Programmer | Web Developer
I rebuilt a site that I had originally built in 2013/2014 using Textpattern. The design was kept similar but updated to become full screen width and made mobile friendly. I imported all the content out of textpattern structured in a format that was seamlessly imported into WordPress. The new site is more flexible and has features that automatically generate the RSS feed for podcast episodes.
Visit: Inkandescent Radio
I built a small site that lets the user submit an image and select an overlay for that that image. The result for user is final image associated with the conference that they can download and use on social media and other platforms. The site was designed by Kinetik
The site is built using WordPress, and the Gravity Forms plugin. After the user submits the form, I set up some post processing code that grabs the user submitted image and the selected overlay, combines them into one image with a bit of php, and shows the result so user can download.
Visit: NAIS Photobooth
More than 2 years! That seems a bit too long to wait to process pics from a 6 week trip to New Zealand, and it is. I kept thinking if I had a nickel every time someone asked me about my New Zealand trip pics, I would have zero nickels. But alas, you lucky souls, you finally get to see them.
I did start the process not long after I returned, but I was quite unhappy with what I was seeing. A lot of soft focus, or just plain blurry pics, and what seemed like big gaps in picture taking. It looked like I forgot to take pics for long stretches of hiking, so much so that I kept rechecking my cards for missed images. 6 weeks and only about 1500 total images between camera and phone. Of course, now that I have edited images and arranged in galleries, I am glad I did not have more. This was way more work than I expected.
I did miss a bunch, but I was getting my ass kicked at times, and was maybe too tired to stop and take pics. But, after processing, the results are definitely better than I expected.
BTW – New Zealand is well worth a visit. On to the galleries!
When gutenberg first appeared in wordpress, I very quickly found myself, along with lots of other people, downloading plugin that removed gutenberg, or at the very least gave a choice on how to edit content. My initial experience with gutenberg involved a whole lot of moving my mouse around the screen trying to figure out how to add a block, or move a block. It was incredibly frustrating. For this updated site, and my new photo galleries, I decided to try gutenberg again. It has been a while, with numerous updates and I assumed some needed user interface improvements in gutenberg.
Why is a good question, and there are in my mind two good reasons. 1) Gutenberg is here to stay, so continuing to ignore it probably means losing out on WordPress features going forward, and 2) Advanced Custom Fields is the only plugin that I use on almost every site, except for a security plugin. ACF is vital to building a custom theme and making the admin interface easier for clients to access content in a way that makes sense. The only problem with ACF is the content is stored in the post_meta table, and not the posts table. I am not sure how big a deal this is in the grand scheme of a wordpress site and how it interacts with search engines. I can explore this later, but I believe it is better to have as much of the post content in the post content field. A topic that would be useful to understand better.
Gutenberg provides some of the same flexibility as ACF, but keeps the content in the posts table. Plus, I just learned that ACF can help in creating custom blocks within Gutenberg. This would be convenient, as making custom blocks for gutenberg is somewhat involved. I looked at it a while ago, but then stopped, as I wasn’t using gutenberg and it is a bit involved. I haven’t explored this in detail yet, but for me, gutenberg is primarily useful if it can help me streamline a clients editing of content. In other words, make it easier for them.
Well, it has been a while since I updated my site. It has been on my task list for a while, as the adaptive/mobile set up was not working so well, and maybe adding some new work examples might be useful. The final push was I finally started putting together a narrative and photos from my 2018 New Zealand trip, and I had some specific ideas on how I wanted to set up my photo galleries. This necessitated some rebuilding of the site structure.
I also have been exploring headless wordpress, and other ways of building a more secure, faster web site. WordPress is still my preferred tool to manage content, but the constant need to update plugins and keep monitoring the site can be time intrusive. I also don’t think that just enabling auto updates is the ideal scenario. That, in my mind outsources keeping track of your site.
The end result is what you see. Here are my New Zealand photos and narrative, which is not completely done, as it is a ton of work. The big deal is this site is now a series of static pages. I am still managing the site via wordpress, but that copy of wordpress runs on my local computer, and I then produce the pages using a plugin that generates the pages. This works for me because I don’t need to update my site regularly, although now that I am going to start adding blog entries, that might change a bit, but also I don’t allow comments, or have forms or other pages that require server side processing. The result is a more secure, faster site. I also tweaked the design a bit, but since nobody was visiting my site anyway :), few will realize it. But I fixed some issues with it showing on mobile devices.