Things By Mike

So as I mentioned a couple posts back, I recently spent a couple weeks taking the layout I created for the Second Impulse website and making it work with Wordpress. Though I’ve used Wordpress for quite a while, I’d never actually created a completely custom theme. In the past I’d dabbled with attempting to do it, but always found most tutorials to not be very helpful. For one reason or another they never seemed to make perfect sense to me, so I’d just abandon my attempts at theme creation. Finally I’ve found some resources that make sense.

• Themes 101 by Brassblogs – For me this is the best tutorial I’ve found to date which covers how to create a Wordpress theme from an already finished html layout. The information is very straight forward, well written and easy to follow. If you have a great design you’ve put together in Photoshop and Dreamweaver (or something similar) but are struggling with making it all work in Wordpress, try this tutorial.
• Guide to the NextGen Gallery – One of the most important plugins I use on the Second Impulse website is the NextGen gallery. Across the bottom of every page are random thumbnails which when clicked pop up lightboxed photos of the band. Vuthy’s tips helped me quite a lot in making it all work how I wanted it to.
• Exporting and Importing Wordpress – With the Second Impulse site I decided to test it all locally using xampp, which allows you to run a test webserver on your own PC via Apache. While I am pretty familiar with what’s required to move a local test site to a live web server (in my cast HostGator’s servers), it didn’t hurt to have a refresher since it had been a while. Nick also has an excellent tutorial regarding Wordpress theme creation as well.

So I just finished playing Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 and I can say it absolutely lived up to the hype, without a doubt. I did my first run of the campaign in normal mode and it was nothing short of epic. For only being on normal, it was pretty damn challenging. I can only image how much more of a challenge it will be when I attempt it on more difficult settings.

The story was excellent, well acted by the voice talent and actually threw in a bit of an unexpected twist. I won’t say what it is, or course. You’ll just have to play it for yourself and see.

I literally played from about 2:30 this afternoon until about 9:30 this evening. I took a couple munchie breaks but for the most part, I couldn’t put it down. Each mission kept getting more epic than the last and I just had to see how it all turned out. Next will be a venture into the multiplayer and Special Ops modes which I’m expecting will be just as fantastic as the campaign.

If you’ve been on the fence about picking up the game, seriously, get it. It’ll be game of the year for sure.

So over the last few weeks I’ve been working on the website for the hard rock band Second Impulse from Baltimore. In a previous entry I posted an image to a layout for the site which we used. It was basically a temp layout. The band wanted to have a site online quickly before a Halloween gig. So we did just that – got the site online quickly. While it was functional, it was very static. Everything required manual editing of individual pages. Obviously in the long run I wanted the band and their manager to be able to update the site with content as simply as possible. The answer of course was Wordpress. So I set out to create a custom theme based on the layout we already had.

After a hefty amount of sleep deprivation, swearing, trial and error and more swearing, I finished the theme in about a week and a half. I found some great tutorials along the way which I will make a separate post about. While there are still some things that needed to be tweaked – the Internet Explore 7 stylesheet (ugh), I am for the most part happy with how it turned out. I’ve yet to widgetize the site, though it doesn’t really need it right now. In all there are seven page templates and five different sidebars used in the theme. A pretty complex first theme, I suppose.