Technical Blog – Page 17

New Website: Closet Space

The first first is a chance to design a movie trailer web site for a friend of mine, Sheru Arora (I did his main site askarora.com). I have always wanted to do one and best of it it’s a Horror flick. My favorite genre these days. I’m not sure what is is, a ghost story or a monster story or both. But it looks exciting and scary. It’s called Closet Space and is sure to scare the pants off of you. I know I used to be afriad of the closet.Especially after seeing Poltergeist as a kid. Parents be warned it’s probably going to cause trauma in small chirrens.

This is a fluid width site which means I did not use #page{width:980px}. Main divs are using percents. I started doing this for my main content div and my sidebar div on other websites but never for a wrapper. The big reason I wanted to try this is because I now have a widescreen monitor. That’s basically it. I’m really not involved in the fluid vs. fixed debate.

The screenshot shows the background image, the trailer playing in the ProPlayer Plugin for WordPress, and the Closet Space banner. I was given a still image from the trailer to work with as the background image. It did not look right “as was” so I grunged it up in Photoshop with some grunge brushes I got from Deviant Art which, by the way is my number one Photoshop Resource destination.

The banner logo is made up of 5 or 6 text layers all set to Overlay and using the blend option Outside Glow. The more text layers, the brighter the glow got. The font face is Baskerville.

Multifeedsnap Plugin Can’t Fetch Ebay RSS Feeds-They’re Too Long!

I don’t use Twitter that often but people use Tiny URL on Twitter all the time because of the 140 character limit per Twit. Seeing this made me think what if I used it to shorten Ebay Feed URI? It was worth a try. So I went to TinyUrl.com and pasted my monster Ebay RSS URL in the transform box and got a tiny url to put in the
[ feedsnap] shortcode [ /feedsnap] Now the plugin shows the feed. And I am happy again.

This reminds me of another Ebay related rss problem. Finding the rss button at the bottom of my Ebay Advanced search result pages. I just couldn’t find it! I asked Ebay support. Got back some whiffle about clearing my cookies and cache. Turns out I was using the Beta Advanced Search. I opted out of this and now I can find the RSS button at the bottom of my advanced searches.

WordPress Permalink Structure Re Structure

they're beans, their beans, there there beans I’ve always set up my Permalink structure as /%category%/%postname% But as it turns out this is not so hot. I’ve just switched it to /%post_id%/%postname%. I checked some of my hand typed urls using the permalinks and was redirected to the new permalink.

This seems sweet. Pretty pretty sweet. Though thankfully my host knows its beans. I wouldn’t like to try this switch over on a host server that did not know it’s beans.

WordPress Meetup

wp-meetup I’m going to the WordPress meetup in NYC. I’m a little unprepared because I haven’t downloaded (or even looked at it-gasp!) the theme they’re going to be talking about. I do need to know what the top dawgs consider correct usage of categorization and I am a little weak on the whole custom fields thing. But all my projects involve using WordPress as a CMS, so I had to sign up when Tina (laidbackhome.com) alerted me there were only 4 spots left. It’s all full,now. I don’t have a laptop but I’m sure Ms.Shoulders will share.

Here’s the Meetup Description:
WordPress isn’t just for blogs anymore. It can be used as an effective content management system for editorial sites when you employ the right plugins and methods of categorization and navigation. Consultant, designer, and developer Johnathan Andersen (www.johnathanandersendesign.com) will share his experience in the online content publishing industry and how you can use WordPress to build and manage your own online magazine and make money.

In this presentation we will use the Revolution theme, ‘Church’ style to create an editorial style blog with advertising. We will look at various ways to utilize categories and custom field plugins to control content and provide an engaging experience. We will also look at how popular sites today are providing similar experiences that can be replicated using these techniques.
This presentation will be for all levels of WordPress users who want to learn more about what WordPress can do for their personal businesses.