So, my friend (Sarah) asks me to make her a website for her guild.
.. That’s what I’ve been doing. It’s here.
I tossed a mockup of the website Sarah’s way, and she liked it- Wine and black are always an attractive colour combination. The only problem is that her guild’s colours are black and blue… So, I put together a second mockup and haven’t seen Sarah since. No reason to cease work on the site, though.
So, first, I thought that I would do the thing in XHTML and CSS, because I haven’t tried XHTML, yet. The only problem with that route is that it would require hand-coded XHTML and CSS- and while I know a bit of HTML, I’m much more used to assembling sites using Dreamweaver. .. Wait, that’s not really a problem, I enjoy coding.
But I thought to myself: If I build it in XHTML, they will have to do all site changes through *me*. Either that or learn the markup language themselves.
Clearly, this site needs some sort of easy content management system. I decided on WordPress, because.. well, I’m familiar with it, and it’s opensource, with a robust theming system.
Unfortunately, the WordPress themes look a lot like blogs and very little like Guild websites- and even less like the bright theme that I designed in the first place.
Okay, so I want to fiddle with WordPress themes. That means I need a working copy of WordPress on my own private server. Which means I need my own private server.
A few l33t hax0rz later, I’ve turned my backup, Ubuntu computer (“Virgo”, seen earlier as the box sitting right next to my good comptuer) into a LAMP server. (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP)- which is good, because now I can run WordPress off of it.
Okay, LAMP installed, WordPress installed. Followed that up with phpBB, the forum system- because that also requires a LAMP server, and I have one, so why not? Okay, so now we have WordPress and a forum.. time to get my fingers dirty with the theme.
WordPress themes are written in PHP and CSS. I had to learn a bit of both to get things done: And it took awhile. I took the “Classic” theme and changed the code a little here, and a little there.. eventually, the theme looked nothing like the way it originally did. By the time I was done, I had a much more solid knowledge of CSS – although because I did it via trial-and-error, some of the rules I could actually read about for greater knowledge.
To strip out the unwanted elements, I had to play with the PHP code- as an example, I didn’t want ‘post categories’- categories don’t belong on a guild website, just a blog. I found the code for that little bit and removed it.
After a few days of miscellaneous work, having almost completed the server/code/theme/etc.., I found myself wanting to show it to some people, possibly.
*/Confusing technical chunk/* Thanks to port forwarding (yay team router!) all incoming traffic on port 80 is automatically routed to my server- but for some reason, nobody could connect to my website from outside the home network. In fact, using Tor to scramble my IP and connect from somewhere else on the internet caused the system to choke, too. Oh my! It took me quite some time to realize that Telus blocks port 80 (as well as port 22, 23, 8080, pretty much anything that could be used as a server.) The only way around such a restriction would be to use an unblocked port- 8050.
On a side note, I wonder if Tor could be used to cheat the pants off of Google Ads? */Confusing technical chunk/*
That also explained why I couldn’t get SSH access to my Ubuntu box from anywhere but home- SSH port changed as well, to avoid future such issues.
So, having resolved all of the major problems with the site, so far, I feel it’s about time to .. uh.. find Sarah. Otherwise, who do I show it off to?
