New Site Design – Enter Nexus

Mon 08/17/2009 00:31 CDT | Site | comments (0) | 3,115 Views

Like a lot of people, I use WordPress for my blogging platform. It is a pretty powerful platform and from what I read it could be adapted to do just about anything. Perfect for a guy like me who wouldn’t even know where to begin in terms of creating my own platform. But the creators of WordPress understand that and give users the option to create their own look with the use of a theme system. When I first started Ultima-i, I tried a lot of pre-made themes; but never stuck with one for long. Plus none of them represented me very well. That’s when I decided I would learn how to create my own, which I did and christened it “Individual System.” This version is actually the third version of my Individual System theme.

So for the last month I have been working on updating the design of the site a bit. Not really a major overhaul, as I kept quite a few elements from the previous design. But there were a few things about the old design that I felt needed to be changed, either because of look or function. There was two big things I wanted to address: automating tasks I used to do manually and connecting Ultima-i to the social websites I frequent.

So I turned to Google-sensei to help me learn a little more about PHP so I could make some improvements. Thanks to various sources, I was able to do the following:

Automated the thumbnail creation process of posts. Before I was having to manually do this using custom fields. After consulting the sensei I learned of a script called PhpThumb and began work on a function that would take the first image from every post and create a thumbnail. It took quite a bit of work to get this little thing working, but after going over the documentation and other sources I was able to get it working.
Twitter support. I wanted to do more than just listing my twitter status on my website. I wanted to enable people to share things they find here with their followers without a lot of hassle. So I found a tutorial on how to create a function that would allow an user to click a link and have it post to twitter. But I wanted to go further! Because I use twitter a lot, I noticed that they went from tinyurl to bit.ly for their URL shortening. The beauty of bit.ly is that it tracks analytic data for the links it creates, which is something I didn’t see tinyurl doing. So after a lot of headaches and tweaking, I was able to build a function posted the post title and bit.ly created link to user’s twitter status field to share with their followers.
Blogroll (link lists) and RSS combined! Wordpress has two plugins / widgets built in that allow users to add a blogroll and RSS to their sidebar. But oddly enough, they don’t have one that can do both together. So I decided to write up a piece of PHP that does! Reason I wanted to do this is because I wanted to put a image banner with my RSS feeds that linked back to site that feed was pulled from. Plus, I am of the opinion that if you are going to link exchange with another site then posting some of their content will help get some link love to them over just having a banner sitting there. And it was rather simple to build this little gem once I learned about PHP’s foreach function and about how SimplePie worked. It gave me a few problems, the biggest one I didn’t catch until I updated the site. But I found it and now it works like a charm. If you follow me on twitter, then you know I had to give myself a self high five when I figured out why it wasn’t working =D
Just some minor site design changes. Basically changing the look of a few things on the site.

All of this was done because I felt that my site didn’t quite represent what I felt was my best work. I mentioned it in both Content is King and Reflections, that this site is a journey for me. Blogging is something that is still new to me, but I want Ultima-i to reflect my personality and express my voice. And really, that is the key thing about blogging – expressing and sharing yourself with the world. Connect with others through shared interests or knowledge (hopefully ^^;).

It is for that reason I decided that I would call this version of my site “Individual System: Nexus.” Nexus being a connection (or series of connections) that link two or more things. Ultima-i is my nexus, linking this site to the various social sites I frequent and those users, as well as users across the web through connections I make with other sites.

Working on this has been the first time and a long time that I have felt like I have truly accomplished anything, motivated by the new things I was learning. But I don’t plan on stopping here, I plan on learning more. There are a few APIs I am looking into learning, want to learn JQuery (been a long time since I done any Javascript), as well as advancing my PHP skills further. I have a vision of where I see my site going and I plan on continuing to work to get it there!

Image source (slightly modified to enhance the color) : Moe Imouto

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