Small Tweaks Made to Blog

I thought it was about time to tweak the blog a little bit. So I added some more information to the footer; it now contains a link to the RSS feed that is automatically generated by WordPress and a link to follow me on Twitter. I also added my email address to the footer to make it a little bit easier for people to contact me. To foil spammers I made the email address an image instead of text, but if your typing and spelling skills are up to par you should not have a problem.

Another thing I wanted to update is the pagination of the blog. After some research into WordPress plugins I replaced the standard (pretty horrible) pagination with the WP-PageNavi plugin by Lester Chan. After some CSS styling I ended up with the Digg-like pagination you can see at the bottom of most pages. I might spruce these up some more in the future.

I also updated the neglected “Book of the Moment” section in the sidebar with jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault and Yehuda Katz. I have enjoyed this book a lot and it has reignited my passion for coding which had faded a lot. I recommend this book to any web designer that wants to take up coding… it’s really not that hard to get started.

Blog Included in Six Revisions’ Top 25 List

Jacob Gube from Six Revisions recently wrote an article called 25 Outstanding WordPress Designs that featured 25 handpicked WordPress blog designs. I was honored that my blog was picked and included in this great company; two of my personal favorites from this list are ISO50 (check out the beautiful prints) and coda.coza. If you are not familiar with Six Revisions you should really give it a read. It is one of a handful of web development/design sites that I frequently visit to find out about new techniques and to be inspired. Here are a couple of great articles to get you started: 30 Exceptional CSS Techniques and Examples and 9 Practical Ways to Enhance your Web Development Using the Firefox Web Developer Extension.

New Blog Using WordPress 2.5

I had been waiting for a while for WordPress 2.5 to be released so that I could finally start blogging. I figured that I might as well wait for the long-awaited new version of the content management system before I started coding, in case it was a major upgrade so that I would not have to rewrite any code. WordPress 2.5 was released on March 29th, and ever since I have been (slowly) working on my blog. My previous website was all hand-coded and did not use any content management system which made it hard to update. The advantages of using a blogging system like WordPress is that it makes it really easy to add new posts, change the design with templates, add tagging, search posts, and let readers post comments.  

The blog is still pretty basic. I will refine the design and add extra functions the following weeks. What I will be looking into is sIFR for the headlines, something like Lightbox for bigger images, cleaning up the forms, and adding some content to the sidebar. I am also interested in learning jQuery for all my JavaScript needs. So please stick with me, and I will try to find interesting topics to write about.