Hello BarCampers, my name is George Huff, but on twitter, my name is georgehuff - nice to meet you.  Over the course of this weekend I attended my first Barcamp.  Well, actually it was my second, but only on the technicality that I caught the tail end party at SXSW in Austin.  This was right before we played Urban Frisbee on the way to another party. Anyhow…

BarCamp is a (geek) conference built like a wiki, we can have a democratic schedule built on the fly.  Want to discuss a topic?  Any topic at all?  Come to BarCamp and paste your topic and name in one of the many timeslots.  At first I decided to be a fly on the wall and sort of take it all in, but then I changed my mind and decided to join up with Bram Piyoto and be an “assistant” presenter where design meets tech.  Hopefully I come across as being less of a jackass than I really am, here’s to hope.

And then came Sunday, while sitting in on a panel discussing hacking existing Wordpress themes I decided to address a need of how to build a theme from scratch. Because I once wrote a post detailing how to simply build a wordpress theme, I decided to build on the basic idea.  But instead of discussing building Eleven3, I discussed my most recent project, HomeSkillet Records.  As I did it last minute, I had a little tiny room with about 8 guests, it may have been light, but it sure was a captive audience! You’re sort of forced to listen with numbers that small - but I hope it was useful for people.

Mmmm Brain Power

Anytime a bunch of geeks get together there is a lot of brain power getting kicked around, so that’s pretty awesome.  What’s great is the general goodwill everyone has.  People are happy to be here and love a chance to have their thoughts and ideas expressed or learn new ones.  Traditionally, other conferences are a little bit idol worshippy feeling, which is fine (cause I am so into Shaun Inman and Jon Hicks), but this one is the opposite.  There are a few “names” here, but generally speaking everyone here is just here to geek out, prettttty awesome.

I had a blast and met many people who I have seen on Twitter - it’s always good to meet people in real life. I am not a stalker.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Downloading and tweaking one of the many themes of Wordpress is all fine and good. But what happens when you want to extend your blog/site past what someone else’s theme can give you? The truth is - this is a realm where most users are terrified to go. While I understand those fears, they aren’t totally warranted. Building a Wordpress theme can be quite easy, given the right process.

I’m freaking out man!

Building a Wordpress theme can be broken down into three steps; design, front-end development, and lastly the Wordpress implementation itself. I’m not quite sure how others do it, but the following guide is a detailed look into the process I have developed for building Wordpress themes.
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Popularity: 100% [?]

We designer types are a finicky breed. Rarely is something just right and we don’t really like the words time and budget. Good work takes time, a lot of it. That being said, when I launched version 2.0 of eleven3.com I was really excited, I felt I had achieved good work. I’m not sure if it’s just me, or if other designers do this as well, but when I design something I like; I stare and stare and stare.

With any creative work, the longer you expose yourself to it, the more stale it becomes. That’s why, about three months ago, I got the itch to redesign my site.

So here we are, one year ago and change I launched version 2.0 of eleven3. Today I launch version 3.0 - and yes I am just as excited as my last redesign. There are a lot of reasons for my excitement, but mainly it’s just a new look, a new focus, and more flexibility. Gone is the rigid and closed-source Movable Type and arriving is the flexible, fluid, Wordpress.

Continue reading for the off chance of relating to the requirements of the relaunch, the design phase, the challenges of coding the front-end, and the use of Wordpress and a plethora of plugins that now make up the site. A lot of work went into it, my hopes are that it is well received. Read the rest of this entry »

Popularity: 74% [?]

Low and behold I figured out something I didn’t know how to do before I figured it out. ;-0

When I first started getting into Wordpress, I just jumped in. There wasn’t a lot of thought on how to go about doing everything right, it was just the emphasis of getting things to work. When this meant creating new functions, I just added those to the existing Wordpress general_template functions list. Stupid!!! This makes upgrading a risky process, as you will probably overwrite the files you create at some point in the future.

Enter functions.php. I was reading through the Wordpress site and fell on the Functions Theme Development section. You mean all I have to do is create a file and Wordpress will do the rest? Smart, simply smart. This isn’t the first time the the foresight of the Wordpress platform has surprised me. Thanks so much for doing your thang.

Just put functions.php in your theme directory, and Wordpress will load it automagically.

Popularity: 13% [?]

When I first got into building blogs a few years back, I decided to go with Movable Type. Since then, I have switched to Wordpress and never been happier. Low and behold, Six Apart (the company who owns Movable Type) is coming out with an open source version of Movable Type.

“Because the time was right.”

Uhh, right. Maybe because Wordpress is kicking your ass? At least that’s what I have seen. I’m well versed in both platforms and Wordpress is better at it’s core, and better in its community. The new dashboard for Movable Type 4 looks really nice, and I may install it on this blog (unless I switch to Wordpress sooner, I am itching to redesign). Realistically, unless the open source MT4 is completely BONKERS, it may be too little too late.

Time will tell. Link.

Popularity: 10% [?]

It seems Wordpress crumbles under the heavy traffic of digg and loses it’s connection to the database. It could be a wordpress thing or a hosting thing, but it seems if one is blogging in wordpress there is something to be concerned about.

Has anyone experienced this disconnect? Here is what the error looks like on a site I was trying to go to:

This would deter me from using wordpress from heavy traffic sites I build in the long run.

Popularity: 8% [?]

So far Wordpress has been impressing me left and right. The plugin developers are building some amazing stuff that integrates so well that my job of building the site becomes effortless. My good friend Nicholas Galanin wanted to have his YouTube videos pull into his site. While there was definitely assumption on my behalf that there would be someone out there that had developed a plugin, there was still uncertainty.

Enter MyTube.

Some guy named VaamYob created this plugin for reasons he states on his site, “This is a plugin that I wrote because I thought videos would look cool on my site. ” While VaamYob did a great job with the plugin, the documentation across the net was sparse. I decided to give a quick rundown of how I integrated MyTube into http://www.nicholasgalanin.com.
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Popularity: 13% [?]

Over the last six months or so I have found myself using IRC more and more. For those who do not know, IRC is a place where like minded people can create a channel, login, and talk to each other about the decided topic amongst other things.

On my Mac I am using Colloquy (which I have no ideas how to pronounce). As with most Mac apps, it’s a very pretty application and I am very pleased with it. On a PC I am running IRC through Trillian, my IM client.

What is driving me to writing this post is something I have noticed. It seems the strenth of an idea or product or a community is directly related to the activity in the IRC room. Geeks use IRC, geeks fuel successful communities.

Recently I started dabbling in Wordpress cause I have begun to feel like Movable Type is a sinking ship. Like another content management system I use, CMS Made Simple, the WordPress community in their IRC channel is huge. There is constant activity and questions get answered relatively quickly. The same can be said for the Rails community.
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Popularity: 12% [?]

I am hoping someone decides to pipe in on this one. Preferably someone who has used BOTH Movable Type and Wordpress. Both are good blogging engines, one is opensource, one was, or something like that. Either way, I am thinking of switching this blog, and future blogs to use Wordpress. Why?

First off, it seem the grass is always greener on the other side. Everything Wordpress is doing seems to be done right. As I am fairly new to the blogging game, I am not sure what it was Movable Type did to piss so many people off, but something isn’t quite right. Last time I felt like I was on the wrong side of the fence, I switched to Firefox, wait no, it was to Apple. I’m getting the itch again.
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Popularity: 8% [?]

Currently I am trying to wrap my head around Joomla!. Certain things seem fairly straightforward, certain things I am finding ridiculous. Perhaps my biggest gripe is the fact I like to develop table-less standards compliant websites, and Joomla! spits out all kinds of crap. If I ask to have a menu split out in a flat ul li structure, it puts it inside of a table. Why?

Joomla!’s biggest pitfall as so far has been how it’s built for yesterday’s web. There is very little documentation online about how to change the guts of Joomla! and what gets spit out. I hope to change that as I go along. I have spent quite a bit of time figuring out where to get rid of the unecessary tables.
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Popularity: 7% [?]