So, this morning we realized that every link we clicked on The Foodies’ Kitchen it will display the homepage content, no matter what post it was. After running around in circles a few times, I decided to talk to the Tech Support from our host Buehost and a very cool guy named Mark, gave me this tip:

Under Settings>Permalink Settings change the settings from what you have them (we had Month and name selected) back to Default and Save the settings. Then change it back to what you had it and voilá! Links work fine now!

This week, in between projects I managed to squeeze in the updated look for The Foodies’ Kitchen for the holiday season.  I wanted to add a little bit of the White Christmas feeling to it. I hope you enjoy it using it as much as I did designing it!

Hello all! It’s been a while since I posted something, but I’ve been a busy bee. For Helga and I, October is the kick off of the holiday seasons… We decided we wanted to modify our Foodies site to look more like Halloween!

We wanted to incorporate Halloween treats: skulls, bats, witches.. the works. I did the theme a bit darker and with oranges, greens, bats and an owl. It all took me about 2 afternoons and a few cups of coffee… I loved it!

This theme will be up all of October, then it’s a few weeks until Holiday season… So expect another theme change for December!

Jake is getting back into Freelancing business to (hopefully soon) do that full time. We upgraded all his services… And when he said that Prepressology needed a new look… I jumped into it! I fired up MAMP and started working locally.

The first thing I did when approaching this project was to see his (and his business needs), bringing the blog up to the new social media standards. Working together was key. I wanted to give it a prepress look, and took the idea from the menu bar on the color blocks. Here was my first suggestion for one of the accent dividers in between posts:

After I showed that to Jake on the preview for the site, he suggested I do it on CMYK order:

Looked better, but still something was off.  We decided to use the color registration marks with 80%-100%-20% opacity for each color, and we got our winning combination! Looks so much smoother and well thought of.

After that, we wanted to make a custom Gravatar for those who don’t have one set up for themselves. We’re both fans an app called PressCheck, and they have some out of registration marks on the splash screen. We were inspired about that and put together the avatar for the site.

My next step was to download the Database locally so I could check up all the posts, links and content on the new template. It was crazy I tell you. Jake has been blogging since August 2005, and there was something funky with the DB. It was 86.0 MB- just the wp_coments was up to 64MB. I seeked out help from the wiseman (a.k.a Nico Pin from Snowy Day Design) and he suggested export and download everything on the data base but the comments and then a second round with just the comments. Finally it worked that way and I got to test it locally.

Then time of truth: Jake still was using WP2.1. With Jake, we decided to uninstall everything and start from scratch. I imported the clean and fresh DB (the problem was on how spam was handled), installed WP, Plugins and the theme. Then… The final result:

Home

Blog Post

I added the RT button, Facebook likes for each post, as well as links to his Twitter, Facebook and Flickr Pages. We still need to fix some little things here and there, but overall the look for the site is pretty much it. Over the next few weeks, we’ll add a portfolio section to the site to showcase all his work.

I hope you like Prepressology‘s new look, I had a blast working on the site!

Always backup! Just noticed a few things that didn’t add up here (backstage that is) so here I am making backup… don’t want to loose this! So, my advice of the day for all of you… Backup!

Well, after a week of coding I’m proud to introduce the new extremely personalized coded from scratch look of Design Backslash! I’m mostly a print designer, so coding this from scratch was definetely a challenge! Thanks to @curtismchale, @danielerossi, @imnico, @joeyyax, @alexanderrehm, @robertbasic, @DominickEvans, @Tastelikecrazy, @the_gman and @zakmo for the help, cheering, kuddos and suggestions while developing

Hopefully, this will not be my only developed from scratch theme! See you kids later!

Here I am, trying to win a fight with CSS and I’m almost there! Here’s preview #4  (and last one) before uploading the theme! I still have a few tweaks to do but I’m so happy with the outcome! It’s my first ever developed from scratch theme so yay!

Ok, so here’s an updated look at what I’m working at… Since it’s from scratch it’s taking shape slowly.

So here I am, coding my saturday away. And very excited to do so, I’m coding the new version of Design. Since I’m starting from scratch, this is what I have so far:

I posted a tweet this morning about doing a WordPress upgrade to this blog, and @StephenTiano asked me if I could share the steps I took. So, here I am sharing that same email I sent Stephen:

Ok, so here are my steps when upgrading to WordPress:

1. Backup the current live version of the wordpress installation you’re currently using. This is very important- in case something goes wrong, so you can always upload the previous version again. 
2. Download the latest version of WordPress (http://wordpress.org/download/), for now it’s 2.7, and un-zip the contents on your desktop. 
3. Find inside your newly created backup your wp-config.php file. Open the file and copy the following info from your existing file:
   define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘DB_NAME‘);    // The name of the database
   define(‘DB_USER’, ‘DB_ADMIN‘);     // Your MySQL username
   define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘DB_PASSWORD‘); // …and password
   define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘DB_HOST‘);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
    
4. Find inside your new WordPress version un-zipped folder on the desktop the wp-config-sample.php file and rename it wp-config.php. Open the file and replace the info you copied on the previous step.
   define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘DB_NAME‘);    // The name of the database
   define(‘DB_USER’, ‘DB_ADMIN‘);     // Your MySQL username
   define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘DB_PASSWORD‘); // …and password
   define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘DB_HOST‘);    // 99% chance you won’t need to change this value
    
5. Find inside your backup your wp-contents folder. Open the folder and copy the contents of the folder (except the index file) to the same folder inside the new WordPress installation folder on your desktop. 
6. Go to your WordPress site, log in as admin and deactivate all plugins.  When upgrading it’s better to have the plugins turned off. 
7. Ok, so now with Fetch, Transmit or your favorite FTP uploader, log into the site and – I’ve read this several times- erase the current WP install. Then upload the new one.  
8. After a while and you uploaded all, go to

   http://www.yoursiteaddresshere.com/wp-admin/upgrade.php

   Note: It can also be (depending on how you installed it)

   http://www.yoursiteaddresshere.com/wordpress/wp-admin/upgrade.php 

9. You’ll  get a window telling you that the DataBase needs to be upgraded. Click yes and you’re all done!

 Hope this helps!