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.
3 Comments
Maybe I should be sliding back into some of your previous post to figure out what in the heck I’m doing with my blog.
I want some serious prettiness on my blog with buttons, banners, stamps, how far a long bars. Frick this premade blogspot crap!
WordPress.com has some pretty nice pre-made themes, if you don’t want to entirely manage your own site (wander around and see examples using the “Next” randomizer link). Otherwise, you’re gonna have to get your hands dirty and set up your own site and find or build your theme just how you want it. I’m not sayin you have to move (although, if you did, WordPress.com has a Blogger import tool so you can bring everything with you).
Hmmm. This may be something I just will have to do b/c I’m very displeased with what I’ve got now.
One Trackback
[...] Months ago i made miahz.com link to this blog instead of isolated project pages, which i’m pretty sure opened up the doors to the search engines. More recently i switched to the Hemingway theme, which hopefully helped some with the visual appeal. I send out my feed through FeedBurner, because apparently that’s the thing to do. I’ve dabbled with inserting ads into some of my posts here, i guess trying to understand how that whole game works. I set up and regularly check site statistics, because i wouldn’t even notice the difference otherwise. And most recently i set up comment subscription. [...]