Archive for the 'Wordpress' Category

My WordPress Blog and Finishing projects

First up I hope everyone had a great Christmas and Happy New Year or if you don’t happen to celebrate those Holidays just generally had a good break.

It’s been a year since I started my wordpress blog, I can’t believe how fast the time has gone and what an up and down year it’s been personally. I have been very happy with how the blog has worked it, it has really motivated me to finish a lot of projects that I suspect in the past I wouldn’t have finished. I still get distracted and go of track but at least I can see what I did finish.

It has been a big year for drawing and paper miniatures for me, I feel my drawing has come along way from the very first paper miniature I assembled way back in 2009 and not just from a drawing view but also colouring and layout. I only managed to finish one 3d model this year and I still find those very time consuming to design and  finish, I’m going to try and do 2-3 in 2011, we’ll see how that go’s :).

I did not post every project I did or completed on my blog some just seemed to small to worry about or I couldn’t really talk about them for longer than 1 line and a picture, so I left them out.

The grand total for completed projects this year on my blog is about 37 additional to this I had about 10 smaller things that never made it to post stage.

If anyone else is thinking of using a blog to document there projects and their completion I  recommend a wordpress blog it’s not perfect but it’ll cover you for 90% of what you want to do. My personal wishlist for additions to  wordpress would be:

  • Add wiki functionality even if it’s paid
  • Allow more different file types even if it’s paid ie block the ones you don’t want don’t block everything and allow a few. My biggest issue is with GSD files.
  • Integrate some sort of project % bar tool, other blogs have it but I had to hack my own together and it’s very ugly behind the scenes.

That’s about it for what I wish my blog could do.

I never for a  moment thought other people would visit my blog and read what I’d been doing and download the stuff I make avaliable but for those curious I’ve gone from 37 visitors in Jan 2010 to 2300 visitors in Dec 2010, oddly it wasn’t a steady increase of visitors over time it sort of jumped around June.

So to all the people now visiting my blog a big hello and I apologise for the bad spelling and punctuation, I am working on improving those :).

If your still on holiday continue to have a good one and for those of us back at work, there are only 51 weeks left of this year so time to get rolling with the projects.

I hope to have some new paper miniatrues rolled out this month although there a little different style wise to anything I’ve done previously, back to the projects for me :).

WordPress Project Bars

So I was hunting around for some project bars to provide a rough graphical representation of the completion stage of my top 4 current projects (progress meters). Unfortunately I couldn’t find a widget that was available on wordpress (did I miss it?).

I spent a fair chunk of time exercising my google-fu and stumbled upon this site:

CSS Global Progress Bar

Thinking all my problems were solved I attempted to upload the solution to a sidebar text widget…no good, seemed the text widget would only accept inline css. I spent an hour or so rewriting the above solution so that it was fully contained inline. I thought for sure it’d work this time but it would appear wordpress filters all styles from dl, dt and dd tags…Frustrating as other tags are allowed styles but apparently not those 3 or the em tag (query sent to technical support). I really wanted a solution now so I spent another hour playing around with the code replacing the above tags but trying not to destroy the look of the bars and got some working css code:

I did a few versions of the final code as I wasn’t sure what I’d use,  I then ended up needing a customized one anyway as my sidebar is a bit of a funny size;  examples below:

Stock Bar

65%

Stock Bar
<p style=”margin:0;padding:0;”>Blue Bar
<div style=”margin:0;padding:0;width:216px;height:41px;background:url(bg_bar_25.gif) no-repeat 0 0;position:relative;”>
<span style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:200px;height:25px;background:url(bar_red_25.gif) no-repeat 0 0;top:8px;left:8px;overflow:hidden;text-indent:-8000px;”>
<div style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:200px;height:25px;background:url(bg_cover_25.gif) repeat-x;top:0;left:130px”>65%</div>
</span></div></p>

Narrow Bar

50%

Narrow Bar
<p style=”margin:0;padding:0;”>Small Blue Bar
<div style=”margin:0;padding:0;width:216px;height:23px;background:url(http://somewhere/bg_bar_15_196.gif) no-repeat 0 0;position:relative;”>
<span style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:200px;height:15px;background:url(http://somewhere/bar_blue_15.gif) no-repeat 0 0;top:4px;left:8px;overflow:hidden;text-indent:-8000px;”>
<div style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:200px;height:15px;background:url(http://somewhere/bg_cover_15.gif) repeat-x;top:0;left:130px”>65%</div>
</span></div></p>

Short Stock Bar

65%

Short Stock Bar
<p style=”margin:0;padding:0;”>Blue Bar
<div style=”margin:0;padding:0;width:108px;height:41px;background:url(bg_sbar_25.gif) no-repeat 0 0;position:relative;”>
<span style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:100px;height:25px;background:url(bar_blue_25.gif) no-repeat 0 0;top:8px;left:4px;overflow:hidden;text-indent:-8000px;”>
<div style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:100px;height:25px;background:url(bg_cover_25.gif) repeat-x;top:0;left:65px”>65%</div>
</span></div>
</p>

Short Small Bar

35%

Short Small Bar
<p style=”margin:0;padding:0;”>Blue Bar
<div style=”margin:0;padding:0;width:108px;height:23px;background:url(bg_sbar_15.gif) no-repeat 0 0;position:relative;”>
<span style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:100px;height:15px;background:url(bar_blue_15.gif) no-repeat 0 0;top:4px;left:4px;overflow:hidden;text-indent:-8000px;”>
<div style=”position:absolute;display:block;width:100px;height:15px;background:url(bg_cover_15.gif) repeat-x;top:0;left:65px”>65%</div>
</span></div></p>


You can grab an example zip from here. I suspect I’ve butchered good css and html practice but it works so that’s all I really wanted but feel free to take what i’ve done and correct the code. As you can see it’s working on the side bar of my blog so I’m counting this one as a win :).


Project Status


WWII Project First Release

80%


B-tech Buildings Five

20%


Design Victorian era City

15%


Something Different

5%


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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Please Attribute to Sirrob01 with a link back to my blog