New design

Yep, it’s finally there. A new design for the home of Mojo. After months and months of not-starting on the site, I finally decided that I would never going to build the damn thing from scratch. Lucky for me, a good friend of mine suggested I should just choose a theme. That way, I would have a great starting point. So that’s what I did.

The next mistake was that I wanted to develop my own comic management code/plugin. I felt that ComicPress or Comic Easel had too many features I didn’t need and I didn’t want to have to rely on third-party plugins like Comic Easel. So I (sneaky) downloaded Comic Easel, dove into the code of Comic Easel and started to rip out the parts I didn’t needed and copy and tweak the parts I could use. But last night – after a couple of hours copying and rewriting code – I suddenly realized how stupid this approach was. Comic Easel works and is build by someone who knows what he’s doing. So why should I invent the wheel all over again? Why not use Comic Easel and have peace with the fact that it has more features than I currently need?
So I removed all my copied code, installed Comic Easel and within 20 minutes (!) I had everything up-and-running on my local webserver.

I had to do some tweaks here and there in the theme, but this afternoon I decided I would just put the first version online. I started uploading all the new theme files, adjusting the database, run the ComicPress-to-ComicEasel migration tool and it all looked fine. Until at some point I noticed there was something missing. Somehow all my non-comic posts were gone. WTF! No idea what happened. I probably made some mistake along the way, but still have no idea where. And the worst part is… I did NOT made a backup of the database before I started to adjust everything. OMG!

But luck was on my side. I had made a database extract last night, because I wanted to have the same data locally for testing purposes. I did made a backup, by accident. PHEW! So, I removed everything, installed a fresh new copy of WordPress, imported all the data and I let the ComicPress-to-ComicEasel migration tool do its job. And finally the new site was up and running.

I’m very pleased with the minimalistic approach of the site. I like that the blog and the comic are separate pages on the site now. And, the site is also responsive. This means that if you check the site on your mobile device, it should scale properly. Yeah, nice nice. I still want to tweak the colors and styling of the site a little. I used the Fluid theme, but since I have stripped out a lot of the portfolio items, it’s pretty clean/minimalistic now. I still have a lot other additions in store for you guys. But you’ll all have to wait and see.

I would love to hear what you guys think of the new design. So, please give me feedback, because… the site is also 49% your property ^^

One thought on “New design

  1. Being a good programmer is hard 😉

    The best job you can do is choose your code battles. I really like the minimalistic approach. It is a good starting point for new things on the website.

    And on a side note – working with WordPress myself lately, I recognize the ‘problems’ with WP, or should I say demanding challenges 😛

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