Well, this post marks the first in a series of “What I’ve done this month” posts. They might be interesting, they might not. I really can’t tell you if my life and work will be that interesting to you, you’ll have to decide for yourselves.

Freelance Work

Custom WordPress Login Pages

I think I started doing these 2 months ago, but I still want to mention them as I quite enjoy designing them and I havn’t done that much work this month as I’ve been fairly busy.

I first started doing these because a client asked if I would make some for a number of her sites. I hadn’t even come across the plugin it uses until then, but after making a few and enjoying it I decided to make one for my own blog (as you will see on my portfolio page about them). The only thing I would have liked to be able to customise apart from the background would be the form itself and log in button, I wonder if there is a way to do that…I’ll have a look later.

What I do is create two images, put them in the plugins folder, then upload and install the plugin (Binary Moon’s Custom Login) on the WordPress blog. The two images I create are one for the main body of the login background, and one for the very bottom of the login page (generally I leave this as transparent with a curved border, but sometimes it requires editing). If you would like one created then feel free to contact me about it.

Bits and Bobs

Other than the Custom WordPress Logins I haven’t really done much freelance work this month. This is mainly because I have been busy with other things (e.g. finishing work for University hand-ins). I have had time to do some work for a few regular clients, but it was all just fixing bits of code and installing scripts. To name a few things I’ve done:

1. Install WordPress – a few times
2. Fixing layout issues in XHMTL/CSS sites
3. Fixing small parts of WordPress themes

Other Things

This Blog

I’ve been meaning to fix some aspects of this blog for a good while now and only got round to doing some of it recently. I really want to make the comments on the blog pages a bit more exciting and will be working on that over the next week or two when I have the time. My main aim is to make them look a bit nicer. So far I have added gravatar images to the comments and installed a few plugins to enhance comments a little, the plugins installed are:

1. Ajax edit comments
   • After you enter a comment, this plugin allows you to edit it for a short period of time. It also gives me (as the admin) an easier way of moderating comments on the site.
2. Reply to
   • This allows you to add “@name” links (like on Twitter) to the comments, just click reply and it will add it to your comment.
3. Live comment preview
   • This lets you see a preview of what you are writing in the comment box will look like as a new comment.

I tested them a little, but if you have any problems with them either leave a comment or use the contact me page to tell me about them. Do remember that they use JavaScript (so make sure you have that turned on in your browser).

I also removed the plugin “Sociable” and replaced it with “Sexy Bookmarks” as you will see at the end of any post. The only real reason is because I think it looks nicer design wise.

University

Well,  I had a bit of a rush towards the end of coursework hand in time, but got it all done with time to spare. My dissertation proposal could have used a bit more time, mainly to find more good references and so that I could go through it again to check I was getting what I want to do across in a good way rather than me just rambling on. We’ll see what happens.

I started back at university for semester 2 now and will be starting work on my dissertation project soon enough (which I have no doubts I will write about).

Next Month

I have few aims for next month, I’m just going to take things as they come like usual.

There’s only two things that I really want to fix/do next month (or soon anyway):

1. Make the comments on this blog look better, the sidebar too if I get time.
2. Redo the WordPress layout(s) on my free WP layouts site (as they are old code that I wrote while learning – i.e. bad code. But I want to keep it in my portfolio, so recoding them seems the best option).

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• Dissertation Project Completed! (0)