AaronBaecker.com

I finally got around to putting my new WordPress theme into action today.  No, it shouldn’t have taken 5 months to do it, but that’s about the speed I operate at when it comes to my blog.  Those (few) of you that have followed my site over the years would most-assuredly agree.

For those of you that are interested in WordPress, here’s a short synopsis of the steps I took in this process:

• Downloaded WordPress 2.5.  It was time to upgrade and WordPress 2.5 is a fantastic blogging tool.
• Purchased Coda from Panic.  I had taken advantage of the 15-day trial version of the software when I last updated the blog, and it made development a breeze (if nothing else, than for the embedded Transmit engine!).  If you’re a Mac-based web developer, there’s almost no way you should be without either Coda or TextMate.
• Mocked up a site page in XHTML and CSS until I got about 90% of the look-and-feel the way I wanted it.  Being totally unfamiliar with WordPress, I was prepared to crash and burn once I actually tried to turn the design into a theme.
• I copied the Kubrick default theme files into a new theme directory and started dissecting each file to adjust the mark-up to match my mocked-up page.  I overwrote the style.css file with my custom CSS.
• After about 2-3 hours of playing around with various elements of the site, I’m satisfied that I’ve covered enough to let the site run for a few days untouched now.  Once I get more content and comments on the site, there will undoubtedly be more changes to make.