The Editing Chainsaw
Rebuilding a Website (or: See Horses, Read Stories, Learn Stuff)
I'm undertaking a big project this month, although most of the change will happen slowly, at some point there will be a dramatic shift in…
This category deals with the joys of hammering together a Wordpress based website. It may also wander off into other coding adventures, but for the moment it’s all CSS, Themeing, traffic management, and blog design.
The Editing Chainsaw
Converting Images to CSS Sprites
I’ve been on a speed kick lately with the site, trying to find ways to make it load faster while keeping the same functionality. I started out by turning off all the plugins I wasn’t using, replacing dynamic widgets with static images… and finally by looking at the Google Page Speed Report and following the recommendations.
The easiest one (at least in theory) was “Combine images into CSS sprites” which meant dumping all of the commonly used images into one PNG file and then using CSS background-image and background-position instead of IMG calls. (more…)
The Editing Chainsaw
Renaming the Subblogs
Custom-Models.com and Martha.net have been less than inspiring subblog names, but I've been dragging my feet on getting them fixed. Since the new year is…
The Editing Chainsaw
Landing Page Redesign(ish)
I've been musing over it for a bit now and finally decided to swap the Index page for the blog back over to a list…
The Editing Chainsaw
Posting a WiP: NaNoWriMo + Blog = WIN?
As November starts to amble into view, I figured it was time to sit down and take another look at how I've been posting Work-in-Progress…
The Editing Chainsaw
The Story of Martha.net
The Martha.net subblog (which is also overdue for a better name) is supposed to be all about the tweaks and tricks I’ve learned about designing and maintaining a WordPress blog.
It covers everything from basic analytics and visitor flow to the coding itself, pausing along the way to dip into posting schedules, color theory, UI and other design elements. For the moment I’ve been writing it retroactively, centering on changes I have already made or plug-ins that I’ve found useful.
So it was a bit of a mess when I sat down to storyboard things. (more…)
The Editing Chainsaw
Blogroll Simplicity – WP Social Blogroll & Widget Logic
Blogroll Simplicity
I’ve been playing around with ways to make the RSS feed of my blogroll a) less time intensive to load and b) more relevant for readers.
Before I started tweaking things yesterday, WP Social Blogroll would pull the RSS feed for every single link in the chosen categories, check it for recent activity, and then post links to the newest entries.
Since I have over a hundred blogs that I’m keeping an eye on… it took forever to load.
Then I stumbled over the awesome plug-in Widget Logic by Alan Trewartha. Now victory is mine! (more…)
The Editing Chainsaw
Storyboarding for Blogs?
Good blogs are predictable, readers know what kind of content to expect and generally when to expect it– even if that timeframe is ‘randomly.’
This blog is not a very good blog.
But as most things, it’s a work in progress, which means the sentence above is simply a current evaluation and not the toll of the death bell. (Valdemar references FTW.) (more…)