practicality: (Default)
practicality ([personal profile] practicality) wrote2012-08-29 10:29 pm

(no subject)

So a friend (hi Yana) reminded me that oh, I need to post more. Which is true, I've mostly been microblogging because 1) I keep my microblog locked, 2) nobody here cares about RP shenanigans, and 3) also nobody cares about my spammy, spammy thoughts on fandom (I make running-commentary plurks when reading stuff). So in news people might actually care about:

-Frustrating job laid me off, which effectively resolved my dilemma if I should quit and search harder for something that wasn't pure physical labor at insane overtime.
-I have been swimming in a sea of CSS, mostly working on things for Dreamwidth instead of, oh, any of my own sites. But it's like slacking off productively!
-I have failed utterly at working on learning any other coding language (aside from a bit of S2 and that doesn't count)
-I have pretty much managed to keep to my cleaning goal.
-I'm considering trying to save up for a new car because 1) the crazy lady next door keeps threatening to have mine towed and 2) some jackass smashed one of my windows in and 3) the car is sixteen years old and showing it's age.
-Started reading Marvel comics. If I disappear, I've fallen too deep into the abyss. Don't follow me.

I'm also starting to realize I need to upgrade my personal blog - it's still running Moveable Type 4.1 which is... years old. And uses tables for layout, and now that I look, has no wide content handler. And the layout is a little embarassingly old-school in light of my DW stuff. Options are most likely either upgrading MT which has the pro of a templating language I know and the con of being owned by Six Apart who I'm not fond off after how they handled LJ, or switching to Wordpress. I don't know if the Wordpress templating system has gotten less complex since I first looked at in like 2005, but I've become a better coder, and it does seem to be the blogging software these days. Thoughts, anyone?

[identity profile] branchandroot.dreamwidth.org 2012-08-30 03:59 pm (UTC)(link)
Wordpress is a little weird in that, if you have fairly basic needs, it's brilliant. If all you need to do is lay some nice css over the html provided by an existing theme, it's golden. If, on the other hand, you want to fiddle with what goes where, you need to be reasonably conversant in php so you can edit the theme, and if you want to really flex the system and make use of passed variables or, heaven forbid, need something outside the pre-packaged functions... it'll make you tear your hair. And write plug-ins. I'm just giving fair warning.

That said it /is/ my go-to CMS for my website clients, and what I use for my fic archive, and if you want to give it a shot I can probably help some. Thankfully, the documentation is also recovering a bit from the weird wipe-and-rewrite it went through around the 2.4 mark.

wordpress templating

[identity profile] tamouse.dreamwidth.org 2012-08-31 10:32 pm (UTC)(link)
Wordpress template frameworks make creating templates a *lot* easier. In some cases, you may only have to create a style sheet in a child template to get what you want.

WP Template Framework itself is pretty good, it's what I use. I've also used Thematic, which was pretty good as well, although it is not well documented.