AbeOlson.com

If you’re visiting abeolson.com, you may notice some changes in the scenery. I’m developing my first wordpress theme, based off a design inspiration from BenGillbanks.com. I started with Kubrick, cut a bunch out, added a bunch of my own and borrowed from else where to assemble this theme, dubbed SimpleCity. Since the main push, I’ve been tweaking here and there for the past few weeks, and by now most of the main styling is complete. There are still a few color inconsistencies, and the comments need some help, but other than that the theme is working out alright. It’s hard to get everything right when I don’t have much time or experience. Also, I’ve been developing purely in Firefox3, so I have no idea what it will look like on other browsers.
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There are three programs that I’ve found quite helpful recently, and I thought I’d share them in case they’ll help someone else.

Journler: One is a program for Mac’s called Journler. If you have a Mac I highly recommend it. You can set it up to be your todo list, your journal, or to take notes on all the projects you may be managing. It’s highly customizable, so you can pretty much set it up to be whatever system you want to use. There are also people who have configured it to work with Getting Things Done principles.

Zoho: Another is a web-based software suite called Zoho. (more…)

I recently decided to add a tumblelog to my website, and found it not to be a trivial thing to incorporate into a Wordpress site. For those who may be interested, here are some brief instructions on how I set it up on this website.

What I wanted to accomplish
I wanted to have two tabs on my website, one that has the main blog, and the other which would show my Tumblr posts. I also wanted to have two separate feeds.

Step 1: Set up your Tumblr account

Go on over to Tumblr and set up an account. Put up a couple posts for good measure so that later on you’ll be able to see if things are working right. I’m using the bookmarklet they supply in the “goodies” section to post to a Tumblr account. (more…)

I found out about Tumblr a little while ago, and decided recently to try and incorporate it into this website. Tumblr is an application that allows you to “micro-blog”, or as it has now been dubbed, tumblelog.

A tumblelog (or tlog) is a variation of a blog that favors short-form, mixed-media posts over the longer editorial posts frequently associated with blogging. Common post formats found on tumblelogs include links, photos, quotes, dialogues, and video. Unlike blogs, tumblelogs are frequently used to share the author’s creations, discoveries, or experiences while providing little or no commentary. (source: wikipedia)

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I’ve just used Wordpress to set up two websites. I had been using Wordpress for the blog portion of abeolson.com. Just recently, you may have noticed that the site has been updated (e.g. color, slightly changed layout, still doesn’t work perfectly in IE6/7). Now, all pages–the links in the top navbar–are run through Wordpress’s Pages. So, whenever I want to make changes or add pages to the site, all I need to do is login into the wordpress admin portion, and never even worry about uploading the new changes/pages.

Polymer-Specialties is another website I just finished putting up that uses Wordpress as the content management system (CMS). By using Wordpress, it’s really easy to go and update the site as changes are made without having to know anything about ftp clients, html or css. It’s great for setting up for a small business that just wants a simple website with the easy ability to go and edit anything in the future.

Both sites use modified versions of Jack’s SybmimDX Wordpress theme. One is of the standard, the other of the ‘ghost remix’. Both have been fun to modify to fit to what I was looking for.