Archive for the ‘Personal / Random’ Category

Blog Look Updated

Hello everyone.  If you’ve visited my blog over the past year or so you now should be seeing some nice new changes.  After starting an overhaul of the WordPress template I originally had this summer and putting it on the shelf during the school year, I actually decided to go back and finish things up.  For starters, I totally redesigned the header of the site.  I put the blog name and main links on tattered looking pieces of paper and made the name appear to be taped to the background.  This kept consistent with the footer design I made a year ago.  Also for the links, on rollover they should look circled by a pencil, or at least they do to me.  On the right and middle there’s some fancy little graphics, just because they fill the space and look somewhat cool.

I finally added content to the footer design that has been sitting there empty for a year now.  On the left I created a “Connect” section, since social networking is all the rage.  Currently I’m listing twitter, facebook, my blog’s rss feed, digg, and youtube (ok…not much on youtube but I might add things later).  If anyone has ideas for other icons to put or wants information on other things I use (xbox live account, music, etc.) let me know.  On the post-it note on the right, I added in a simple script to gather the “popular” posts and display them.  This is simply listing posts in order of how many comments they have.  It’s kind of scewed at the moment, but if this site picks up any steam that should become fairly accurate.

Website now live!

This morning my domain name finally was found, hurray.  Only took about 6 days and way too many refreshes of www.thewickipedia.com to see if it was alive yet or not.  Up until now I have been using a temporary link.  Now I get to migrate all of my WordPress links or whatnot over to the new url.

Anyway, last night I spend a considerable amount of time designing what my page will look like, and then took a plunge and designed the entire footer image.  I learned numerous new photoshop techniques and think it turned out quite well.  Credit to:

• http://kaoz-tutorials.com/ours/postit/
• http://www.avivadirectory.com/photoshop/creating-crumpled-paper/
• http://www.screenfrog.com/photoshop/scotch-tape-in-photoshop-tutorial/

Now when I have some time I will need to design a matching header and navigation menu for this site.  I’m also thinking about moving the search box up to the top right and combining it with some kind of area that looks like it is paper-clipped onto the website.  Some other things I might look into are things to optimize my blog for search engines.  I’ve heard a lot about the SEO pack and sitemap generator  plugins.

I had another idea for a sub-category of this site.  I was thinking about posting guitar-tabs, and more specifically ones that either I have written, modified, or think are very good.  Would anyone be interested in that?

Number One

Hello everyone!  This is my first blog post on my new website, www.theWickipedia.com.  I’ve been thinking about having my own website for quite a while now, and it was kind of a spur of the week decision over Christmas break to buy one.  It actually started when I saw a post on SlickDeals for a nice bargain on web hosting and domain name registration.  I thought it over and checked out the company to see if they were legit, and then bought the site.  It probably helped that I was kind of bored every night and needed something to do while I was in Nebraska visiting family, all of which would go to sleep about 2-3 hours before I even got tired.

The first problem I was immediately faced with was, what am I going to use to manage all of this…or better yet, I need a website to put online!  I quickly discovered WordPress and fell in love with it.  Things are so easy to do and I like how the entire admin interface is setup.  Adding, editing, and creating themes is fairly simple too.  I really like how you can switch between your themes with about two clicks in the admin controls.  As for a site layout, I’m starting with this torn paper theme that I found and was free.  It’s getting me started but I plan to re-do just about every single image and the code to make it my own.  I’m also looking into the different widgets and plugins that you can utilize through WordPress.

My plans for this website are fairly vague right now, I’m keeping it open to any and all ideas.  What I’m thinking about for starters is to write up reviews for various media (movies, tv shows, music, etc.) and post them here on this website.  I might even look into posting those reviews elsewhere, such as bigger name sites, to attract traffic to this site.  I’m also considering making either tutorials or various web graphics and wallpapers that I could host here.  Once I have the time I really want to make a WordPress theme free to the public and get it posted onto the WordPress site.  I think that would be something cool to do, and it might help draw in traffic to my blog.

Plenty of work ahead of me to make this website worth viewing!