Turnthescrew v3

Jul 2, 2008 by Dan Taylor    No Comments    Posted under: News, Technology

Welcome to the now 3rd version of TurntheScrew.  I felt that it was time for a new look, as I often do about every 6-9 months, and the move to a new host, along with the err..umm…kinda sorta database flub, it was a good time to update the look.

After hours of searching for new templates, and testing some, seeing what I could change with others I happened upon this new theme that you see here.  ‘The Unstandard‘ was coded by Derek Punsaian over at 5thirtyone.com.  This guy has some seriously sharp templates.  Go visit his site.

Another reason for visiting his site is to compair and contrast my own slight modifications.  Nothing drastic, but you know me…I can’t stand a simple cookie cutter, hey I found it, let me just slap at up and run with it process.  Of course I had to customize it.  You’ll notice right off the bat that I’ve replaced all the orange from Derek’s site with red here at TTS.  Reasoning being that while I have nothing against orange, I wanted something a bit stronger.  A bit bolder.  A primary color.  Red seemed to be the obvious choice, as it’s also a carry over from the ‘old’ TTS style template accent color.  With the help of BigBlueBottle, I also managed to get a little slicing and dicing of the css stylesheet in order to move the tabs at the top a bit closer together.  Dunno…just looks a bit better to my eye.

All in all, I’m pretty darn happy with this new look.  There are a few things that I’ve still got to take care of, but as always, TurntheScrew is a work in process and will get to them shortly (think widgets).  What are your thoughts on the new look?  Leave a comment below.

Fresh Start

Jun 17, 2008 by Dan Taylor    10 Comments    Posted under: Uncategorized

Sometimes in life you get a fresh start. Sometimes this is a welcome change, in fact, a relief. Other times, this is due to some massive mistake that would take a really…really…long time to fix. Other times, it’s just ‘unfixable’.

I’m hoping it’s more of an option 1 for me, rather than an option 2. As you know, I recently moved hosts, and had to take the site with me, and then set it up on a new server. I followed a bunch of advice forums, tutorials, and comments, and felt as though I had done everything to the letter. Crossed all my t’s, dotted all my i’s. And so it seemed that way. Everything looked fine once I had FTP access, did the Fantastico WP installation, uploaded plugins, etc. Great. And then….

Well, the and then part is where things start to get sticky. Upon trying to import my mysql database, everything got funky. I started getting a bunch o’ weird 404 errors. So, my first thought had to do with the subdomain. As you may have already read in the previous post, I’ve set up a redirect on turnthescrew.com to actually take you to blog.turnthescrew.com. So…perhaps I just need to change all the instances of turnthescrew.com to blog.turnthescrew.com in the mysql database. Did that via a handy free tool, textwrangler. All looked good. Let’s cross our fingers and upload.

Well, WP sees the mysql db as being valid, but now has a bunch of widget errors, incorrect arguments, etc….

Oye vey. Bottle is giving me a hand with this one, and we’re testing over at a super secret URL right now, but as it looks right now…ummm…I kinda f@#)ed up the database. I’m not overly stressed, as there must be a simple solution to this…something that I’m just over looking. Either way, I still have 99% of the original content, it just might be a mind bogglingly big project to copy/paste a massive amount of content, and then restructure the permalinks to match up. Right…all you non-super-nerds out there catch all of this?

In human terms: Umm…I think I made a booboo, but I think I can fix it. Either the easy way, or the annoyingly hard way…it’ll all be back soon.