Category: Website
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My Own Custom WordPress Theme
Posted on:October 29, 2011
So I made my very own custom WordPress theme, and I wanted to write a bit about the experience.
This site has always been hand-coded by me (click here to see the previous version), but I really wanted a Content Management System (CMS). I looked into Joomla, but the documentation is very poor. Drupal’s is better, but it is far too complicated for my needs. WordPress is simple, has decent documentation, and does everything I need it to do. As for the look, WordPress uses “themes”. There are tons of WordPress themes available for free, but I take a lot of pride in this site, and none of them were what I wanted. So I committed myself to developing my own theme, and I am very pleased with the result.
As you can probably tell, I am no graphic artist. Things are pretty well organized in a practical manner, with form and function taking precedence over style. There are no pretty pictures, fancy graphics, etc., though I do wish I had just a little bit of artistic creativity. As it stands, I can barely pick out a color-scheme.
As for actually making the theme, it helped that I already knew some HTML and CSS, although I did need to brush-up my skills a bit. And anyone who knows even a little about programming languages shouldn’t have any trouble dealing with the PHP. One problem I did have, however, is that a lot of the sample code on the internet just doesn’t work. If you are making your own theme, and having trouble getting something to work, it might just be bad code. Try figuring things out for yourself, or hunting around for another version of what you need.
There are a few things that I still need to work on. The sidebar is not quite the way I want it, so I will be working on that. The commenting functionality is not quite the way I want it either. One particular problem is that, on individual pages that have commenting disabled, there is still a blank comment area that has a border and a different background color. I will most likely be re-arranging a few elements here and there as well.
Aside from that, the biggest thing is going to be adding content. Much of the content of this site is in PDF files, which I intend to keep for printing purposes, but I also want to put that content into individual pages so that people can (finally!) leave comments. I will also be pulling some (not all) of the posts from my old blog over to this site.
All in all this has been a fun and rewarding experience; I was able to completely re-vamp this website and learned a lot in the process. I hope you enjoy it.
Categorized as: Website, WordPress
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Moved
Posted on:July 17, 2011
I moved this site to a new hosting account. I didn’t bother setting up anything that involves scripting, as I intend to re-design this site soon.
Categorized as: Website
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New Content
Posted on:July 27, 2008
I’ve just uploaded four papers that I wrote while a graduate student to the “wonderings” section.
