Web redesign progress

Hop on over to my new website, and you’ll see what I’ve been up to.  There isn’t any real  content yet, but I’ve managed to set up the  basic framework.  On my homepage, you see the following items:

• the most recently posted unfinished work
• the most recently posted finished work
• Excerpt from my latest blog entry
• Randomly selected finished work

There’s a lot yet to be done (set up the sidebars, format things to look pretty, add real content, etc.) but the underlying code is there.  I know it doesn’t look like much, but there was a great deal of custom code required to put this together!  By default, WordPress just displays the 10 most recently completed posts on the home page.  I had to figure out how to get the most recent post from a given category to display (finished works, unfinished works, blog), install a plugin to generate a random post, and get a “cover image” for each finished/unfinished work to display.  It wasn’t easy, but I figured it out.

A plug for WordPress here: it is a wonderful platform for the artist and novice developer: highly customizable, but also EXTREMELY well-documented.  If you want to know how to use a particular function, the documentation will probably contain not only the information you need but also the code snippet that does what you wanted it to do.  It’s very clear and easy  to read, good for someone who doesn’t program PHP professionally but can understand syntax and modify code snippets.  (i.e., me!)  The documentation was one of the primary reasons I chose WordPress; with its help I’ve been able to do quite a bit of magic that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to accomplish.

Meanwhile, I have beamed on the 120/2 silk warp and am about halfway through threading.  It was pretty challenging at the beginning (I had a hard time distinguishing the threads) but, 500 threads into it, it’s starting to go quickly.  I expect to tie on and begin weaving today.