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Archive for WordPress

Video Game Page & Book Status

Dec04

I deployed a new video game topic page yesterday. This was a good chunk of work. I use a modified iThemes Builder child theme and so continued to use their custom layout and variable widget systems to build out a special page to replace the older, uglier, video games page. First though, I had to hack into the code and modify the way in which the sharing icons and related posts were being inserted. WordPress plugins often have automatic insertion into the end of the content, but as soon as you start getting a more sophisticated layout with more than one “content” on the same page that starts to be problematic. I had to turn it off and insert it manually into the right templates.

Then I spent an entire day exploring ways to implement different grids of magazine style excerpts for particular types of posts on particular pages. I ended up writing the code myself, but using Builder’s extension system to inject into the layout’s I wanted. I got it working for this page, but I’m only about 90% satisfied. There are still some mysteries. Like how to convince CSS to extend each entry down to the height of the tallest one on a line. I align them with “vertical-align: top”, but I don’t know how to match up the bottoms. I’d also like to improve the handling of the thumbnail photos and I need to figure out how to generalize my extension so I can use it on different pages. That being said, I still think it’s better looking than the old page.

Check out the new page here and let me know what you think.

With regard to my books, busy busy. I’m waiting on a second sketch for my new, professional cover for The Darkening Dream. That should come any day. I’ve pretty much finished up the interior artwork, but I’m not ready to post it just yet — soon. I’ve been working through proofs of the interior book design as well, which is looking great.

I also got back the full line edit of Untimed yesterday. Two of my editors, Renni Browne and Shannon Roberts did a simultaneous full line edit. This is on top of four drafts of higher level discussions. Getting 320 pages of line edit back is a lot to digest in one sitting! Look at the example page to the right. That’s just one page worth of edits. I have to go over them all and decide what to keep, what not, and how to rework anything suggested by the comments. But it’s worth it. Books need editing. It’s essential to have more than one set of eyes on them. And, ultimately, it’s still my book — I decide what stays and what goes.

This will keep me busy for a week or two. Haha.

More about my writing here.

Related posts:

  1. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 5 – The Method
  2. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 3 – Getting Started
  3. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 1 – Why
  4. So you want to be a video game programmer? – part 2 – Specs
  5. New Book Pages
By: agavin
Comments (2)
Posted in: Darkening Dream, Technology, Untimed
Tagged as: Andy Gavin, blog, CSS, Editing, game, Line Editing, The Darkening Dream, Untimed, Video game, Website, WordPress

New Book Pages

Nov16

Continuing the big upgrades on my website, I’ve built out new pages for my books: The Darkening Dream and Untimed. And I’m in the process of working on a generic “Andy Gavin: Author” landing page too which I should have done in a couple hours. These pages are an attempt to look less bloggy, more like typical author and book sites. I’ll, of course, be continuing to refine and add. One of the nice things about using WordPress is that it’s easy to continually modify. I’ll add reviews and promotional information. Sample chapters, etc. When I get my professional cover art for The Darkening Dream I’ll have to reskin those pages.

Please let me know (via comments) what you think about the new pages. Or any suggestions you might have. Comments are turned off on the book pages themselves, but you can use this one here.

At a technical level, these new templates show off some of the power of the builder platform premium theme I’m using. It has cool layout tools that make it easier to create different layouts in WordPress and then assign them to different pages. Each of these layouts can reference or use separately constructed menus and widgets as well. That way, for example, I have a different more bookish menu on those pages, but it’s shared by a number of layouts. I’ve also been using a quick redirects plugin to create virtual slugs that I can use to build out URL hooks that are independent of the pages themselves. And one of yesterday’s projects was getting that animated jQuery “featured post” slider going. Builder had one that formed the core, but like many WordPress plugins it was setup for a single instance with just one category. I hacked the code to add parameters to the shortcode enabling me to feature different feeds on different pages. Took all of 15 minutes (mad coding skills — and I don’t even really know PHP). One wonders why the authors didn’t build it that way to begin with. I’ve noticed that PHP code is often extremely “non-functional” with an over reliance on global variables. I don’t mean the program doesn’t work, but that it doesn’t adhere to proper functional programming style to allow easy and modular reuse of code.

Check out The Darkening Dream book page.

Check out the Untimed book page.

Related posts:

  1. Website Upgrades Coming
  2. Book Review: The First American
  3. Untimed – Two Novels, Check!
By: agavin
Comments (1)
Posted in: Technology, Writing
Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Author Website, Blogging, Darkening Dream, PHP, Programming, Tools, Uniform Resource Locator, Untimed, Website, WordPress, WordPress Plugin Directory

Moving on Up

Nov08

I’m moving my hosting from WordPress.com to MediaTemple in the next 24 to 48 hours. The site should remain up but I won’t be doing my daily posts until things are settled out with the move.

Expect theme and feature changes and improvements. By hosting it myself there are all sorts of plugins that I can add: like Facebook comments! There may be some (hopefully) brief wonkiness as I add them though, or the occasional broken feature on the site that was supported by some WordPress.com feature that I have to replace.

Thanks for your patience.

Related posts:

  1. Website Upgrades Coming
  2. Introducing the Fiction Index
By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Uncategorized
Tagged as: Blog hosting, Facebook, MediaTemple, Tools, WordPress, wordpress.com

Website Upgrades Coming

Nov06

Since I’m waiting for both my line edits on Untimed and my proofreading on The Darkening Dream, I’m researching website construction. I have to morph, upgrade, or supplement this blog with a genuine author website and I can’t bring myself to hire someone to do it given that I’ve written far bigger and more complex websites and apps. It’ll just annoy me to no end to not be able to control it all myself. But at the same time, old school coding the whole thing manually (I’d probably use Ruby on Rails for that) is overkill and probably too much work.

So I read this Professional WordPress book yesterday and today to see if it would be reasonable to just extend WordPress. I think it is. A few plugins and some custom theme programming will probably do the trick. The problem is that I host on wordpress.com and they don’t allow you to install extra plugins (they have some installed by default) or add any PHP code. So I’ll have to migrate to a self hosted server. Maybe Media Temple VPS? Rackspace? Research. Research. Research. Anyone have any suggestions/experience with the good hosting platforms?

And I have to teach myself PHP, so I grabbed the bird book. PHP is one of those popular but slightly icky languages like PERL and JAVA that I’ve never been very partial to. It’s like Ruby, but 100x uglier and more primitive. I am a LISP (and Ruby) guy after all. Oh well. This is easy peasy programming, so I’ll just suck it up. Using something like WordPress will make my life much easier maintaining the site as it’s choke full of content management features. If I program it myself I have to go and code everything manually, which really isn’t very efficient.

I even wonder if one of these newer WordPress themes/frameworks like PageLines Platform isn’t a good idea. Anyone use one?

More to come as I get into it.

Related posts:

  1. The hits keep on coming
By: agavin
Comments (7)
Posted in: Technology
Tagged as: Andy Gavin, Author Website, blog, Darkening Dream, Languages, PageLines Platform, PHP, Plug-in (computing), Programming, Rails, Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Untimed, Website, WordPress, wordpress.com

New Look

Aug10

My original theme, Quentin, was getting a little long in the tooth and didn’t support custom menus, post formats, and the like, although it was attractive. So I switched to the brand new Quintus which is an updated version. This has necessitated a somewhat inadvertent new look. I played with the CSS a bit to customize it, but my patience for this is limited. The new theme is wider, which is cool, but some elements don’t look as good to me like the comments.

Be sure to check out the new top menu (below the old-school paper). You can click on the top levels and get inline filtering of the post categories, or find in the drop downs various indices and popular posts.

Let me know what you think. Here’s what the old one looked like:

By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Uncategorized
Tagged as: Cascading Style Sheets, CSS, Style Sheets, Themes, WordPress

Introducing the Fiction Index

Jan11

In my pursuit to optimize the blog I’ve created yet more pages:

Food Index
Fiction Index
On Writing
Complete Archives

Blog navigation is funny because the default themes make it difficult to to lure people into old posts. Given that my posts are often “references” (reviews of restaurants, books, films etc.) it’s useful to see a list of them by topic.

All ofthese indicies, including the existing Food Index can be found in the righthand sidebar under “MORE POSTS ON.” Just click the ghetto programmer art buttons.

As a note. WordPress.com sure could use some code to help making these better/easier. If one uses WordPress.org (have to host it yourself) there are a bunch of plugins and you can use php to automate the process. WordPress.com only has a simple code snippet thing for the archives, but it doesn’t allow any filtering by category or tag, sorting other than by date. In other words it’s lame. This is a totally obvious candidate for automation.

Related posts:

  1. Topics at a Glance
By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Books, Movies, Television
Tagged as: Index, Pages, Plugin, Templates, Tools, WordPress

Topics at a Glance

Dec15

In an effort to tame the byzantine nature of my posts and the particular mechanics of a WordPress based site I’ve introduced a “Topics at a Glance” section to the sidebar and a Food Index page. You can click the little food icon on the right for it. This page will organize the food posts alphabetically by location. When I get the energy I’ll see about improving it further.

I’ve also put in quick hit buttons next to it (in the same section of the sidebar) for articles on writing and book reviews. At some point, particularly for the book and movie reviews I’ll probably do an index page.

By: agavin
Comments (0)
Posted in: Uncategorized
Tagged as: Index, Website, WordPress
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