Jay Croft's Resume(s)

I spent the last week redesigning my rather blah and flat looking sight on my acting career. I still have work to do on it. I plan on adding a few little extra bits to give it more interesting texture.

Well, to start with, I needed to decide on a very specific theme. I wanted to avoid the cliche acting kind of sites. So as I was driving into work, listing to a Discover News podcast and the subject of old typewriters came up. Thought that was interesting, so I googled around and found a computer keyboard modified to look like “Steampunk“. So what is Steampunk? I googled that and followed links. Steampunk is technology based on the Victorian era of steam power and what if steam were the primary source of power today.

The art work is sort of  Rube Goldberg’esk with metal, old parchment, gears and leather and a Victorian feel.

So last week I set about the makeover. Downloaded some images from iStockPhoto and went to work. I have put the mostly finished product out. I have a few defects and the images are still a bit two large download wise. And the blog still needs to be converted. And I still want to add some image tweaks. I don’t think I have achieved Steampunk, but I did get a site with some texture and depth.

But I have to say the most annoying part of the redesign has been dealing with Internet Explorer. I hate it.

I am not the best designer, but I like to do my own. If I can I do start with a template of some sort. Croft & Stout is based on a template. A very nice one. There are templates everywhere. For an individual developer like me, a lot of time can be saved by having your client (or even yourself) use one of the many free templates available.

I recently moved my Acting Blog from one blogging software to WordPress. As with this site and my acting site, both sites already have a design, both done from scratch, but I needed to make my blogs look like the rest of the pages.

For WordPress, there are literally thousands of pre-designed templates. All you have to do is search for them. But unlike a simple css design for websites, there is more to a template for WordPress than just css. Each template for a WordPress theme also includes all the php files which put everything together for display. For most people this is not an issue or concern, but like I said above I needed to make my blogs look like the rest of the pages on each site.

There are a few Blank templates out there, but I recently came across Sandbox. This template came with a half dozen very basic style sheets for the number of columns and their placements. The only problem I had with them was that they were all fluid based layouts. I wanted a fixed width design, but I easily changed that.

I did, however, make a few changes in the php files to suit my needs. For my acting blog, I modified the comments.php file to move the comments meta div to below the actual comments instead of above. I suppose I could have done this with css, but my first instinct was to change the layout. The only potential issue and the reason for doing this in css is that if that file gets overwritten with an update, now my placement change has been removed.

On this blog though, I did modified the header.php file to put in my hCard header that I use on the rest of the pages. If you do not know what an hCard is, it is a microformat. Just follow the link.

Whit the change to the header.php, I had another issue I needed to rectify. I have a seperate style sheet for my hCard microformat. The Sandbox template also used microformats so that my hCard.css made the meta data (bottom of this post) do some things I did not want them todo. The fastest, probably not the best way, and something I am sure I will tweak, was to give my hCard header some different class names and change the hCard.css. Actually I am sure I will change that back and make everything work via css.

Anyway, in conclusion, I really like the Sandbox template for WordPress. I still have some tweaks to do to the css, but I did update both sites in just a few days.

Let me know what you think.

I wrote a few PHP scripts that moved my acting blog from Serendipity 0.7.1 to WordPress 2.2.1. Specifically those versions. As Serendipity and WordPress evolved, so to did their respective databases. I used MySQL for both.

These scripts were written over about a week or so and only done with knowledge of my data in mind. I know what my data consisted of and did not worry too much on doing any manipulation.

I could have cleaned up the scripts: There is a function that I pulled from WordPress and included in several scripts instead of using an include. I also created 3 temp tables to keep track of Old ID’s to the New ones, etc.

I suppose I could have also made this into proper classes, but this was just for me with no mind for making an “open source”, “commercial” or any other version of these scripts.

What these scripts do:
1. create temp tables for holding old and new id’s
2. Moves the Categories
3. Moves the Posts
4. Matches Posts to Categories
5. Moves the Comments)

What they do not do (and I suppose I could have written):
1. Move Users
2. Move attachments/images
3. Meta data

Be aware:
1. there are a few hard coded values
2. I assume you have already installed WordPress
3. I assume the table names begin with serendipity and wp for Serendipity and WordPress respectively
4. Modify the mysql.class.php script with an id that has read, write, update and create permissions.

You are welcome to use these scripts at your own risk. Be aware that I will not be held responsible for whatever you do. Nor will I be available to help. Please note that these scripts are only from Serendipity 0.7.1 to WordPress 2.2.1.

Download scripts from here

The questions actually are:

Why another IT related blog?

Why am I doing another blog?

The answers:

I’ll answer the second question first. I have 3 blogs: One on acting, one on my cats, and this one. I am not one that hopes I will have thousands of people reading my blog(s) so the information is mainly for me. But from other blogs and podcasts that I read and listen to, one of the rules for a successful blog is to keep the topic of a blog narrow.

I suppose I could do a single blog for My Life, but in spite of what I said above, I don’t people to read and find my topics interesting. Those who want to follow my acting career but have no interest in PHP or Quality Assurance can do so without having to wade through all the other junk.

For this blog and my acting blog, they are, I suppose, addendums for the rest of that site. My acting site has 5 other main pages with a dozen or so sub pages. The blog, or journal as I call it there, is simply that. An ongoing addendum of what I am doing in acting. It is a supporting document if you will. Same with this blog. This is an addendum to my IT career. A place to add additional information not appropriate to my resumes.

I believe I have answered the first question. This blog is not necessarily to pass on new information to the public, but simply an addendum to this site.

Enjoy.