wordpress theme update

Over the past week I’ve been working for long hours on WordPress. I think it’s safe to say that I am able to put together the functions that I need to create my virtual work later next year.

This theme is created for my personal website, as a practice. These are some progress screenshots of many trials and errors of creating the layout. I jumped from 2-column, 4-column, before settling on a 3-column layout, using a basic table structure.

Had plans for a fancy looking theme, but settled on an imageless/simple theme to look professional. The typeface is Roboto, a Google Font that I installed in the theme. It’s quite a basic and lovely typeface that I might continue to use. I realised that adding a custom font instantly makes my site look less dated, after being used to my standard choices of Georgia and Courier New.

The middle column are WordPress pages – I used a code that generates the pages in a list format, according to the order I specified in WP dashboard. The homepage displays a static page (my bio), defined by this character (·̇·̣̇̇·̣̣̇·̣̇̇·̇). I didn’t want a line of text like ‘home’ to appear there. Having a special character gives the layout an accent.

For links, I created two classes of links: one for body text (pink ones) and a dark grey one for the navigational links.

For content, they are all WordPress posts. I removed all the functions that comes with a typical post so that it showed the title only.

Still in the midst of getting everything up, and will share the completed theme soon.

visualisation concept

This was my final work for Facts & Fictions. I made this booklet on the day of the exhibition… it was a really packed month for all of us. It’s not the most refined piece of work I’ve ever made, but I am quite happy with the concept for visualisation and this is something I will work on next semester, after I am finished with making the dataset.

A group critique made me consider a lot more about what would best capture the nature of my blogging journey. I have also received comments that it would be great if I can incorporate some illustrations too. I came up with the germination process as a metaphor, not the most original, surely, but the concept is pretty basic and there is a lot of room to play with.

This page was made using the sketch I created on Google Sheets, using a radial treemap as a reference. (Google Sheet is able to generate a treemap chart too – very cool)

I think having this overarching concept to go along with the visualisation will make my work more relatable and meaningful to others, rather than being this abstract data vis-y thing that people just look at with no clue what it is about.

google sheets

In the past month, I’ve worked a lot with Google Sheets. It helps me to organise my categories and tags easily.

Due to the scale of the project and the personal, arbitrary nature of journal entries, it can be tedious and tricky to build the database of tags and categories. Here’s how I tagged my entries.

– Tags: subject matter, activity, event, names

After a review of my Sheets, I am on the fence about using Categories as part of the database narrative. Categories are more general than tags, which can be very specific, and as a rule, I categorised my entries based on the general tone/subject matter of the entry, which can be quite tricky because as I’ve said, entries can be arbitrary. I thought about how my dataset could work for me and I find that tags may offer a better solution. A combination of say, tags + time, will project quite interesting visualisations, and definitely more effective as well. Categories would become an extra set of variable, and because they can look rather similar to tags, it would be really confusing too.

Here’s an overview of my Sheets. This is from January 2005 – 2015. There’s a lot of cleanup to be done, for sure.

Sorting of Categories.

All the tags, before they are sorted. Tags in the colour columns belong to a bigger category, while those on the left side are more specific.For my Facts & Fictions final, I narrowed down the categories and tags and worked with these.

Sketches of my visualisation, using Google Sheets.

writing a wordpress theme

Spent the last few days working on making a WordPress theme. Progress could be better if I am not interrupted periodically… but I am quite pleased with where I’ve gotten so far. The screenshots don’t really show much, but I am getting better at understanding how a theme comes together. Also, doing this is a real refresher course on working with PHP again.

I used the WordPress Codex for help on theme development. Having imported a good percentage of my blog posts for my Facts & Fiction project (the january project) gives me a good base to work with, in terms of theme development. It is definitely useful to have some posts there rather than working on an empty blog. This December, I’ll be working a couple of things: developing the dataset for my blog, create a skeleton theme for the final, and think of a meaningful way to make the data visualisation. The dataset is created by tagging and categorising all my blog entries and forming the database narrative. More on this part on my next entry — I am also excited to show the progress of that part of my project as well as my outcome for Facts & Fictions. All of this will come in the next few days. So many things to do, and I’m eager to share along the way.

In this screenshot, you can see the very basic skeleton of a theme. At this point, I felt a sense of achievement. Getting the posts and categories to show up. I also added the tag cloud (didn’t have a screenshot), and I could see something developing there, with just January’s worth of entries. I’ve mentioned before that it’s not my intention to share the blog posts, but to use meta data to tell the story. By developing my own theme, I can get down to the specifics, and decide what part of the blog I want to show on the front page. I am able to hide the posts, and work with just the tag and categories.

Here are a couple of screenshots from my Google Sheets, which I’ve used for my final project in my data vis course. More on that for the next post. These are the information that I get from important my entries into WordPress. Using WordPress and Google Sheets in tandem is really useful for my process. With this in mind, I am also considering how I would like my physical outcome to look like as well. I’ll think about it as I go along.

Having built a skeleton theme, I made a copy and installed another blog on my server. As I am also working to revamp my own personal website, I am taking the opportunity to learn more about what I can do with WordPress themes. All of this is good practice for my virtual outcome, and I am trying my best to do as much as I can over this break, while not letting anything I do go to waste. This screenshot shows a WordPress blog with no posts, just pages. What I am doing with this WordPress theme is to put all my content in WordPress pages, which would be a breeze for updating. The php function allows the pages to be displayed as they are on the wp-admin, which is a fantastic option – you can see the various things nested under the parent page of ‘works’ It’s been useful to work on these two sites for now as I explore what I can do with both posts and pages and consider how I can best incorporate their key functions together in my final theme development.

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