I have made a lot of changes to my site from WordPress admin and I’m excited about all that I’ve learned about WordPress. Going into this class, I’m realizing I knew very little about WordPress and learning all of its capabilities was a really cool process. Code on the other hand has kicked my butt for the most part and I’m pretty sure I’ll be extremely happy when I’m done having to do it.

The good thing is that the majority of what I wanted done for my site has been completed, minus learning how to code. I’m starting to become a professional copy and paster and I’m so grateful for all of the coders that have so graciously put out the codes that they felt best worked for them. What I’m not so happy about is that I don’t really feel like I know how to code per se. I believe there are far more things that I don’t understand than those that I do. Regardless, I’m happy that I will leave this class with a site and that’s what I ultimately wanted to get out of it.

I have not finished my site, and am a little nervous about what you’ll say but looking forward to seeing everyone else’s site and the progress that they’ve made. I think the main thing that I’ve learned from the course is that coding requires google and a lot of it. I’ve used Lynda and google like crazy but the huge problem is that it takes up so much time watching and learning and once it doesn’t work, it’s become 2:00 a.m. in the morning and I’m completely defeated. I have made a lot of progress by watching online tutorials, but I think I’ve learned more from those than in-class. That is not a jab at you at all, but I think I’m more of a visual person and I needed a lot more run-thru’s than what we received. Hope you like my site!

It feels pretty good to be coming up on the deadline for this project. Without a deadline — and this goes for all projects of mine, not just coding ones — I’m prone to second-guess myself and keep changing or adding into eternity. Having a set date when we were meant to be “done” with our site means I had to reach a point where I was happy enough with the site to call it finished.

But, because my site functions as a personal portfolio, I’ll never really be done with it — I’ll keep adding elements as I complete work I’m proud of, and deleting others that start to feel elementary as my skills improve. I’ll change the design as trends and technology evolve, and I might even add a new page or two if a career move or personal project demands more space on the site. All of which is to say that, although the deadline hits in just over four hours, I don’t really feel the sense of relief and pride that I usually get when I finish a project at class or work. I do feel excited by what I’ve learned and what I’ve been able to do, but more of my mind is focused on what else I want to do with the site once this class is over and I have some more time to put into it.

Most of my work this past week was spent on finishing touches, which, for me, meant adding more content to my posts. I spent way too much time sizing and positioning images in my “Clips” section, and I’m still not happy with how they stack up as screen size shifts (which is especially relevant for mobile optimization). But all in all, I’m pleased with how the site looks and I kind of can’t believe I figured out how to change the theme to suit my needs! I’m really looking forward to seeing everyone else’s sites on Tuesday.

I originally posted kind of a downer post, but after reading everyone else’s, I decided to try again.

So I think this week I did a lot with my site. I began with some basic css code to clean up the TwentyTwelve theme. I got rid of all the extra words on the theme, to include the text around the comments box, the “categories” text, and even the “Powered by WordPress.” (Sorry WordPress). Once it was clean, I started to look for ways to make the site styling more personal. I found a pretty nice code example for a home page and copied that into my stylesheet. That allowed me to take my clean theme, and start to build a “display case” for my photographs. Initially, I had some functionality issues, but through some tweaks and Google searches, I was able to clean it up.

Once I had the display figured out, I started to add some “functionality.” I encased that in quotes, because I may be misusing the term. I basically made the site comfortable to browse. I wanted the viewer to feel like they were a guest, and that I was sharing my life experiences with him or her. So I used my widgets and menus to guide them through the site as if it were a scrapbook sitting on their lap. However, I tried to do that without compromising the cleanliness of my site.

I added a small Twitter feed on the sidebar, and included an interactive world map that called back to locational tags I created for each photo. I also created a custom contact page, with personal error messages in case a user got it wrong.

Hmm, what else? I definitely customized the look of the header, and removed it from all pages other than my home page. I eliminated borders around photos, and set up permalinks that were a little “prettier,” as they are described.

All-in-all, I learned to use plugins, widgets, and menus to build my site the way I wanted. Then I created five or six unique pages in my child-theme to add the extra functionality and look that WordPress couldn’t provide. Honestly, I got the impression that I hadn’t done much, but I think once Tuesday comes around, my work will come through. I did bust my tail on this site, and I am very pleased with how it looks. Like others, I think I too will continue to make improvements. However, considering where I began, this is quite an achievement in my mind.

For those who may have read my first post, please disregard. 🙂

“See” you Tuesday.

Counting down the days and hoping for a miracle that will address my local site to live site sync issues. Not to mention my inability to see past the hurdles.

This course has been quite the adventure. I wish I could say that I have the key concepts down, but I still feel all over the place. I hope to continue learning and strengthening my knowledge of WordPress with the hope of one day seeing the light and laughing about all the hours which I have dedicated to figuring out customer posts, and taxonomies, etc. I feel that I am confused with the subject matter as a result of being able to include the same functionality from the admin site. At least that is how I see it at the moment, but I am sure that as I learn more I will understand the reasons why it is good to learn how to create custom taxonomies. I read several blogs, which speak to the benefits, but I cannot say they have convinced me and/or that I even understand what they are saying. What a humbling experience this has been.

On another note, this class has helped me get a step closer to what I definitely do not like. The subject matter is interesting, but the tradeoff between the time I spend trying to figure things out and how I feel when I figure it out are just not aligning to something that I want to continue learning and pursuing. The only reason why I would want to continue learning about development and WordPress would be to help small business owners establish an online presence. Then again, I can probably just find someone that does enjoy this type of work to help.

Looking forward to seeing everyone’s creativity this coming week. Good luck everyone.

I’ve come pretty close to getting my website to look and function the way I want it too.  Using plugins I was able to create simple galleries for my posts, allow star ratings for certain parts of my posts when I want my users to rate something, and I gave myself the ability to post with footnotes. Much of my writing tends to be filled with “bonus” information that I feel enhances the post but doesn’t contribute to the coherence of the main article (aka I get sidetracked really easily and don’t want my readers to miss out on extra content just because it doesn’t go well with the rest of the post), so footnotes were key.

I finally figured out how to get my header to fill the top of the screen, and there are a few other styling things I want to do, but I’m happy that it doesn’t look too much like the original Twenty-Twelve theme.  Eventually I want it to be unrecognizable, similar to the way that AMCtv.com and some of the other great WordPress sites are.  The tough part here will not only just be the design (I’m not much of an artist, so I’ll probably be borrowing a lot of styling from other sites) and keeping the site optimized for mobile.  While I’ve got the site looking good for computer users, it looks downright terrible on my phone.  I’ve found some good tools for testing live sites for mobile, but I already have an iPhone and could do it on my own.  I need to find a tool that lets me test my local site on a mobile emulator, because I don’t want to have to keep updating my live site just to see if it is optimized for local.

It looks like I’ll be spending the rest of the night trying to fix what has been plaguing me: custom meta boxes.  I’ve been through three different tutorials, and still can’t get my custom box to appear.  That the last real functionality piece that I need, but it’s also the one that’s been giving me the most trouble from the start.

I can’t believe it’s already time to present our sites. In nine weeks, I went from knowing very little about web development to having a fully functioning website. Not only is the visible aspect of the site gratifying, but having knowledge about the “behind the scenes” coding and application part (MAMP, GitHub, GoDaddy and Cyberduck) is just as rewarding.

Last week I felt pretty good about my site – the functionality was complete, all I had left to do was add some content via my custom post type (CPT). When I began adding posts, however, I quickly realized that my site was not “calling” my CPT posts – it was only calling the generic posts built into the theme. After some good-old Codex research and collaborating with Charlotte, we discovered that we needed to add a filter that would “get my CPT posts.” Four lines of code later, we got it to work – but I wasn’t out of the woods yet.

In addition to creating my CPT called ‘wine,’ I created two custom taxonomy categories (region and year). The plan was to have each post searchable by year or region. While my CPT and taxonomies were showing up just fine in the Admin for last few weeks, I realized this weekend that only my ‘region’ taxonomy works properly in the actual posts. This was very frustrating because I created the region and year taxonomy the Exact. Same. Way. Trust me, I looked at this code for about two hours yesterday.

At this stage of the game, I decided to delete the ‘year’ category and just roll with the ‘region’ category. I plan on troubleshooting the problem again because having the ‘year’ category would be nice, but since our sites are due today, I decided it’s better to have the site working without the additional taxonomy than having a malfunctioning site.

Looking back at my initial pitch, my site is pretty much on par with what I set out to accomplish. But, now that I know substantially more about coding/programming than I did back then, I wish I had time to do more. I’m looking forward to further developing my site, but for now, I’m at happy place.

Excited to see everyone’s sites on Tuesday!

Advice for next time: Always check that your theme is supported by ALL browsers. I learned the hard way that my theme (Magazine Basic) is not supported by Chrome, so please view in Firefox or Safari.

It is interesting to look back on previous posts and see what my expectations were at the beginning of the semester were, and comparing them to what I have accomplished today. I was ambitious and definitely overestimated my own future abilities but overall I would say I did ok. We have talked quite a bit this semester about how learning to code is an ongoing process that takes time and serious amounts of practice/effort. Putting a deadline on it means that some things will get done, others probably not. At the end of the day I like my website but know that with more time I could have tweaked it just a little bit more. Obviously these are things that I can still do, just not before the deadline or for my web development class grade.

By this time last week I thought I was done with coding. All I had to do was insert content and voila, the website was done. However, things don’t always turn out the way we think they will. In class I left an extra space at the bottom of my php file which crashed my entire website. Once this was solved, the code I added to make my custom post type file properly under categories was glitchy and I couldn’t figure out the problem. Being a visual person I have a hard time wrapping my mind around concepts when I read them. I need to discuss them and see someone physically show them to me. This made solving the glitch difficult since I knew the project was due before I would see anyone else from class, or really anyone in my life who might have had the proper knowledge to help explain the problem to me. With the final deadline was approaching I decided to circumvent using categories and figure out the problem at another time, one when I am not facing a time crunch.

We have all been working on our projects in class and yet, I have no idea what other people’s pages look like! I’m excited to check them out and see how the ideas we discussed during circle time back in May take shape on everyone’s websites.

I’ve been working pretty aggressively on my project this week and I still feel pretty far from a finished product. The struggles from last week continued onto this week. Depending on someone else for content is a little frustrating but these are struggles we’ll all face in the real world should be end up becoming account managers or project managers for a web design or advertising firm of some sort. I’ve come to the realization that not all the features you expect to have, fit for all projects.

I was keen on including a custom post type. In fact, I already built the thing and installed it onto my local server. I asked my mother/client to snap a few photos from her client’s homes and ask permission to post online. One by one they’ve either refused to allowed her to take photos of their home, or have only agreed to allow one photo of a specific room be used. After this discussion, I’ve come to the realization that my initial thought about creating a portfolio of homes cleaned — from townhomes, condos, and single-family homes — so potential clients could relate to the homes is not realistic. It also doesn’t make much sense to post that information on the web because there is a privacy concern for the home owners. No home is identical to another and the idea that someone could find comparisons between their home and a home in photos, I now realize is far fetched. I have to abandon this idea and replace it for another. Most homeowners make no qualms of posting a photo of a specific room as long as it cannot be traced back to their home. I’ve now decided to use the Instagram API in order to create a page of abstract photos of cleaning supplies or cleaned rooms in order to generate fresh content on the website.

A great lesson for this week is to try not to force something that isn’t natural to the industry you’re building a website for. It’s ok to go back on your initial ideas no matter how late in the game if it doesn’t make sense for your website. In this case a portfolio didn’t work for this industry and you have to learn to adapt and move on rather quickly. In my previous roles as a Social Media Strategist and now as a consultant, I’d get asked questions like “Can you make us a Pinterest?” from a wireless phone retailer. That industry just doesn’t fit in well with the Pinterest audience. I’ve also gotten questions about using Vine from a furniture company. Furniture doesn’t move so I didn’t see a connection between the platform and their industry. This same concept applies to web development. Don’t try to fit a square peg into a round hole.

As a secondary lesson – don’t apply for an affiliate program until AFTER you’ve uploaded your theme and exported your content to your live site. Argh!