Building ndoherty.com (part 1)
Tuesday, July 31st, 2007As you can probably tell, I’m currently in the middle of redesigning this site. Please excuse the scaffolding. The new build is hardly groundbreaking stuff, but it’s all I need for now. Here’s my attempt to justify the decisions made while putting the whole thing together…
Why horizontal?
The landing page of ndoherty.com scrolls horizontally instead of vertically. Why? Well, why not? I tend to think sideways, so why not have my homepage scroll the same way? I achieved the effect using The Horizontal Way template. I have noticed a few inconveniences with it, however, mostly cross-browser compatability issues. For example, I liked the fact that you could move left and right using just the mouse scroll wheel, but this doesn’t appear to work in Safari 3 and Opera 9. There also seems to be some problems displaying homepage in IE7 (surprise!), but I’m sure I can work out those kinks in due time.
Wordpress theme
I’ve had some experience with Wordpress before, but I’d never delved too much into creating my own theme. Having seen seven billion different WP themes, I knew the system was flexible, but I didn’t know how easy it was to bend. Turns out it’s pretty easy if you know some CSS. A dash of PHP knowledge helps, too.
GoDaddy hosting
Feckin’ GoDaddy. I’ve had major problems with them before trying to get a Rails project running on their servers — in the end, I moved to RailsPlayground.net — so I guess I shouldn’t have bee too surprised to find a few quirks when setting up this site. The most head-scratching was the Wordpress permalinks. I like clean URL’s, and WP allows you to have them by clicking a radio button and saving. However, doing this left me with 404’s all over the shop.
The solution? Wait a while.
Seriously, that’s it. Give it an hour or so and your permalinks will magically start working. I figure Jimmy over at GoDaddy received a telegram informing him that I wanted clean URL’s, and he had to get the okay from Mr. Garland before going downstairs to press the big red “Enable clean URL’s” button on the side of my shared hosting server. I guess you get what you pay for.
Further development
As stated, there’s plenty more work to do on this site. I’m sure to run into a few more issues and remember those I’ve already forgotten. A week from now, this will more closely resemble a finished website.