Chillez.com » Blog

Fully operational again

Gilles — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:29:16 +0000

Finally the problems with my site are solved! My hosting provider discovered that the problem was caused by their firewall settings. Fortunately they were able – and willing – to make the necessary configuration changes. It was an awkward situation that my own plugin was no longer working on my own website. I’m glad it is all resolved now.

However, the event painfully pointed out that I should invest some time to investigate how I can rewrite the plugin to use the API instead of the RSS feed. Maybe in the near future…

Logo doodle

Gilles — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 21:29:35 +0000

This site is lacking a decent logo but I have not yet found enough inspiration for a logo. A few minutes toying around resulted in this doodle. Nah, guess this will not be the one

To-do wishlist – Update

Gilles — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 13:29:26 +0000

As previous visitors might have noticed I switched from the 2-column dark theme to a 3-column light theme. The dark theme is still a beautiful theme but it had a kind of ‘warez-look’. This light Child Theme Byty is based on the Thematic framework. I will use this one to further develop my site.

Regarding my to-do list, a few items are resolved now that I have changed the WordPress theme:

Shorten the height of the header. Don’t know why a lot of themes (and website) use such a large header. I agree you need some space to show off your logo and flashy site/brand name but it doesn’t mean you have to spoil valuable pixels. E.g looking at a site on the smallest Macbook or any netbook with a browser which has the adress toolbar and tab-browsing enabled, only has so many pixels available for showing content…
Add second sidebar and maybe even make the width dynamic instead of fixed.
Replace the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ page indicators with real page number (already experimented with 2 plugins but they require some tweaks to fit my theme.
LifeStream plugin works nicely with auto-grouping of events but somehow it does not display the events in a group in chronological order. Weird but true. Have to look into that and try to fix it. Maybe even going to try to have the event timestamp displayed when showing details.
Add search. The build in WP search widget looks ugly in my theme.
Add About page and/or show ‘About-info’ on homepage. I tried the WP build in free-text widget but didn’t like the outcome.
And looking at a preview of this list; ad color to the bullets or something else to juice up a list.
…

To be continued.

To-do wish list

Gilles — Sun, 15 Mar 2009 22:33:28 +0000

More as a reminder to my own self rather than something to share with whomever visits this blogs . There a some things I wish to change to my website, these are (in no particular order):

Shorten the height of the header. Don’t know why a lot of themes (and website) use such a large header. I agree you need some space to show off your logo and flashy site/brand name but it doesn’t mean you have to spoil valuable pixels. E.g looking at a site on the smallest Macbook or any netbook with a browser which has the adress toolbar and tab-browsing enabled, only has so many pixels available for showing content…
Add second sidebar and maybe even make the width dynamic instead of fixed.
Replace the ‘Previous’ and ‘Next’ page indicators with real page number (already experimented with 2 plugins but they require some tweaks to fit my theme.
LifeStream plugin works nicely with auto-grouping of events but somehow it does not display the events in a group in chronological order. Weird but true. Have to look into that and try to fix it. Maybe even going to try to have the event timestamp displayed when showing details.
Add search. The build in WP search widget looks ugly in my theme.
Add About page and/or show ‘About-info’ on homepage. I tried the WP build in free-text widget but didn’t like the outcome.
And looking at a preview of this list; ad color to the bullets or something else to juice up a list.
…

Of course a site also needs some interesting content but this is of lesser importance to me. I am just playing around with WordPress and trying to build a site with some nice features.

Something you would like to see changed or added to this site? Just leave a comment with your tips or ideas, your feedback is appreciated!

Spelen met WordPress

Gilles — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 00:44:44 +0000

In oktober 2001 ooit eens besloten om een internet domein aan te vragen. Ik had het idee om zelf een website te bouwen (was toen lekker bezig met html koppen in notepad). Tja, wat voor naam moet je dan verzinnen? Met het spelen van Unreal op het kantoornetwerk koos ik meestal Sellig – mijn voornaam achterstevoren, niet echt origineel maar je moet toch wat, niet waar? Uiteindelijk werd het de dubieuze creatieve uitspatting: chillez (Gilles = Chillez). Vooral die -ez aan het eind vond ik zelf erg cool (haha, loser!!). Een .nl domein was destijds alleen mogelijk als je een heel formulierencircus met KvK nummers, etc. door wilde worstelen, dus het werd chillez.com.

Al die jaren nooit wat mee gedaan, alleen email forwarding, tot nu! Vanwege de goede ervaring met WordPress op de blog van mijn vrouw ook maar eens op dit slapend domein geinstalleerd en nu eens kijken of er iets van te maken valt. Maar eens begonnen met een ‘Theme zoeken’ – zelf maken komt misschien nog wel. Vervolgens een paar must-have plugins erbij gezocht. En dan… dan is het wel de bedoeling dat er wat op komt te staan.

Sinds een paar weken ben ik aan de Twitter dus mijn tweets kunnen ook content zijn en ziedaar de eerste posts met behulp van de plugin Twitter Tools. Ook naar LifeStream gekeken – ondersteund vele ‘social networking’ sites – maar die vergt nog wat nadere studie.

Al met al, het begin is er!