loganleger.com Renaissance

Introduction

Several years ago when I first came of age on the internet, I had a blog. It began as a Blogger account and was then upgraded to a full-fledged WordPress blog on my newly purchased domain—loganleger.com. The blog was a living historical account of my progression through the internet phenomenon. Moreover, you could see my maturation in writing and thought. Some of this data has been lost—some in part to my carelessness, some in part to time.

Now, as I enter a new stage in my career, I decided to reopen the blog. When I went to LSMSA, I decided to shut it down and make my site a static portfolio because I simply hadn’t the time to devote to it. Now that I’m out of the hectic bubble of Natchitoches, I finally have time to write again. This time, I plan to fill this space with all sorts of content. I’ll discuss whatever is on my mind, and these days it’s far more than just technology. There will be thought-provoking articles that’ll make you think and there will be funny articles to lighten your day and there will be technology discussions and tutorials. This time through, I plan on sticking to it and making regular posts. Nevertheless, I’ll never sacrifice quality for quantity. I care about my writing, so you can expect to see nothing less than some of the best writing on the internet. I also plan on bringing in some of my colleagues to make guest posts. These colleagues are friends that I have accumulated in my academic circles and I assure you that their writing will be nothing less, if not more, than my own.

Design

Recently, I’ve really invested in the minimalist aesthetic. From the arrangements of my living space, to the designs in my portfolio, everything is done with one thing in mind: simplicity. One reason for this is my love for Apple, but I’ve found a great quote to support this. You can see it in the footer on my website, but here it is: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Albert Einstein said this. Einstein was unequivocally a genius and when geniuses speak, you listen.

So, I knew from the beginning that I wanted a minimalist design. I did some reading around and perused some minimalist galleries. I drew lots of inspiration from Khoi Vinh Subtraction.  My site is even in more or less grid-form, which Vinh created. I also drew inspiration from the newly redesigned http://www.criterion.com/, the online home of the Criterion Collection. Once I had an idea of what I wanted it to look like, it was just a matter of sitting down and coding.

Now, I have a confession: This is the first time I’ve ever coded a WordPress theme from scratch. Yes, I’ve used templates before and modified them—that’s how I learned HTML, CSS, and PHP to begin with—, but I’ve never gone from start to finish with my own acumen. I won’t lie: It wasn’t an easy task. I began locally using Coda and MAMP in basic HTML. 37signals recommends this in their book Getting Real, which I highly recommend for anyone, much less those building web applications. They call this process “wireframing,” and it’s basically to get a feel for what the site will feel like.

After the wireframing was complete, I still had to build out the WordPress template structure. To do this, I downloaded a blank WordPress theme as a guide and began filling in the template.  I thought using the blank theme as a guide would be relatively easy, but the structure of my site is much different from a traditional blog. This required lots of time to translate, if you will, to my structure. I had to do lots of research into using multiple loops and custom fields for the homepage (more on that later). The main post title is one loop; the recent blogs is another loop; and the quotes is yet another. I had to exclude the quotes from the other two and make sure that if one post was at the headline, then it wouldn’t be in the others. I also used custom fields for the source of each quote and used CSS3 specifications to open and close the quotes around it, so this might not be visible in your browser. All of these were explained in the WordPress Codex. Another CSS trick I used was a “sticky footer,” which I got here.  This was really helpful and while I think it’s broken on some of the pages, it works quite well.

Conclusion

Because I’m new to this, my CSS is probably not as organized as it could be and my HTML is riddled with comments. In the coming days, I plan to go back through the files and clean this up a bit. Also, my content thus far is lacking, not only in posts, but also in pages. If you notice, a few of the pages are missing content. In the coming days, this will be filled out as well.  But, I’m really loving WordPress 2.7.  It’s a big step up from when I last used it.  One last thing: I haven’t even checked this site in IE.  From what I can see in my site statistics, a majority either uses Safari or Firefox, which, on my computer, both render this excellently.  Also, if there’s anything that you were wondering how I did, please let me know and I’ll explain. But, I would like some feedback. How do you like the design? Are there any improvements you could suggest? How does it feel for you? I’d like to improve the design as best I could and, potentially, release it for the community. But, I think I’m a long way from that.