Art of Px

I have had my portfolio online for a while now. I made my former site just to show some of my work and contact information. Idea to enhance my portfolio to blog have been lurking in my mind for a while. Yesterday I saw an article about free WordPress themes and found one theme called Infinity designed by yichi for Smashing Magazine that really got me excited. It was time to install WordPress and let go the old portfolio.

I have been playing with WordPress earlier on my Travel blog and I remember how it was easy to install. Back then I did have some problems with including SQL database to blog but after I got all working it was really easy to use and was awesome way to report about my travels in India to people who were worried back home in Finland.

So lets get to the install project then. First I had to download the new WordPress package from wordpress.org and of course that theme I fell in love formerly from Smashing Magazine article. I was aware that I would probably want to make some modifications with theme so I also downloaded the Photoshop work files too. I was happy to find all plugins the theme needed included in the zip package.

Next I headed to my DirectAdmin at my web page provider in Serverimaailma.com and find out that making SQL databases was easy enough. I named the database and made user for it. Then I opened wp-setup file with notepad and edited those database names, users and passwords to that file. I hoped that database path “localhost” would work because before I had some troubles figuring out the right path because the default localhost was not working.

Next I opened my FTP client Cyberduck and moved my old Portfolio to a safe place and added WordPress files to my web page also including theme files and plugins.  All done. I opened my web page with wp-admin install path and hold my breath. I entered WordPress name and some information what my blog was about. After that WordPress gave me an sarcastic comment that they was sorry that it wasn’t harder to install it and after that it was successfully installed. Yay! No database problems or any problems at all. WordPress really is a quality tool for blogging!

Right. Now WordPress installed successfully I needed to add that new theme to it. WordPress admin tools seems to work like a charm and I went to Appearance and Themes to change my theme. It showed an preview image of the new theme and after clicking it I saw errors in my screen. Sight. After some reading I found out that I have to give theme some writing permissions via FTP client. New try and Tadaa! It works and looks good too.

Theme used some social networking tools like Twitter log, Flickr image show up and Delicious bookmarks. After signing up and making accounts to all of those and some modifications to php code via awesome theme editor most of those seemed to work like they were supposed to. Only Delicious script did not show up my links but I thought that it would take some time to update my Delicious rss it was using. So i commented that feature off for a while. Theme included an readme file that helped a lot with those little tweaks.

Next I got rid of those characters and trees from background image by editing the Photoshop sources I downloaded earlier. Header picture now contains only this eerie feel on it. I also edited the footer to just shop up some glow instead of papers, stuff and cup of coffee. I am not completely happy with the overall looks and it seems to still need some work but I will do that later on.  All in all the sources were quality work from Smashing magazine and all elements were in layers so adding and removing objects in pictures was really easy. That is if you happen to know how Photoshop layers work.

All was done after some tweaks to page phps. I tried to add first posts to my new blog and adding those thumbnail pictures to post seemed to work as well. I got a ready to use blog with amazing theme working less than an couple of hours. I would like to thank WordPress for making blogging on your own homepage so easy and Smashing Magazine for their theme. Needless to say I am very pleased to outcome of this little project.

I really recommend you to try WordPress. Installing it to your web page is not that hard at all. All you need to know is some basics about web pages and maybe only the “hardest” part will be those SQL databases you have to create with your server providers DirectAdmin. Other than that everything from daily use to adding more widgets and plugins is made really easy and user friendly. There is also thousands of free themes you can use with your WordPress and endless way to enhance your own themes.

Start blogging today!