Design Topics

Looking through my feeds today for some design ideas I came across a post that had an awesome piece of arcade themed artwork in it! Check out this Space Invaders, Pac-man and much more-piece below. Oh, and to me this one doesn’t even scratch the surface of some of the work of this Guilherme Marconi! Makes me feel awestruck inspired and silly all at once.

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Been picking at this website since May of 2008. In April a friend of mine who has been a mechanic for many years was looking to start up a website that talked about repairing cars. I could tell by the way he spoke and knowing his passion that he was looking for a creative outlet.

I knew that there were plenty of websites out there talking about car repair, the key would be finding a niche mission. Oh, and the little thing that I know very little about cars, so the website was highly reliant on him being consistent about writing content. Here we are September of 2008 and this Auto Repair Facts.com website has taken off. (more…)

I’ve been busy you might say on many different projects. Here is one that I started about three weeks ago, a new contract / freelance website design for a client here in Indianapolis called Image Builders Institute.com. Image Builders is an Incentive and Impression management service in the Indianapolis area and their website looks static, but is built off of Wordpress. (more…)

Some of you out there really want to start your own arcade game blog, but are clueless about web design and therefore don’t understand how to customize the look of your own Wordpress website. There are plenty of tutorials out on the internet on how to make your own Wordpress theme, sifting through the good ones might be a challenge. Regardless of that fact, I don’t feel the need to rewrite them because customizing your theme is a time investment no matter what you do. You need to learn HTML, CSS and understand the purpose of each html file in the theme.

However, just about any themes out there typically can look like a completely unique website by just adding your own header graphic. I am going to show you how to edit the header in your newly downloaded Wordpress theme to add your own custom designed banner graphic. (more…)

For now, it appears as if the commenting feature isn’t working on the blog. I have spent a ton of time, more than I care to think about, trying to figure the problem out.

When a comment is attempted, you will get an error page with a message that says “Sorry, comments are closed for this item”. Some of the fixes I have attempted;

• Validating my pages, fixing validation errors
• Tested in Safari, IE, Opera and Firefox. IE gives me an error page, no message
• Checking commenting for the whole site
• Checked commenting on a per post basis
• Checked my website error logs and general logs, couldn’t identify any problems
• Searched Wordpress Forums - No posts at this writing about comments broken
• Searched the Web
• Upgraded all plugins that needed it, deleted unnecessary plugins
• Reverted back to the default theme
• Upgraded testing environment to Wordpress 2.5 final, but can’t replicate the problem
• De-activated any comment type plugins for subscribing, etc.

The only step I see left is to try to deactivate all of my plugins and see if one of them is the cause. I thought that Wordpress 2.5 was supposed to have a “re-activate all” function, but apparently I misread that somewhere.

I wish I could get this problem to show up on my testing environment, it would make it easier to isolate the plugins without frogging around live. But at this point, the changes in validation and restructuring of some of my html has been enough work to make me go crazy.

I hope to have this issue fixed in the next day or two. Please remember your comments until then.

Thanks.

Jeff

~Edit: Comment error in Wordpress 2.5 fixed.

Big thanks to Jamie. In my wp-includes/comment-template.php file my code stopped at line 327 with the function comments_popup_link. But in the new Wordpress install, that file went to line 768! So, I replaced that whole wp-includes directory again, and my problem appears to be fixed. I may have been able to just overwrite that one comment-template.php file to get rid of the “Sorry, comments closed” error, but I decided to be safe.

Changing the permalink structure of my posts had been on my to do list for my Wordpress based Rotheblog for quite some time, if not a month after I launched the redesign. I knew my apache server was configured with mod_rewrite available, so I didn’t have to worry about my server not supporting permalinking.

I had tried setting permalinks up once before, updating my permalink structure in the admin control panel interface, but unsure what to do next as my website links were broken. I thought maybe I had to give my .htaccess certain permissions to allow the system to write the rules to it, but I didn’t make time to explore it in depth. Wordpress should update that .htaccess file for you when you change the structure, but double check. Download the file yourself and look.

Turned out today, I tried again without exploring much more in depth, and got permalinking to work. I was nervous, not completely understanding the mod_rewrite engine, that any dynamic links pointing to my site would now be broken. But, the rewrite works on those links, no matter where they are.

Originally, my links were the default, and looked like this;

http://www.rotheblog.com/?p=1606

I added these rules to my Options > Permalinks > Custom Field

/%post_id%/%postname%

This will use the unique post id and then add it to the slug name of the post, which is dynamically generated from the title of the post. (Or it can be entered manually) My links will now look something like this;

www.rotheblog.com/1611/enabling-setup-permalinks-structure-wordpress

Then, all I did was download my empty .htaccess file from the server, and add these rules to it, and publish;

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

I found that these two sites were all I needed to setup my permalinking structure

1. Wordpress Codex
2. Perishable Press

Now, I can have those keyword rich search engine friendly link titles available to use to my advantage.

For those of you who zoned out in the first sentence and are asking, “How does this affect me?” It doesn’t. It just means that my blog should be a touch easier to find in Google now that the link structure isn’t a variable name anymore.

Questions? Having issues yourself on how to setup your own permalinking structure? Leave a comment and I will help you out as best I can. If I can do it, so can anyone else.

Late yesterday I had a freak out moment. I was working on a file and was exporting it and the colors were off. Usually this means that my color space is not what I am expecting. Sure enough, exporting to a jpg the color space should be RGB, and it was set to CMYK. I changed the space in the “color” palette,saved the file and thought nothing of it.

I went to open it back up later and got this wonderful message; “Can’t open the illustration. Could not complete the requested operation.” I didn’t worry too much, sometimes I’ll get a similar message when my system’s memory has been maxed, and programs just start shutting down or working funny. But after I even rebooted I was still getting the same message and starting to freak that I had lost my work.

If you look anywhere online, designers suggest you to save stages. I hadn’t ever adopted this practice because of resources (space) and time (managing all the different versions). So, I didn’t have an earlier revision, so what do I do? I can open the file as raster just fine in Photoshop, and I can see the file in preview in Illustrator.

What I ended up figured out was, because I could see the file and open it other places, that the corruption wasn’t too bad. I may be able to save the file, it may have just been a linked file that had caused a problem.

So, I opened the Illustrator file in Adobe Acrobat, and saved it back out as an .eps. I opened it in Illustrator and I had my artwork back! Pretty psyched about that, and hopefully I learned a lesson to save some multiple copies or stage revisions.

If you have a corrupt Illustrator file giving you the “Can’t open the illustration” message, try that and I hope it works for you.

This is one of the most simple building blocks of Coldfusion, but you have to start somewhere when learning a new language.

#variable#

You just have to surround the variable in those tags. All Coldfusion tags, I read today, start with the “cf”. That coupled with the fact that it is a tag language, with an opening and a closing tag is supposed to make the language easier on designers used to just HTML programming.

Now, can it be easier for designers and a better language than PHP? I know my friend would say no way. And I do know that it is way too early in the game for me to evaluate that with an expertise, if ever. But I read a number of articles today that had good points as why it is better. I will just have to have the time to continue on the path to evaluate that for myself.

Wow, what a morning.

In a matter of minutes, I tried to do two things in Wordpress, one upgrade and one switching of a site to a new folder and…I broke both sites.

I read the instructions in the codex for moving a website to a new folder. (Taken from the Wordpress website -
http://codex.wordpress.org/Moving_WordPress)

Here are the step-by-step instructions:

1. Create the new location using one of these two options:
   1. If you will be moving your WordPress core files to a new directory, create the new directory.
   2. If you want to move WordPress to your root directory, make sure all index.php, .htaccess, and other files that might be copied over are backed up and/or moved, and that the root directory is ready for the new WordPress files.
2. Login to your blog.
3. Go to the Administration > Options > General panel.
4. In the box for WordPress address (URI): change the address to the new location of your main WordPress core files.
5. In the box for Blog address (URI): change the address to the new location, which should match the WordPress address (URI).
6. Click Update Options.
7. Logout of your blog.
8. (Do not try to open/view your blog now!)
9. WordPress 2.0 only: Delete the folder wp-content/cache.
10. Move your WordPress core files to the new location. This includes the files found within the original directory, such as http://example.com/wordpress, and all the sub-directories, to the new location.

Well, I followed the instructions. I applied changes and I got a 404 error page saying that wp-login.php didn’t exist.

So, I just figured that since the directory was pointing to a new place now, it wouldn’t be finding the files. But the instructions said nothing about a 404 error message that would give no indication of whether the changes were actually applied or not. Not to mention, the instructions didn’t remind you to make the directory and make a copy of the files first, before applying any changes. That was my mistake.

So, for an hour while I copied the files on the server, I had no idea if what I just did was going to work or not.

Forunately, it did. I felt better. But then, there was the upgrade on the other blog.