So randomly today I am please to be able to announce the launch of www.kilotangohotel.co.uk. For this site this is a relaunch and a re-purposing I guess it could be called. I’ve decided instead of buying up new domain names to add to my portfolio, I’d actually make use of the domains I have. On my development slate this past week has been kevhiggins.com and kilotangohotel.co.uk. The kevhiggins.com site is being re-purposed back to a portfolio of my previous creative work. This is a huge effort and I don’t expect to be posting progress on that for a while. While kilotangohotel.co.uk is now at a stage where it is launched, it’s not completely finished.
KiloTangoHotel – What’s it all about now? (You all ask in harmony)..
Well it’s a blog with a focus of daily or current issues. Sometimes there are issues or topics I want to talk about on a public platform that don’t fit with the ultra-personal style blog I have and use only when really needed. They also don’t really fit into the scope of a ‘project’ as is the primary focus of topics posted here at IHTCI.
So KiloTangoHotel is designed to be more of an open discussion blog where we can discuss World matters such as North Korea, new technology such as the World’s first ‘Taxi-Drone’ and other wonders that come out of CES and other tech-expo’s. Perhaps the Rift that went live for Pre-Order this week and it’s unrealistic early-adopter price point of $599! Commenting on writings from others within the tech arena and many other topics. The site has been designed with commenting and discussion in mind with integrations to Social Media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Easy registration / login integration with the two aforementioned platforms as well as WordPress.com accounts. As always there are plans to grow, but for growth you need… growth. So let’s grow.
What I have done with kilotanghotel.co.uk is to take a free theme and modify it to my liking, as is usually what I would do anyway. But this time I have gone further than I have previously and created a new css style for the theme. In doing so I have taken the decision to call this a revision and to save myself from losing any changes I have created a theme and installer for my version, exclusively for use on kilotangohotel.co.uk.
I’ve made these revisions while searching and researching software to aid a non-developer (me) develop a theme for WordPress. I am thinking of writing up my research findings in detail for another post here soon so I won’t go deeply into that now. Other than to say I have found on my travels a plugin for WordPress called ‘Yellow Pencil‘, which I have purchased and installed. Yellow Pencil is advertised as a ‘Visual Customizer for WordPress’. What it ‘does’ is to allow a user to look at the front end of a website (WordPress in this case) and to click on every aspect of what is on a page. With each aspect highlighted a selection of options appear for each element meaning you can change 50+ CSS properties per element. Using CSS to customise the look and feel of a theme is I suppose the more modern less hacktivist way of changing or editing a website or theme. It is certainly an area of web development I wish I knew better at a coding level. I can find my way around a property and through trial and error using ‘Inspector’ in Chrome for example I can find most of the time what property it is I need to change, and where it’s located in the stylesheet, but there is no way I’d know all the different property choices off the top of my head. So this kind of plugin for me is invaluable.
I’ll talk in more detail about the changes I made to my modified theme for kilotangohotel.co.uk in another post along with my findings from researching for a ‘true front end visual theme creator’. For now, please welcome kilotangohotel.co.uk to the IHTCI project family.
EDIT: Then I realised that I’d forgotten to check one important thing, functionality and that of being able to add a featured image. The theme in question must be like one of the… four themes that doesn’t have the facility and so me not knowing how to modify things in such an extent.. I’ve switched to another theme. One which includes a featured image by default, and one which I’ve modified one thing over the features of Customizer. – Much simpler. Not getting my day back though am I?!