Well, i finally got around to doing a little remodeling.

If you’re expecting to see the LCD page, it has moved to miahz.com/projects/lcd/.

Now the WordPress-powered blog which used to live at the undiscoverable URL http://miahz.com/index.php is at the root, which should make things flow much better around here. I’m wondering if and hoping that it will boost the ratings of my blog posts, as they didn’t seem to be doing well with the hidden home page. It definitely was not SEO’d.

I used WordPress’ Pages feature for the new LCD project pages. They had been static HTML pages sitting in the root directory, and i wanted to try to move everything into one interface and database—managed by WordPress. I had never really done much with WP’s Pages or Templating before so wasn’t exactly sure how to do it. A little poking around at the Codex gave me a push in the right direction. I wanted to keep the exact same page design and layout for now, just changing the location.

I created a couple of new Pages: first, “Projects” with the slug of “projects”, then “LCD for Firefox” with the slug of “lcd-firefox” as a child of the Projects page. Now i had two empty Pages. At first i just copied and pasted the the source of the HTML file into the content box of the Edit Page screen. But that resulted in mangled content in a busted Kubrick layout. The problem is that the layout of Pages is determined by the Page Template they are set to use. So i needed to build a new template using the design of my HTML file. But bump that.

I quickly realized that i could just paste the HTML into the page template and link an empty Page to it. The content isn’t actually living in the database this way; i was essentially pointing to the same static HTML files via WordPress. Nevertheless it achieved the exact effect i was after—quickly. Repeat for the Screenshots Page which i set up as a child of the LCD Page. Just make sure to add the PHP comment that defines the template to the top of the file, and make a unique template name for each “static” page.

In this case the Title of the Page just determines what is listed in the blog sidebar – the page title displayed in the browser window is already in the HTML i pasted into the template. The Slug, however, is more important, as it defines where in the site structure the Page lives. With that in mind, i wanted to make sure these would be as permanent as possible. I wasn’t crazy about ‘projects/lcd-firefox’ being the address to this page. So i ended up shortening it to ‘projects/lcd’, and moved the Flock variation to a subpage at ‘projects/lcd/for-flock’.

Oh yeah, the only other thing i had to do was correct the links to CSS and image files in the Pages templates, as they now lived deep in the bowels of WordPress. And i think that’s all there was to it.

Next: adding some furnishings. Then maybe some redecorating.