Tag: WordPress

WordPress blogger bundle from Appsumo.com

Personal

Earlier today I stumbled across a WordPress Blogger Bundle from Appsumo.com and it’s definitely worth the $32 it costs. I’m pretty cheap so I usually opt for the “free account” with services or just stick with open-source if need be. But this is definitely an awesome bundle to look into. The bundled apps value at ~$950 and you get the following:

Appsumo.com

  • Page.ly – 3 months of business hosting ($150 value)
  • BuySellAds – $50 advertiser credit
  • inboxSEO – 6 months ‘Standard’ Plan ($114 value)
  • WooThemes – Unite theme (plus 2 more of your choice)
  • PadPressed – PadPress WordPress Plugin + Theme
  • And eleven other apps/items

I decided to take advantage of the bundle namely for the BuySellAds credit and the WooThemes offer. That’s $32 for what would have been at least ~$120. Not bad!

Pluginless maintenance mode w/ functions.php

Coding

I’m always looking for ways to ditch plugins to keep from bloating WordPress even more than I already do ;). I prefer working on a live server so I end up resorting to utilizing .htaccess to allow access to a specified IP addresses only. Using this snippet in functions.php is way easier since it just looks if a user can edit themes and if they’re logged in. Easy peasy!

Toss this into your functions.php file.

// Admin Access Only
function maintenance_mode() {
  if ( !current_user_can( 'edit_themes' ) || !is_user_logged_in() ) {
    die('Maintenance.');
  }
}
add_action('get_header', 'maintenance_mode');

Displaying posts for current day using a query

Coding

For the last week I’ve been working on a new project of mine that is a heavily modified calendar theme for WordPress that displays video game releases. The original concept of mine was using an actual calendar but after having some issues with how it displayed (basically just bad UX/UI) I nixed that idea. I decided that I would rather display all current releases for the current day.

So here’s the custom query to display posts for the current day. You can edit the query parameters to be as specific (or general) as you need them to be. 

<ul>
<?php
$today = getdate();
query_posts('showposts=-1&post_status=publish,future&year=' .$today["year"] .'&monthnum=' .$today["mon"] .'&day=' .$today["mday"] );
while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title(); ?></a></li>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</ul>

Breaking out of the mold

Personal

For almost a year I have been relying on premade themes from places like WooThemes and Elegant Themes for my personal site. I just didn’t have the time nor patience to devote development work to my own website. It definitely showed as I just didn’t feel like updating my site.

A few days ago I randomly felt inspired to work on a new theme and I actually stuck with it. I’m known to work on something and get as far as coding out the header and then quitting on the rest of it. I just don’t like working for myself as I start to hate it a few days later. I’m very pleased with myself as I’ve finally gotten a theme done that isn’t just tweaking a premade.

I decided to go more on the CSS3 route with some features (eg: rounded corners) as I am an ass backwards developer. I am still trying to force myself to work in Photoshop to get a PSD going then to code it up. Unfortunately I prefer the code out the framework then shove in colors and images. Truthfully it’s a method that’s worked out okay for me so I suppose that’s why I still stick with it.

Oh I almost forgot! I have finally? switched domain names. I was ridiculously bored and hated atourworst.org. I had registered a few other domains along with icupcake.org, but ultimately this was my winner. Atourworst.org should now entirely redirect to iCupcake.org; There are going to be some errors here and there but I have it set to log and email them to me so I can fix as I see them. The biggest will be images in posts, so I’ll get around to that momentarily. If you spot any problems, let me know. For what it’s worth, this was not designed to support >IE7. Don’t bother checking in there 😉

Is It Really December Already?

Personal

I can’t believe that it’s already been almost two months since I last blogged. I honestly don’t know why I lack the motivation to keep writing blogs here, but hopefully I can get back into the groove.

The same design has been up here at atourworst.org , and well I honestly think that was the problem. So I decided to go ahead (and against my better judgement) and put up a new theme (albeit premium, and not something I even did myself.) I’m at a bit of a time constraint and lacked motivation so it was really the only thing I could do to get the ball rolling. It’s by no means permanent but at least it’s somewhat decent?

Christmas is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I really need to get on the ball and get Christmas gifts situated. I’ve got an idea of what to get my mom and dad, so now it’s down to just picking up something for Morgan and Nicolle. Of course I’ll be getting my boyfriend Armando something too, but since I know he reads this, I’ll be damned if I just let you know about my sekrutz. All I know is that I’ve been feeling really.. family-y this season so I’ve been conspiring with my youngest sister to cook a Christmas Eve dinner. We haven’t done anything on Christmas Eve since I was maybe 10’ish? We typically celebrate on Christmas Day.

Well, I think that’s enough for a quick post. Here’s to hoping that I can try blogging semi-regularly. I’ll probably shock myself if I even open up WordPress again this week…