Cloudy With a Chance of Coding

Over the past week, in spare moments here and there, I’ve been working on a WordPress project — a Christmassy theme.

I used to throw up a Christmas theme on the blog in December. For two or three years, back around 2007 and 2008, I used Brian Gardner‘s “Wonderland” theme. I enjoyed spreading some seasonal cheer that way. 🙂

In 2012, Automattic (the company behind WordPress) started releasing annual Christmas themes, beginning with Cheer. I used that one in 2012, but the themes for 2013 (Shine) and 2014 (Together) didn’t do a great deal for me, so my holiday tradition fell by the wayside.

I thought about resurrecting the tradition, such as it was, by putting Cheer back up for the month of December. It would need a few modifications under the hood, so that it would work with the modifications I made to Hitchcock.

I’m still undecided if I’m going to use it after Thanksgiving, but the project is done.

As for what I’m using currently — Hitchcock, which I like a lot — there are two more things on my to-do list that I’m still thinking about.

One of those two things I’m undecided how I want it to look. Do I want to do a series of tiles, or do I want to do a slider? I spent some time thinking about the problem yesterday, and I realized that, insofar as the PHP code is concerned, I wrote the routine I need (specifically, a “Walker”) two and a half years ago. It’s just a matter of deciding which nav menu to use (an unconventional use of the nav menu function, true, but it’s easy to maintain on the fly) and what the HTML output needs to look like.

That’s what’s happening on the coding front.

Published by Allyn

A writer, editor, journalist, sometimes coder, occasional historian, and all-around scholar, Allyn Gibson is the writer for Diamond Comic Distributors' monthly PREVIEWS catalog, used by comic book shops and throughout the comics industry, and the editor for its monthly order forms. In his over ten years in the industry, Allyn has interviewed comics creators and pop culture celebrities, covered conventions, analyzed industry revenue trends, and written copy for comics, toys, and other pop culture merchandise. Allyn is also known for his short fiction (including the Star Trek story "Make-Believe,"the Doctor Who short story "The Spindle of Necessity," and the ReDeus story "The Ginger Kid"). Allyn has been blogging regularly with WordPress since 2004.

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