Posted on by Tim Thorp:

New Website for Bruno United

I went live with a rebuilt website for Bruno United FC this weekend. Designing the site involved restructuring the content so that it was organized in fewer pages and adding more marketing content to the homepage. By moving the navigation from a column on the left to a menu on the top, we had more area to design attractive pages with big pictures of soccer players.

Technically, we switched from Drupal to WordPress. The site was built on top of the Avada theme. Since we had a staging site with a different url during the buildout, we used the search and replace tool at interconnectit.com to replace the staging url with the production url.

Posted on by Tim Thorp:

Switching my task manager: a comparison of two tools

For years now, I have been using “Remember the Milk” to manage my list of tasks. It’s a good program, but if you don’t pay the premium theme it only allows one refresh per day on mobile. As a result, it’s hard to use.

After reading a great review, I switched to todoist.

It’s been a week now and I am really liking it. I am using it as a desktop program) rather than having it in a browser tab and it is also running as an add-on to gmail and I have it installed in my phone.

There are two paradigms that emerge as I use the program:

  1. “Inbox Zero” is a concept that has been around a while. This program makes it easier to move away from the inbox as a list of things that need to get done.
  2. Making and completing tasks is a game. I get points for doing it. Some methods:
    *if an email is immediately actionable, just do it and archive it
    *if it will take some time, create a task for it in the Inbox
    *if there are several steps in completing the work, make a project for it and list out the tasks within the project

Todoist is a pay-for-premium service with some extra features for premium users. One that could be useful is task notes. For now, I am using it free and am linking to evernotes for note-taking

Posted on by Tim Thorp:

Trip to Zealand Falls

Just getting back from a great trip to the AMC Zealand Falls hut. The trip included a visit to Zea Cliff, which offered gorgeous views of the valley and a hike up Mt. Hale (4055′ elevation). Here is a panoramic shot of the view from Zea Cliff:

P1040837

We went with hopes of being amazed by the colors of the fall New England foliage. The colors were gorgeous, but will probably peak in the next week or so. What really interested us was the micro-life found in ferns and other tiny plumage.

P1080249

Posted on by Tim Thorp:

lightweight local dev setup

In an effort to change old habits, a lot of my recent posts have to do with new tools and working with different processes. The nasty old habit, in this case, is working directly in production environments without source control.

Here is a set of steps to working locally in a really lightweight manner:

  1. create directory for development and navigate to it within the command line
  2. assuming there is a repos already in existence, clone it into said directory and make a branch to develop on
  3. git clone...
git branch <name-of-branch>
git checkout <name-of-branch>
  4. install dependencies (bower install)
  5. setup pre-processing:
    codekit (just drag the folder onto codekit)
  6. startup php local webserver in folder 
    php -S localhost:8000

  7. make files, edit files, etc.

  8. commit changes to git 
    echo ".DS_Store" >> .gitignore
git add .
git commit -a -m "message"
git push --set-upstream origin <name-of-branch>
  9. thereafter, make changes and push them
  10. git add .
git commit -a -m "message"
git push origin master
Posted on by Tim Thorp:

Durability: the biggest problem with front-end dev tools

In the past decade, front end development has changed a lot. In the old days, you would hand-roll, hack, test. It was a labor-intensive coding project. Lately, a suite of tools has emerged that promise many benefits to the developer workflow including grunt, foundation, sass, pre-processors, emmet, docker, composer, bower…

The tools are fine in their own right, but the problem with them is that they aren’t really durable.  Using woodworking as an analogy, the tools last longer than the products that you build.

I was recently visiting a site for a foundation outline theme that seemed promising and found its discontinuation sidenote.

http://themes.required.ch/news/required-foundation-project-discontinued/

And I quote:

We switched to _s and a custom grid system and therefore don’t use Zurb Foundation anymore. The docs will stay available until 2015, feel free to fork the project on Github.

It’s been quite the journey and we learned a lot maintaining the required+ Foundation theme and it’s assets. We are grateful for all the people helping and using required+ Foundation as their WordPress base theme. Instead of releasing a version that we don’t use internally, we finally decided to discontinue required+ Foundation. This decision wasn’t easy and we tried to free some time for the project, but had to realise that it’s best to discontinue the project instead of letting you wait in limbo any longer.

Thanks again for the support and understanding
– Silvan & the required+ team