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Cold Coding

or coding with a cold. Either way – don’t do it.

Early last week Erin got sick and spent a night throwing up. It was … unpleasant. She had a slight fever the next day and then was fine. Of course, the following day Chris went down. He tried to drag me down with him, but I managed to stay out of the range of “deathly-ill, can’t get out of bed, must sleep more” and just hung out in the “Land of Feeling Like Crap and Fighting a Migraine” all weekend. I don’t recommend that place, the service sucks and the towels are really scratchy.

Anyways, the weekend was a slug-fest with Chris and I just lying around while the whirling dervish that we call Erin made a huge mess all around us. I basically spent 3 days just hanging out in my chair with the laptop keeping me warm. And since I had a bit of a break from Sweet Blog design work, I decided to finish up the work on my own design portfolio site and the photo-blog I created last Dec.

And apparently I was a bit sicker than I thought, because things were much more difficult than they should have been. I spent Friday trying – unsuccessfully I might add – to figure out how to add links to a WordPress theme. Links! What theme doesn’t allow links?! Could not get that stupid theme to work the way I wanted! So I moved on to other themes. That I couldn’t seem to get to work right either. weird. Of course I woke up Saturday morning and had a huge “DUH!” moment, climbed under the warmth of the laptop and viola! Links.

I moved on to the photo-blog. Now I thought this one was ready to go a week or so ago. I had a theme that I had customized to my liking, and had already spent quite some time hacking the files to add a navigation menu. What kind of theme doesn’t have a nav menu?! But like I said, I had added one and everything looked good. Then I tried to add a post with some text, not just a photo, and that’s when things got ugly. The formatting was all effed up. And this is where I came in on Saturday. Well, I can fix this. No I can’t. After much flailing around in the files, I decided to re-install the theme. Without making a copy first! oh what a rookie mistake. Lost everything. It wasn’t hard to recreate the styling changes, but the nav bar… ugh. After working on it for more endless hours, I still wasn’t happy with the formatting and decided to go another route. I would use the Thesis theme and design it to look like the photo-blog I originally had. Brilliant. And by this time it was Sunday and my head was much clearer. This was working. I even learned how to add a 4 column widget-ready footer to Thesis. Bitchin’.

and then when I was almost finished, just adding a few more little css tweaks… ::POOF:: all my custom code was deleted! everything but the line I had just added… gone. No backup. I took a couple deep breaths and started again. Again. And let me tell you, by this time I had that code dialed. I started from the top of the page and moved down div by div, copying and saving every few steps. And I was done in no time. And let me tell you – that is some lean, clean, code baby!

Check it out – Slamdance Photography.

wow. That kinda went on for awhile eh? Guess I’ll save those deranged princesses for next time. Something to look forward to.

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