shibbyonline

New home and a new start

This should hopefully be a ‘come back’ style of post, as you will know I have been some what pre-occupied with other things and the whole blogging side of my life was put on hold.

Yet what better to kick start your progress than a new theme!
I present to you: Frost.

It is still not 100% complete but over the next few days it should be tweaked to a point of being workable.
The second more important news is that shibbyonline has moved.
For many years the good people at UK Cheapest have been providing me a place to call home. Yet with another year looming I thought I would shop around. I ended up at 5thirtyOne and noticed the offer currently running with his host of choice; DreamHosts. Being the cheap bastard that I am I signed up and got a cheap year; thank you Derek!

All in all despite the lack of work on the surface things have been moving very quickly behind closed doors. Now that everything is sorted it just leaves me time to sort out my email clients and the new DreamHost settings.

One step forward, two back

Last night I had a bit of blast on the site, trying to finish off some of the features I never had time to put in before it went live.

We now have a AJAX powered search feature, currently it is only present on the home page and archive page, not sure if you need it in the side bar on every page or not?
I’ve also sorted, well close too to sorted, the seperation of comments and pingbacks. The styling is not complete but the function is there.
The final feature which is not quite working yet is a ‘mint popular’ list (it’s a clever play on the standard most popular list) on the archives page. However I’m having some problems getting it to call just pages and not files.

So I was pretty chuffed to get all this working, but some where along the line the Falbum plugin decided not to work. I don’t think this is just a plugin issue as the settings and database records are totally trashed. I’m pretty certain everything will work together but I just can’t get the plugin to re-install, every time I upload and activate it remembers the settings from last time, which are not much good.
Back to the drawing board I think.

Rebooted

Today was the Spring 2006 reboot, finally my new theme goes live, well sort of. Drop me a vote here

It is not 100% complete, I’d say about 85% (I love making up figures) I still have some navigation links to complete. I’m not happy with the commenting and there needs to be a search feature and improved Archives but apart from that my first theme from the ground up.

A theme is born

It has been in the back of my mind for quite a while now; create your own WordPress theme.

The problem is that I have not really got the inspiration to sit there and come up with something interesting. There are plenty of ideas swirling around in the grey matter, I even started planning out some rough ideas before Christmas but I think they got lost in the post Crimbo tidy up.
Every time I log on or view a blog I find a different aspect I like the look of, which reminds me of my long term plan to build my own theme. Finally I think I found the drive to put this into motion. It did not come from a site layout but more a person’s plan to release a theme a day for a week.

If you are not aware Phu is planning to release a theme a day for a week. Now I know Phu is damn good coder and quite the visionary but if he can code a theme in a night and release it; take a look for your self they are not two bob hacks they are respectable themes, then why can I not get off my ass and have something to show for all the thoughts.
Last night I finally put pen to paper and tips to keys to start planning out some ideas. At present I have no idea, name or set scheme to stick to, this will just be creative flow.