On a usual Saturday, there’s an ongoing amazing talks happening and since Europe is something that I could not afford in many years to come or perpetually, internet saves my day as usual as I  live streaming WordCamp Europe 2015.

In the recent real estate project, I got to finally play with Genesis Framework and I can’t deny the newly embraced fact that it’s dang “sweet”. I always wanted to try out this framework ever since but clients are requesting to build their websites with other frameworks. So I always hit it in that direction. This time, I happened to suggest this tool to a client and had the chance to give direction on how to build the website that meets their business goals, timeframe and budget. The first time I felt like an engineer and manager in that process.

Well, I couldn’t get enough of the overwhelming hooks and filters around this framework. It’s like a bed of roses for child theme and some plugin developers. The lego of the WordPress frameworks world as it can be taken out part by part without even touching the core. The thought of it before that this might be another “everything but the kitchen sink” has been ruled out. The fat is there but it’s the good amount of fat that makes your website healthy.

I can see now why everyone is talking about it. I don’t even need to elaborate that as the summary of it’s superpower has been laid out here. There’s a huge number of developers that are into it as well becoming access to solutions to a probability that you may encounter issues even easier. So far the experience was superb but I can’t wait for the unimaginable hurdles that I may encounter along the way of using this sweet little thing.

Maximizing the full capacity of Jetpack, I decided to enable Photon to boost serving of images in my blog from WordPress.com end. It’s worth noting that WordPress.com rank very well in terms of DNS performance.

Along the way of discovering how to effectively use this module to match with the design specification of my blog, I have discovered few things to be mindful of.

Caching

Images are cached like forever. If you decided to update the image, renaming would be the solution.

Shrinking

If you experience shrinking or if it’s not serving the dimension you set, consider checking your theme functions.php for something like this code:

if ( ! isset( $content_width ) )
    $content_width = 640; /* pixels */

Add the code if there’s nothing similar to that in the file yet. Change the $content_width to the maximum width of an image you’re serving up. Photon can perfectly handle resizing of image to lower resolution but it will not upscale an image in most circumstances.

Retina

You will love this module even more for it’s capability to support retina devices out of the box!

I recently got a downtime in several of my projects and so I took the chance to work on that one thing that I’ve been meaning to get done – personal website redesign. This is the second redesign of drebbits.com and I decided to come up with a look and feel that could represent my work and my personality somehow. I got fascinated with the idea of ‘Less is More’ direction as I am starting to realize about the massive noise we get everyday and how much our surrounding gets busier as the day progresses. This approach helped me weigh down what’s important to share and what are those that were deemed no value.

[Mac setup photo]

The redesign is straight forward. Everything is visible on the surface beginning from Works – the homepage as I’d like to emphasize that this is primarily a portfolio site, up to the Contact. I get to easily build this with Underscore, Sass, Grunt and flavored with Jetpack magic.

This is not just another redesign. It is so special to me as I finally have the guts to be a grown up and embark on an adventure that has something to do with setting up a server. Never done that before as that thing is scary and costly. But the fact that I made a career out of making websites, it is rightful to bring investment on the table and give myself the dignity as someone who knows what and where he creates his works. Luckily SSD-based cloud hosting is ubiquitous and each of them has advantages on their own. Primarily because of their ‘built for developers’ headline and quite a number of followers, I signed up myself with Digital Ocean. Surprisingly, they do have affordable packages for the, indeed, developers and are flexible if you need to scale up later on.

The ride on setting up a server (from scratch!) was crazy so far but I never expected it to be easy either. Digital Ocean has good documentation and community that helped me along the way. I will find time to write a follow up journal on this exciting discovery.

One last important matter though. With this milestone. I’d like to remind myself to always be thankful to my incredible aunt for being a huge influenced on me. She introduced to me the world of online publishing and ultimately end up with WordPress. She’s my savior that gave shelter to my online version for 5 years and patiently guided me in getting out there. Props to her with every bit of my heart!

I happened to work on a site that needs retrieving of SoundCloud playlists for a simple podcast site. I’ve taken a look in the wild if there are already plugins that could do the job since the client has given me limited amount of time. There are indeed a bunch of them but almost all of them are lacking or exaggerating the simple yet functional tool that I’m looking for.

Since there are available SoundCloud API references and with the use of Advanced Custom Fields, I went ahead and decided to grab this chance to play with SoundCloud’s API while keeping up with the deadline. Little did I know during the time that I develop it as part of the theme function, the idea that it could be pulled out as an independent plugin immersed.

After a couple of months of play and raping WordPress codex and SoundCloud API, I can finally submit ACF SoundCloud playlist in WordPress.org.

SoundCloud Playlists plugin is an Advanced Custom Field add-on that simply adds a field type to let you browse your SoundCloud playlists and add to post, options or widget. This has an option to return the list of tracks in an unordered lists or simply get the array for you to play around with the result. I have added it a little feature to show a player utilizing the SoundCloud Widget when clicking a track in the the list of tracks. To make the most out being an author of this plugin, I went ahead and designed a banner for the plugin page.

Developing it as a plugin was pretty much challenging and it truly gave me a wider understanding about WordPress and Javascript. That ‘Ah’ moments that make you wanna go back to a situation before where you can apply that exact logic/solution that you just came up with.

I hope there would be people out there that could try this mini plugin and see if it solves part of their problem/project.