CharlieHolder.com

I’ve been working on a new theme for my site for a while now and I finally finished implementing it into WordPress. Creating a theme for WordPress was a lot more difficult than I initially thought. I’ve been doing web development for a number of years now and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on a lot of development and programming concepts, but while figuring out exactly what I should be doing with the WP Codex (aka API), I definitely ran into a few roadblocks along the way.

The first roadblock came when I tried to implement the “latest post” callout on the homepage. The function that loops through all the posts only does so much by default. Any modifications to the query that retrieves all the information you want creates a huge hassle for doing anything technical like pagination.

The second issue I had was just wrapping my head around each individual page I needed to create. Each theme has specific page names in the theme folder that WordPress looks for to do certain tasks. So I had to spend a lot of time figuring out exactly what to name my files to that I could overwrite the default behaviors that are programmed in.

Other than that, I really do think everything else was pretty straight forward. But even though it seemed to be pretty easy, it was definitely tedious. There was a long checklist that I combed over many times to make sure that I had covered all the bases as far as “theme development” does.

Anyway, with that being said, I hope you like it when I make it available for download. Please let me know if you see anything that looks out of place or completely broken. I tried to do as much testing as I could with what OS and browsers I have available to me at home.

I hope that this will open many doors for me as far as development goes. That was one of the biggest reasons I did this. And with THAT being said, I am now open for business doing WordPress themes.

Adios for real now.

We’ve had this EEE PC 900A that we bought off Woot.com for a while now. I used it my last semester at Georgia Tech to help me take notes in class. It’s super light-weight and fits in my bag really easily.

Since I got a new laptop to help me to do freelance website work, the “old” EEE PC is going to be used by Amanda now.

Overall the process was pretty easy. I didn’t really know if I would be able to do it without any help, but turns out it was a lot easier than I thought.

1. I Googled for tutorials on how to upgrade the EEE PC and found this one. It helped me figure out that we may want some new parts as well as let me know that I should probably upgrade the BIOS.
2. We took a trip to Fry’s Electronics and picked up the stuff we needed pretty easily. Compatible with the EEE PC, we found a 32GB Patriot Lite SSD drive and a 2GB Kingston RAM chip.
3. Easily found the BIOS on the ASUS website. Put the .ROM file on a USB drive (correctly named as 900A.ROM), booted from the USB by pushing ALT + F2 during startup, and it automatically detected the USB drive as well as the new .ROM file. Then I rebooted the computer to make sure the new BIOS worked.
4. I took out the battery and popped off the back panel and put in the new chips with a Phillips 0 and 00. Put the battery back in and we’re almost ready to turn it back on.
5. I grabbed the latest release of Ubuntu and put that on a large USB drive so I could install it on the EEE PC. It was difficult trying to figure out how to put a .iso disk image on the USB drive, but I was able to find a nice little tool called UNetbootin. It “allows you to create bootable Live USB drives for a variety of Linux distributions from Windows or Linux, without requiring you to burn a CD.”
6. Plugged the USB fit with the lastest copy of Ubuntu into the EEE PC, made sure the power supply was connected, and turned it on.
7. Started pushing ESC (as read on this site about installing XP on the EEE PC) in order to boot from the USB drive. Some very-easy-to-understand text-based prompt came up and I selected to boot from my USB.
8. The .iso file of Ubuntu loaded onto the screen and I clicked the icon to “Install Ubuntu 9.10″ to the EEE PC. The steps to install are pretty straight forward and you just restart the computer when everything is done.

I hope some of this helps someone. If you have any questions about my process, just let me know. I wanted to take more pictures of each step showing what the screen looked like at different points in time, but I really seriously just forgot.

[UPDATE 2009-05-11: Since posting this, the Mac version of Chrome has be updated with a functional bookmark manager. At the very least, at least you can still use this article for how to find where it's storing the bookmarks. Maybe it will help you transfer them between computers or something.]

I have searched the internet high and low for how to edit bookmarks in Google Chrome for Mac. In a large number of places, the general answer that I found and that it is not supported yet, i.e. the bookmark manager for Chrome on Mac has not been activated. (Edit: If you get the new DEV channel version, it’s enabled. Thanks Justin.)

The only way to edit bookmarks is through the tedious use of the star icon to the left of the address bar. By clicking that star you can add a bookmark. If that star is filled yellow, you’re on a page you’ve already bookmarked so you can click it to edit where it’s saved or delete it altogether.

I ran into an interesting problem that I could not fix. I somehow saved a bookmark for http://google.com into my bookmarks bar. Since the address bar will never read that exact URL, Chrome doesn’t recognize me ever visiting that exact URL and thus never filling in the star so I can delete it. Make sense? http://google.com always resolves to http://www.google.com so I couldn’t delete the bookmark. There is no way to right-click the bookmark and edit it. That functionality is simply not available yet in Chrome for Mac.

The first thing I tried was to delete Chrome from my computer altogether. I reinstalled Chrome and opened it “for the first time” to find that all of my bookmarks were still there. WHAT?

[On a Mac, deleting applications is rather simple: drag the icon from the applications folder into the trash -- done. If you have a dock icon, drag that too. The great thing about a Mac is that those icons in your applications folder are actually a package -- a bundle of files -- that appears to be a single clickable file. All the files that you need to run the application are contained within this package, so to get rid of it, you just drag it to the trash.]

When I opened Chrome to see that all my bookmarks were still there, I knew that the bookmarks had to be stored in a separate file located somewhere outside of the package. (I guessed that they were stored in some kind of XML format.) I started poking around my harddrive and found the file where the bookmarks are stored.

/Users/MY_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Bookmarks

The file is called Bookmarks and there is no extension. You can open it with TextEdit.app (I used my development program called Coda). All of your bookmarks are stored here in some kind of list format (Edit: It’s JSON. Thanks Trey.) with each element containing the attributes date_added, id, name, type, and url. You also find “children” attributes that contain all the same information for folders.

[If you just want to delete all your bookmarks and start over, just delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome and restart the Chrome application.]

Now you can edit your bookmark structure by hand. Close Chrome, go to town, save the file, and reopen Chrome. BE CAREFUL. You are editing code that the browser needs to be able to parse in order to run properly. If you mess up something, stuff breaks in an unrecoverable way. You’ll have to:

1. Delete /Users/YOUR_USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome
2. Delete the Chrome.app from /Applications
3. Download and reinstall Chrome again

Hope this helps someone. Definitely helped me.

Any information you might have that could help, please let me know in the comments.

Finally got a frame and some matte. I love how “With High Honor” is the smallest font size on the entire thing.

ZOMG HAHAHAHAHAHAHA