Tagged: wordpress

WordPress child themes

I have been learning about WordPress’s child themes in the last few days. A child theme is a theme that extends an already-existing theme. At its most basic, a child theme consists simply of a CSS stylesheet that replaces the one supplied with the original theme.

It’s actually a fairly straightforward way of enhancing and customizing an existing theme; it’s better than hacking at the original theme’s code because, should that theme get updated, your changes would be lost.

I have a website called the Daily Funnies where I’ve used this technique. In this case, the parent theme is called Genesis, a theme framework. If you follow that link, you’ll see that the basic Genesis theme is black and white. It offers very flexible page layouts, however, and is easy to customize.

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SXSW: WordPress and Yahoo!

Vote for “WordPress and Yahoo!: a Marriage Made in Hell” at the South By Southwest Interactive Panel Picker. UPDATE: The PanelPicker is now open—thanks for voting!

I’ve used WordPress for my personal blog for a several years (I’ve also played with TypePad and various other blogging systems, but that’s beside the point). In my job at Yahoo!, our bloggers got along with various home-brew systems for a several years, so we decided to move most of our professional bloggers to WordPress.

Many people have called WordPress a serious, enterprise-class blogging application (I’m not going to cite any sources here, mainly because I don’t fully agree with it). Yahoo!, of course, has a somewhat different opinion about what is a truly world-class solution for performance, security, and integrity.

WordPress is a best-of-breed blogging platform, which is why we chose it to use at Yahoo! It does, however, have serious architectural and structural problems that had to be overcome before it could be fully accepted as part of Yahoo’s Media infrastructure.

The story of how we created a highly scalable, fully redundant, extremely secure installation of WordPress at Yahoo! is the subject of a presentation that I have proposed for the South By Southwest Interactive festival in March, 2011.

Before that presentation makes it to the conference, however, it has to be voted on by the conference attendees. If you’d like to hear about this, go to the South By Southwest PanelPicker and vote! The presentation is called ”WordPress and Yahoo!: a marriage made in hell.”

The technology of politics

I was recently asked (well, “cornered” may be a better word) to take over as the webmaster for Dan Sahagun for Congress.  Dan is an old friend of mine that I’ve known since I moved to California in 2000; he managed to win the Republican party primary for California’s 16th congressional district as a write-in candidate (the Secretary of State having disallowed enough signatures on his petition to prevent him from appearing on the ballot). In a very short time, I found myself not just the webmaster, but the “Director of Media Operations.” It’s a very high-sounding title, but it basically means I’m handling just about anything that involves media or infrastructure.

I am not a hugely political beast. I am a registered Republican, and there are times when I regret that. I find that my personal opinions tend toward the middle of the road, and both Democrats and Republicans are often too extreme for me. And, I’m sure I don’t fully agree with Dan on everything, but I respect him as a person, as a business person, and as a thoughtful politician who earnestly desires to do good. He’s running a “come from behind” campaign against a well known, well-financed, and thoroughly experienced incumbent, Zoe Lofgren, and he has a lot of work to do to win this election.

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