Tag: wordpress

Designed in Sweden…

I was able to scratch two itches this past week: Start to learn how full-site editing works in WordPress and update my homepage in the process.

Screenshot of my updated homepage at jamesmichie.com.

Anders Norén released a new block theme called ‘Oaknut‘ earlier this month. It boasts a clean single page design, created specifically for landing pages. And with less than 150 lines of CSS, no javascript and locally hosted fonts, it is exceptionally privacy friendly and lightning quick.

I selected a monochrome style variation and got to grips with tweaking parts of the template, including individual blocks and group containers . I stuck with the suggested layout for the most part with a logo, title, tagline and four standard buttons directing visitors to four locations, three of which are on my main blog. All of this was relatively simple in the Gutenberg editor. Finally, I edited the footer and header. This was far easier now with no child theme required. All told, it took less than 30 minutes to go from installation to hitting publish.

I am really pleased with how it looks and even more pleased that it was designed in Sweden 🇸🇪 and is hosted in Germany 🇩🇪 – making my homepage a truly European 🇪🇺 affair.

Scratching an itch…

I have long admired the way some bloggers are able to include an image when auto-posting to Twitter. Looking at the IFTTT applet I was using to auto-post from my own blog, there did not appear to be an option to do this, and a web search did not yield any useful results.

I turned to Twitter and asked Warren Ellis what service or plugin he uses1. Having asked the question, I received a couple of suggestions from Doug Belshaw:

Looking into both of these I could see that they would achieve what I wanted but I was not satisfied with either implementation. Blog2Social requires you to create a Twitter application. This is not a big deal (I’ve done it before) but I did not believe this was necessary to achieve my goal. Furthermore, it is heavy-handed on the promotion of its paid features in the WordPress backend. The other option, Jetpack, is too feature rich and its footprint on the back end of your blog is quite intrusive. Furthermore, to access all of the auto-tweet features a paid plan is required. This does not sit right with me given the open source origins of WordPress.

Returning to IFTTT, I could not shake off the feeling that there was a way to do it. The search function in IFTTT is a bit hit and miss with a high noise to signal ratio. However, there were several recipes that indicated images could be posted natively to Twitter from other sources. This lead to me taking a fresh look at the Twitter channel in IFTTT. I saw that they have added a range of options and this indeed included the option to tweet with an image.

So, to relieve the proverbial itch, I started from scratch (😉) and created a new applet to share my WordPress posts to Twitter with an image.

dr amp shovel

This was a definite case that proved it is always worth digging a little deeper! Dr. Amp would approve.

  1. I subsequently found out that Warren uses the Jetpack plugin. However, he has recently written in his newsletter about issues he has had with this feature not working correctly. And I do believe he has since found a solution.[↩]

Reclaiming My Domain (since August 2016)

This is a post that I started writing back in 2017. I thought I should finish it off and post it for posterity. Some of these details have also been added to my about page.

rh make some noise gif

Reclaim Hosting

Back in August 2016, I moved my domain from Bluehost to Reclaim Hosting, which was co-founded by Jim Groom and Tim Owens. It grew out of the Domain of One’s Own project at The University of Mary Washington; providing space for students and educators to take control of their web presence. The migration was efficient and hassle free. A couple of issues arose as these things do and the support Reclaim provided was unparalleled.

Jim and Tim are legends and I am very happy to support their work. The ethics and aesthetics of the company chime with my own; not least due to a youth spent listening to punk and new wave. Two years on, I remain more than satisfied. Auto-updates; easy back-up and detailed documentation have allowed me to keep my various sites running with ease.

German Server

When I first signed up to Reclaim Hosting all of their servers were based in the US. As someone one who cares about privacy, I was ecstatic when I read Jim’s post: ‘Reclaiming Europe’. Jim and Tim’s success meant that they had to keep adding server space and this included the addition of their first European server in March 2017. I immediately made contact and took them up on the offer to move my domain to a Euorpean server. The server is called Kraftwerk and has been reliably serving my domain ever since.

Kraftwerk

On making this move, I realised that it had been quite some time since I had listened to everyone’s favourite German synth pioneers. I put all of their records on rotation and even made a playlist of their best material. This quickly began to punctuate my Saturday morning runs and the walk home from work.

Long Live RSS

Finally, like many of my web peers, I value open web standards; particularly RSS. In May 2017 Manton Reece and Brent Simmons released a feed format similar to RSS and Atom called JSON Feed. Based on the “developer’s choice for APIs” it “is much simpler to read and write” than XML, “and it’s less prone to bugs”.

This has been added to my blog using the WordPress Plugin giving readers an additional way to subscribe alongside the built in XML feed that comes as standard in WordPress. If you want to know more about why they created it, Manton and Brent discussed it on The Talk Show with John Gruber.

“We’re functioning automatic / And we are dancing mechanic / We are the robots”

~ Hütter, Ralf, The Robots (1978)

Make Some Noise Gif CC: Bryan Mathers (2017)

Cultivating a brand (caring for your digital self)

Since part way through last year, I have been working on leveraging control over both my digital identity and digital self. This has included closing a number of accounts, redesigning my home page, this blog, and leaving Facebook again. It has entailed making some tough decisions about which social networks I will invest time into; which apps and services I am prepared to share my data with.

This process has, and continues to be motivated by two values:

First, it is important to own as much of your own data as possible. Too many of us invest time in various apps, networks and other online tools, without considering whether or not we will be able to get that data out, should we decide to stop using them.

Second, it is important to give mindful consideration to the information that you publish online, as this is how many people will form their opinion of you. For all intents and purposes, your digital self is like a brand. It needs to be cultivated and cared for. It is therefore, my intention to ensure that brand ‘James Michie’ is well cultivated.

Home Page

Blog

It was with these principals in mind that I decided to move my ‘other’ blog ‘Et cetera’ from Posterous and integrate it with my main blog.

Twitter’s recent acquisition of Posterous, provided the final push I needed to make this move… one that I had considered doing last year. Do I think that Twitter is going to shut down Posterous? I am not sure but the signs are not great. Recent trends on the web would also suggest that either the service will fall into neglect or eventually close.

In making the move, I decided that it was also an opportunity to do some cleaning up. Before importing the blog, I removed any content which I felt did not fit in effectively with my main blog; this included the remnants of a failed #365 project and a few other posts.

If you were a subscribed to Et cetera, then please consider subscribing to this blog either by RSS or Email.

Owning your data and caring for your digital self is very important. Putting in, what I believe to be a reasonable amount of effort, has allowed me to take (greater) ownership of my data, and to better establish the version of my digital self that I wish for people to engage with. I encourage you to do the same.

Redesigning jamesmichie.com(blog) – CSS FTW!

I’ve been tweaking and redesigning aspects of my blog ever since I started it, attempting to balance clean/minimal design while trying to provide visitors with an enjoyable reading experience and straightforward navigation. I feel that I’ve finally achieved this and in doing so learned a lot about CSS. Completing work on my blog resulted in me redesigning my homepage from scratch, creating a greater sense of uniformity between the two. As I’d done before, I called upon the excellent site: w3schools.com for help in figuring out padding, margins, borders and floats, amongst other attributes.

jamesmichie.com/blog

blog 26.02.11

My blog is built upon the ‘Plainscape‘ theme. It is a very simple, two-column theme with very few unique features which makes it highly adaptable. I have made some minor edits to the layout and have completely overhauled the header and footers to suit my needs.  This included moving my sidebar buttons and search box into the header. From my research this seems to be a more common place for them to be. While I was making these adjustments I also added a new photo to my about page, tidied up my categories and moved the Evernote, Delivr and Instapaper buttons to the top right of my posts, a position that I feel is more intuitive for their purpose. Also, I have made significant changes to the css of the blog creating a strict colour scheme. I’ve added borders around menus and the different sections of the sidebar to improve navigation. Overall, I am more satisfied than I have been for a while, feeling that the blog has a far more consistent/professional look.

jamesmichie.com

home 26.02.11

To bring my homepage up the same standard as my blog, I began by deleting Concret5 and installed WordPress instead. I then looked for a one column theme and settled on F8 Lite. Being fairly confident in editing html and css it didn’t take me long to match the css of my new homepage theme to that of my blogs. I then went about stripping many of the features from the header and footer sections. I made use of the themes widget placement being at the bottom to add my blog feed, tweets and lifestream. In the settings I changed the front page from ‘latest posts’ to a ‘static page’ and went about creating one, adding the same photo I had selected to use on my about page. I matched the buttons from my blog to direct people to the parts of my web footprint that I feel they would be most interested in visiting. And with that I was done. I now feel that my homepage does a much better job of representing me and gives a much clearer picture of the key parts of my web footprint.

Understanding and taking control of css was the biggest win during this process. It made a huge difference as it allowed me to make design changes with greater ease and far more consistency. I have included, below, the css attributes which are consistent accross both my blog and homepage. If you would like to know about specific aspects or features, feel free to ask me in the comments.

CSS attributes:

background:

  • color: #f8f8f8

header, hmenu, sidebar header text:

  • font-family: ‘helvetica’, arial, sans-serif
  • font-weight: bold
  • text-transform:uppercase
  • color: #000000
  • a: #000000
  • hover: #34c48f

body, sidebar, footer text:

  • font-family: ‘helvetica’, arial, sans-serif
  • color: #333333
  • a: 34c48f
  • hover: #9a9a9a

meta text:

  • font-family: ‘helvetica’, arial, sans-serif
  • color: #9a9a9a

borders:

  • weight: 1px
  • style: solid
  • color: #9a9a9a