Welcome Back

This place has needed a facelift for quite some time now. I had planned on creating a new theme after WordPress 3.0 was released. Well, WordPress is now at version 4.3.1, and 4.4 is probably just around the corner. I guess I’m just a little bit behind my intended timeline.

In addition to the design, the content around here has been pretty stale. Before I started working on the new design, I hadn’t blogged since November 2013. Considering I used to blog a lot, that’s pretty sad. I guess the things I used to blog about are things that I now tweet about.

About a month ago, I started working on this place again. I built a theme from scratch that uses the Foundation framework and was inspired by FoundationPress. I’ve developed a few custom themes at work over the past year or so, using other themes as a parent and building on that. But those themes all seem to have a lot of extra stuff that I never used. So I wanted to create a theme framework that cuts out all of the bloat. I used that as an excuse to start working around here again. 

Once that was done, I then had to pick out some paint and some pictures to hang. I’m okay with the carpentry, but I suck at interior design. (sorry about the sad home improvement pun)

If I’m given a PSD from one of our designers, I can slice that baby up and create a nice little theme. This time around, I don’t have a designer to turn to for the PSD. I was on my own to figure out the design and create the necessary graphics. Since I’m a code monkey and not a designer, I kept it simple. And I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

I’ve also upgraded my hosting from shared hosting to VPS hosting. So now I get to play with the server itself and not just the website. 

This place might look a lot better, it might be mobile friendly, and it might be on a faster and more reliable server, but that won’t mean a thing if I don’t post some new content.

I’ve had some down time from client projects at work, so I’ve gotten back to learning Laravel. I started learning it a little over a year ago, but then I got pulled into several WordPress projects and had to put it back on the shelf. I’ve been making some notes while figuring things out, so there will be a few posts on that to come.

I’m going to try to post more technical stuff like that as well as recipes and other random stuff. I won’t promise that I’ll post every day or even every week. But I’ll definitely post more often than I have in the past 2 years. 😀

So come back every now and again and keep an eye out for some high tech posts, some redneck posts, and some woman type posts. Just make sure you wipe your boots before you come in. 😉