I finally got my lifestream working — using WordPress itself!
My lifestream.
I owe thanks to two plugins: FeedWordPress (which brings in the feeds) and AsideShop (which handles how the posts look). I also owe thanks to Six Apart’s new release, Motion, which is Movable Type’s answer to the lifestream idea. I tried getting Motion to work, but I kept getting strange errors — character lengths were too long, certain files didn’t exist, and then my login information didn’t exist. =/ So I decided to go with something I knew I could figure out: WordPress.
Continue reading ‘Making a Lifestream with WordPress’
I’m working on my own WordPress theme!
Here’s the concept:
New WordPress Theme
It’s not in the WordPress stages yet — this is still the barebones. I’m thinking about using the very sandboxy WP theme Sandbox as it’s framework. I’ve used Sandbox before as a theme and I can’t say enough good things about it.
I just don’t like the new direction WP themes are taking. The “premium” look, as I call it, is just too much. I want to go back to the days of basic two-or-three column layouts, without the big square buttons on the sidebar or the magazine-like “featured” sections. I mean, for someone who keeps a personal blog, all of that isn’t for me. I’d prefer the simplicity and minimalism of yesteryear….*wistful*
I can’t say that I’m having the best of luck with SweetCron. There are problems abroad. If you go to my personal site, you’ll see that I have a decent skin (one that looks like my Soup.io page), but I’m completely screwed when it comes to the php. In short, I don’t know what I don’t know.
I have two problems with SweetCron so far. First, it doesn’t support most of the site feeds that I want to include. Yeah, it has the standard Twitter and YouTube support, but not much else. It doesn’t support my Tumblr feed. Hell, it doesn’t even support Delicious! What the hell?!
Second, I have to go in and manually edit php code to add Delicious, Tumblr, etc. support. Though I wanted to learn a bit of code while working with SweetCron, my code didn’t do ANYTHING different. I still have a plain old ugly box with “SweetCron doesnt’ recognize this feed” blah blah blah. Why not? Soup.io does.
I’m begining to think that the word “beta” is a cop-out for errors in code or software that is lacking somewhat. “Oh, it’s ok that we have errors — we’re in beta” seems to be the mantra these days. I think softwares stays in beta for as long as it can because it is safer and they can avoid criticism.
Ugh. I didn’t mean for that to be a tirade. I’m just really frustrated right now. I’m also on the look out for another open source lifestream. Any out there?
I’ve been thinking about converting my personal site into a lifestream using SweetCron. I’ll have to look into it a bit more, but I might have to brush up on my cron job knowledge. I have no idea how to run them. The last few times I tried, Dreamhost gave me some problems. But other than that, I’m thinking SweetCron might be a good idea. It’ll help me brush up my coding skills.
I re-opened my blog site at blog-her.com using WordPress and the K2 theme that I love so much. Take a look:
Blog-Her Redesign
I’m using the same color scheme that I did with my old Writings… page. I love the color scheme. It’s easy on the eyes and gives off a cool, calming vibe.
And yes, I did move my Writings… site to its own domain: nina.scaletti.org. Here’s what it looks like:
nina.scaletti.org
I went with something darker this time. I made that striped header image myself in GIMP. It took a lot of math and conscentration, but I managed to pull it off!
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