Rough Groove

Finally, Wordcamp Philippines 2008

The first WordCamp in Southeast Asia and I was a part of it!

As I haven’t registered my gear, I was already at La Salle-Taft, Manila (College of St. Benilde) as early as 0800H trying to beat the expected heavy traffic of attendees. Fortunately, the participants lining the gate were still few and filling out the forms were quick. Of the scheduled 0900H, the program started 30 minutes after and what I was hoping to hear about Wordpress usage in the Philippines as outlined in the activities didn’t materialized, until Matt Mullenweg talked about it in the afternoon. Of course, there were the breakout discussion sessions with topics that I’ve been looking forward of attending but because of the time constraints, it was more of a series of showcase presentations.

Originally, I intended to do a photo story of the event but by the afternoon, I wasn’t already feeling well that after the web standards discussion, I have to leave. Anyway, I just hope that you will find the slideshow above interesting and more or less get to have a feel of the event.

By the way, I finally met Nina and Eric, known Pinoy travel bloggers and Mabelle who I had a great discussion with. Nice meeting you guys!

The new look of ROUGH GROOVE

I’m finally done with redesigning this blog, ROUGH GROOVE! This Wordpress theme is a ready made design by Jai Nischal Verma named Statement. I like this one. It’s simple and the colors are subdued. It’s clean and organized. However, I made some minor adjustments to suit my needs:

• removed the infobar
• changed the width of the left column to 600px and the sidebar to 320px
• originally, there were two sidebars (left and right) but I removed the other
• changed the footer to have the meta/admin menu

I’ve already added Google Adsense and, like what I’ve done with my other blogs, added photo links to my other sites as can be seen at the sidebar. The next few days will be some tweaks and adjustments and I will be adding the Google Search as well as RSS above. Now, I can proceed with other important tasks.

The new look of simbahan.net

Following in the heels of two major theme redesign of Langyaw and Binary Silver, I’ve now updated my simbahan.net blog. Like Langyaw, I’m using Michael Jubel’s great magazine style theme arthemia2. Its an elegant work that compares well to premium themes or even much better.

The changes I’ve implemented is the same but I’ve also modified the number of categories that can be accommodated at the browser bar from five to eight. I’ve also switched to another color for the links. The footer has also been edited with the center column made widget ready by removing the “most commented.” One last thing, trackbacks are now separated from the comments section and is now cleaner and organized.

The next few days will be spent finetuning the site by adding some adsense ads, google search and some other widgets. With three blogs already redesigned, Rough Groove (this blog) will be next but not immediately.

The new look of Binary Silver, my photoblog

If not for a surprise email that I got this weekend, two in fact, I woudn’t have redesigned my photoblog, Binary Silver in a huff! My second blog to be redesigned in three days. Well, I will just announce the surprise when the time is ripe.

Anyway, I was so busy the whole day today making a very big change to the way my photoblog looks, a major overhaul that seems to be a big leap forward. My idea was to have a clean and simple design. A minimalist approach that will highlight more the images with the overall layout not stealing the thunder from the photos. All styling is done in cascading style sheets or CSS.

First and foremost, it has lots of white space. Text is uncluttered and revolves around the images. I did away with the sidebar and opted instead to subdivide the 960px width into two with about 2/3 devoted to the content while a third is reserved for the post title and details. A 300px wide Google Adsense ad will also be placed here.

The color scheme is limited to two gradations of grays, orange and light yellow for a fresh feel to it. If you will notice, there are no other images other than the main photo and the rest is text. Horizontal lines are also predominant and the only other design element with a shape is the header menu which is a rectangle (of course, other than the photos).

The header got me some problems earlier. At first I opted for a left float so that the header title and the header menu will be at the same level but when I placed a clear below the header, there was just a very wide space underneath. I wasn’t able to resolve this problem that I opted to do away with it. To remedy the disconnect, I placed a border below the title. I think it was a good decision. However, when I get to solve this technical problem, I might change the way the header look.

As for the footer, I was at a bind on how to do it. At first, I had this dark gray block with lighter yellow links but it just doesn’t jive. Later, I replaced the dark block and opted for a white background. To separate this from the main content area, a gray line, 5px in width is used as a divider. The three columns are all widget ready.

Now, its more unified.

The new face of langyaw.com, my travel blog

For the past few months, I’ve been thinking of utilizing a magazine style theme for one of my blogs and after much search, I’ve come upon Michael Jubel’s Arthemia2 Wordpress theme via Gladita’s informative blog. She commented in one of my posts in langyaw.com and when I checked her site, I just fell in love with the theme.

Michael did a wonderful design. It is beautiful. I like it’s simplicity, the color scheme and how the different sections are arranged:

• The Headline allows me to highlight a new post
• The Featured section lets me drive readers to past posts that are interesting. Its an effective way of making them explore the blog more.
• The Categories bar is located below the two sections. Its a clever design and the number of items that can be placed here is just five. It would be difficult if you have more than that but it forced me to really do some category “cleaning” and narrowed it down to 5!

These top three sections are all above the fold and its usage is very commendable.

• The rest of the posts are located below the fold showing five at a time (but this can be customized). Much older items can be accessed through the pagination (WP-PageNavi is built in).
• The Sidebar is widget ready and can be configured through four sections
• Lastly, the Footer is dark, a contrast to the upper parts. This is divided in three columns with two widget ready. The last column seems to be fixed. I also like the placement of the admin links which is located at the bottom of the footer.

There’s a caveat, however. If you notice, there are thumbnail photos for the Headline, Featured and all other posts. This was achieved through the use of Wordpress’ custom fields. Fortunately, the designer provided a script that will automatically generate these images but you still need to place an entry in the said fields. Another thing, this theme needs some configuration and to do that will involve editing the index.php file and adding some category names. Instructions on these can be found at Michael’s blog.

I made slight customizations of the theme to suit my needs:

• I changed the header logo, unless you want one named with arthemia. You can readily replace the png file with your own but making it as text is possible and will need some styling
• got rid of the categories located at the top of post title

One of the biggest work that I did was that I manually generated the thumbnails. I did away with the script for two reasons:

• I can’t make it work at localhost where I test my posts, and
• I want to control the composition of the thumbnail images. For me, I want to pique the reader’s curiosity so that they will check the post

With just around 70 plus entries, it’s still manageable. However, to make this work, I made some changes to the theme files especially those governing the custom fields. I made three different key names for the following thumbnail images: Headline, Featured and all other posts. For upcoming posts, I need to input these three values.

With the initial changes implemented, the next few days will be spent fine tuning the theme like arranging the widgets, adding Google Adsense and work out some other customizations. After that, I will redesign the rest of my blogs, especially this one!