The new AnotherRobot! Part 2
April 21st, 2008
It would be nice to think that creating a WordPress template is an easy task. In fact, after visiting several sites that tell you how to WordPress a design they call it fun. To be perfectly honest with you, it’s not fun, it’s a bloody nightmare. The main problem is, it requires that you split your design into four parts, a simple enough task that should go rather smoothly, however, that wasn’t how my design was initially set up. I was required to alter the design code to make WordPressing my blog “easy.” The look is identical but that code is slightly different.
That wasn’t even the first hurdle I had; the first was trying to get WordPress to correctly identify my theme even though the theme-info in my CSS was correct. I found throughout this project that WordPress is one finicky little blogging platform. After some trial and error, I came to the conclusion that it was my copy and pasting it from TextEdit to WordPress. I guess it was the unseen formatting that was breaking up the info even though I was working with Plain Text in TextEdit.
Every aspect of this blog took hours. The entire process had me making a small change in the stylesheet and then refreshing the blog to see if I achieved the desired result. It was a time consuming nightmare. One that thankfully only lasted 2 weeks. I had to make so many different changes and workarounds I’m still don’t have a grasp of what works, why it works, and why it didn’t work in the first place.
Finally I finished everything but there was still one thing bothering me. My URL was being redirected to my access domain for mediatemple. Basically, when you typed in anotherrobot.com you were redirected to the gridserver URL. You would get to the blog, but part of spending all this money on domain names was to, well, use them for the entire browsing experience.
I called mediatemple and talked to a bloke name Ian who thankfully was smart and knew more than I did. He tried some things but couldn’t get it to work. It turns out, after sending it to a higher level that it was me who didn’t change the URL’s in WordPress. Oops! :) Now everything was working and I was done.
At least that’s what I thought. I still hadn’t tried it out in Internet Explorer. I hate Internet Explorer. Hate it! The reason people still use it is beyond me. It certainly had its place in the world in the 90’s but now there are much better alternatives (e.g. Firefox or Safari). So I waited until my Mom got home and looked at my blog on Internet Explorer. There were two extremely noticeable problems that could not be ignored. Great, this was going to take me hours to figure out. Thankfully I was able to solve them both in about 30 minutes.
Now it’s done. Even though the code is bloated and not 100% valid, I’m happy with it. This is the first blog I designed from scratch, starting with a blank page and typing in code. I usually would modify other designs, but I wanted something that was uniquely mine. Much of the WordPress code is used from Kubrick, but over all the design is mine.
Tags: blog, mediatemple
