Back in business! It’s been a very eventful April for me – on the 4th, I was notified that I was approved for SS disability, a HUGE relief. I am getting ready to move soon, and busy packing things and looking at furniture, but tomorrow I am going to the Mac store in Portland and purchasing a brand new iMac! I cannot wait, this is my heart’s desire!

In a couple of days I should be back on track. I am going to finish the next WordPress theme before I finish BK2K Web Design – I’ll probably submit it to WordPress.org on Friday, and you should be able to download it the following week.

Until then…

A couple of days ago, I created a kind of “chapter outline” of BK2K Web Design to map out the static pages that the site will have. After I did my outline, I created the pages and put in my meta titles and descriptions. These can and will be tweaked, but I’ve added what I’ve got to the outline.

When you’re done creating your outline, and adding the titles and descriptions, you’ve got the basis for a perfect list site map. Not the same as your Google XML site map, this is for your users’ benefits, although search engine bots may very well  find your site map page to be very tasty! Here is my basic outline, with links and descriptions added:

(more…)

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

Ideally, I would have all my content written and organized before I coded a site, but I wanted to finish the BK2K Web Design theme so I can finish the Scrumptious theme. I’ll work on that and the content for BK2K over the next couple of weeks, giving myself a little variety. I love coding – but I really don’t like writing. It’s hard to get inspired! So I’m going “back to school” and treating it like a homework assignment. I’m starting by creating an outline.

1. Home
2. About
   1. About BK2K
   2. About Me
   3. About this Site
3. Learn
   1. Online Schools
   2. Video Tutorials
   3. Tutorials
4. Tools
   1. Hardware
   2. Software
5. Jobs

That was easy enough! Tomorrow, I’ll decide what the title and meta description tags for the pages will be, keeping SEO, and which keywords I want to target in mind.

Join the forum discussion on this post - (1) Posts

I’ve decided to handle all support for Rose City Gardens’ WordPress themes in their individual forums, and close the comments for the initial release announcements. I hate to stifle discussion, but it’s getting a bit overwhelming keeping up with comments, email and the forum. While you will have to sign up to post, I swear before all that is holy I will never, EVER, spam you or give your address to spammers.

While I’ll be around for a few years yet, I have a bad liver problem and that means that my energy level is pretty limited. Sometimes I have to leave things for a day or two and catch up when I’m feeling better. I am so sorry to let down the wonderful users who like and download my themes. Be assured that I will be making WordPress themes as long as I can use a keyboard. Whether or not they will be usable is an entirely different story!

Join the forum discussion on this post - (4) Posts

For the longest time, I’ve been struggling with the Wordpress Custom Header API. I wanted to use it in my next theme, but was getting some wierd behavior, and it was screwing up a snippet that I use in the header that renders the right heading tag for the right page, and the headerimg is an <h1> tag on the front page only.  The post titles on the front page are <h2>. I use <h1> tags for top level pages, single post pages, and <h2> tags for archives, category pages and the like.   I use the above code to make sure the semantics were right.

I wish they’d made it a bit more flexible. it would be nice to upload both a background to the header div AND replace the headerimg div lext wtih a logo. And leave the description part alone, electing to hide it separately.

I am sure that all this can and will be soon accomplished by a WordPress geek soon! Just don’t expect it to be me!

So, I elected to trash the idea of custom image header in the next theme. What I am going to start doing though, is opening both support forums and making videos of how to do these manually,

Here’s my code I couldn’t bear to part with: goes in header.php, replacing everything in the <headerimg> its ending </div> tag.

<?php if (is_front_page()) { ?>
<h1><a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/” title=”<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>”><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></a></h1>

<?php } else { ?>
<a href=”<?php echo get_option(’home’); ?>/” title=”<?php bloginfo(’name’); ?>”><?php bloginfo(’name’); ?></a>

<?php } ?>

So, production on the promised theme shall begin again soon!

Good morning, world!