{"id":175,"date":"2007-06-09T06:20:50","date_gmt":"2007-06-09T06:20:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/general\/learning-css-layouts-and-wordpress-the-hard-road.html"},"modified":"2007-07-20T02:18:08","modified_gmt":"2007-07-20T02:18:08","slug":"learning-css-layouts-and-wordpress-the-hard-road","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/work\/learning-css-layouts-and-wordpress-the-hard-road.html","title":{"rendered":"Learning CSS Layouts and WordPress – the Hard Road"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my desire to learn, I have bit off about as much as I can chew. In February, I wrote a quick post<\/a> explaining only briefly that I had come out from the dark ages. I was embarking on a journey to learn how to layout pages using CSS, blog using a platform other than Blogger, and build a dynamic website that meets my long term requirements. As a frame of reference, my old website, ziprz.com was built in a short period of time to get my first .com job in 2000. It was a simple design built with static tables and frames, plus a dead-nuts simple blog on Blogger.<\/p>\n

Here it is June 9, 2007 and I have learned a lot.<\/p>\n

Ambitious Ideas<\/strong>
\nFirst, I have always had this idea in my head that my website could chronicle EVERYTHING about me if I so chose. If I wanted to talk about professional things I could do that. If I wanted to talk about Life, I could do that too. But, I want to keep them separate. Do my family and friends care about the latest recruitment marketing trends? Nope. Do work colleagues care about my fishing trips and personal rantings? Doubtful. I want 2 clean feeds. I also have this obession with documenting every piece of design I have done since the dawn of time. I am both a chonic organizer, and someone who likes to collect things. Even though a proper portfolio only has your 10 best pieces, EVERY single thing that I create is some sort of learning that educates the next thing I do. When I’m doubting myself before I get the next idea it is therapeutic to look back and say “I have had good ideas in the past, surely one is to come”.<\/p>\n

Master of My Personal Domain<\/strong>
\nThe domain I chose in 2000 was largely a result of reading Peter Merholz’s blog<\/a>. Ziprz.com became the home of me because it was much shorter than my real name and sounded cool, hip and webby. Now that I look at identity management online, it seems clear shauninman<\/a>, cameronmoll<\/a>, jeffcroft<\/a>, and many others have solidified thine firstandlastname as an excellent choice for personal domains. My job has taught me a bit about SEO too. If someone were to meet me at a conference, they are likely to Google Kris Rzepkowski (although they would DEFINITELY misspell it). Fed up with Catalog.com I wanted a blog-fiendly host where I would register my new personal domain, krisrzepkowski.com<\/p>\n

Spelunking in WordPress<\/strong>
\nWith a general sense of what I wanted to accomplish, I then searched for a platform. I knew that blogging tools could be manipulated into almost anything you want to publish dynamically online. I read a few platform reviews, and ended up with WordPress. I installed it and started to play with its features; first by importing my old Blogger content, then by examining the site structure. I found with a little manipulation of the default template, I could split out the site into Work, Life, and Portfolio. But, I also got a sinking feeling that I would need to understand a few foreign languages (PHP, HXTML,and CSS) to really bend it to what I wanted<\/p>\n

I’m a Designer, Who Needs Templates?<\/strong>
\nMy blog is also a platform for professional development. While plenty of people put up a basic blog in 15 minutes, I’m a designer – I need something different. I figured it would be perceived as weak to use someone else’s template. Who respects a marketing person who uses someone else’s brand? I’m paying for that attitude this very minute. While I learn CSS for doing layout – which I have found to lack any sense of intuitiveness, the inner pages of the blog are next to impossible to read. Instead of minor tweaks to somone else’s template, I jumped right into Illustrator, did a design, and am now trying to reconstruct the default template’s CSS to accomplish it. This approach has been insanely slow and tedious.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my desire to learn, I have bit off about as much as I can chew. In February, I wrote a quick post explaining only briefly that I had come out from the dark ages. I was embarking on a journey to learn how to layout pages using CSS, blog using a platform other than […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-175","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blogging","category-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=175"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/175\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=175"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=175"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.krisrzepkowski.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=175"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}