Categories
Photography WordPress

Sizing Flickr Images with the WordPress Twenty Twelve Theme

I’ve just installed the new WordPress Twenty Twelve theme on my blog here. Twenty Twelve is a responsive design – meaning that it works well across not just traditional computer displays but also on mobile devices with much smaller screens – exactly my goal.

This is a significant upgrade from the old, original WordPress Twenty Ten theme that I have been running for a couple of years since migrating this blog from Typepad to WordPress.org two years ago this month. That theme didn’t dynamically adjust in response to smaller screen sizes – and with so much more of the visits coming from mobile and tablet devices, I needed a new theme that worked well with them.

With the responsive design of this new theme, I’ve noticed one glitch. I frequently embed an image – using embed code I copy from my Flickr portfolio. The code Flickr provides includes a hard coded height and width in the HTML based on the selection I make when copying it – historically I’ve been using 640 px wide images because that was the original width of this blog’s main content column. When viewed on a tablet or mobile phone, these images were being squished – with their aspect ratio being changed to “fit” the image.

To fix this problem, I need to edit the HTML inserted in the post to change the height to 100% and to remove the width specification. Once that’s done, everything scales beautifully!

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs WordPress

Playing with Child Themes

Just created my first WordPress child theme – to allow minor tweaking of the style.css for the Twenty Ten theme. Cool stuff!

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs Photography Travel Web/Tech WordPress

About that Header Image – Overlooking Luggala

When I launched this new WordPress-powered version of my blog over the weekend, I quickly looked through some recent photos to find one that would be suitable for use in the header image. The one I picked, which I’ve loosely titled “Band on the Run!“, was taken on November 19, 2010, in County Wicklow in Ireland. Seems like a near perfect shot for an album cover, doesn’t it?!

We’re standing on a cliff overlooking Luggala – the Guiness estate. We had just jumped out of our tour bus (Wild Wicklow Tours – highly recommended!) and were headed over to capture the views when I snapped this photo with my Canon PowerShot S95. My Glenbrook partner Carol Coye Benson and I were in Ireland teaching our Payments in a Mobile World workshop earlier that week. That’s Carol out in front of the band in the photo!

Here’s a page showing all of the header images that I’ve used over the years on sjl.us.

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs TypePad Web/Tech WordPress

Thoughts on Migrating from TypePad to WordPress

Since 2003, this blog has been hosted by TypePad. They’ve provided excellent service – I have no complaints in that regard.

So, why did I decide to migrate from TypePad to WordPress?

Basically, the TypePad version of this blog had been put together (by me) using Advanced Templates and a bunch of hacks. It worked – but even I couldn’t figure out how to maintain it going forward.

So, I decided to migrate.

Over the last two years, I’ve launched several other blogs based on WordPress – and have become more familiar with the administrative aspects of WordPress. WordPress has just become more comfortable. That’s not to say it’s simple. WordPress is complicated – especially with respect to themes, plug-ins, etc. Be careful.

That said, while the posts export and import readily, there are many other issues – like image libraries that don’t export/import cleanly, category archives that have different permalink locations, and photo albums that simply don’t migrate. Not a pretty picture – but no surprise given the current state of the blogging art. Cruft. Crap.

I stopped using the TypePad photo albums a few years ago – when I became such a Flickr fan. But, there earlier links are still around, in the search engines, etc. Want to view my photos? Checkout my Flickr site!

Among other things, my migration initially screwed up the images displayed on another of my TypePad blogs. We’ve figured out a clever workaround for that – but it’s dependent on both the old and new sites being available. No way to cut the cord between the two without a lot more work. We’ll deal with that eventually.

Tonight, I spent time adding a bunch of redirects for the TypePad category archives – to their new locations on my new WordPress instance. This was just another giant hassle – but, with only about 30 categories, something I could get done without a lot of pain. Luckily, .htaccess provides a lot of power for redirection of URLs – but it’s still a giant PITA.

Tonight, I think we’ve got most of the conversion issues resolved. I’m watching the logs to see what URLs from searches aren’t resolving correctly – and may need to add a few more tweaks. Such is the life of the aging sysadmin…

Categories
Blogs/Weblogs TypePad Web/Tech Weblogs WordPress

WordCampSF 2009 – The WordPress Community

I attended WordCampSF 2009, the WordPress community gathering, in San Francisco today – and had a great time (pictures)! Held at the Rutter Conference Center at the new UCSF Mission Bay campus, this was a most impressive turnout of the WordPress community for an all-day session of talks about blogging, having fun and, yes, about all things WordPress. Eventually, the videos from today’s talks are to be available on WordPress.tv.

wcsf-smallbutton.pngI’ve been a long-time TypePad blogger and fan. This blog, my personal website, started out originally in FrontPage back in the 1998 timeframe then moved through Manila and Radio Userland to Typepad when it launched in 2003. Recently, at work, we launched a new blog – PaymentsViews.com – and decided to try using WordPress for the first time. Bringing up PaymentsViews was a great experience – thus my newfound interest in all things WordPress and in wanting to attend today’s conference! The $25 all-in conference price made it a no brainer to attend!