitrogen.us/wordpress/projects will give a very nice listing. Even better, it fits perfectly with the Archives page, as it is based off the same code written by Shawn Grimes (SRG Clean Archives, which is in turn based off of work by Sebastian Schmieg).
April 26, 2007: Tonight I decided to experiment with adapting the Wucoco WordPress theme to take over duties of my site, as it would be a bit cleaner, a bit more elegant, and a bit simpler. Some progress was made, and I found that the 2-column version was handy. I’ve got it up in a usable format so far, but it still needs a lot of work to get the navigation set up right. I’d like to still have tabs if at all possible. I also came across the WordPress Theme Generator which does a pretty nice job at creating a somewhat customized theme. I might be able to look at the code for that and incorporate some of the features I want.
To-Do:
Make a full page for About Me, or use that space for a login button.
