It’s Alive

February 23, 2020

14 days after deciding to start a new theme and almost 10 months since the last release I’m done with an initial releasable version. I know on the front it doesn’t look like anything changed, but below the hood I did a lot of improvements. The new Stylesheet is now 4kb smaller, but not only is it slightly smaller, everything is build much more modular and a lot more using css grid.

What I did change though were the Navigation Icons. I used Fontawesome’s new Duotones icons and I also included them, the calendar and the tag icons directly as SVG, so they won’t be loaded through FontAwesome but are loaded instantly and therefor now layout shit is visible.

Another noteworthy addition is now the ability to use this website with your keyboard only. I highlightet the focused element and you can even switch between light and dark mode and between color themes all with your keyboard. There are a few issues with special elements, but I think it’s better than nothing.

This is now version 2.0.0 and there are tasks for further improvements. I will probably delete every Image wordpress generated from my uploads and generate new ones with fewer different versions.

There are also ideas for an infinite changelog scroll, related factory items and related posts on a factory single view.

But for now I relax a bit and enjoy my weekend.

Factory Feed

The rest can be seen in the Factory.

Seven is almost here

February 16, 2020

SoaPatrick, Theme, Wordpress

I had a busy coding weekend where I recreated the current theme but used everything I’ve learned in the last 12 months. There was a lot of code I could rewrite more efficiently or code which was not needed at all anymore but was just laying around.

I would have released it this weekend already, but there are some pages that need some work first. The Archive view, The Factory view and some PHP functions to run everything smoothly. I guess by the end of next week I will release it.

Another thing, I took a break today from all the coding to go out and get some fresh air and enjoy the nice warm weather. During that time I kept thinking of things to write, and with write, I mean PHP, HTML, JS or SASS. I mean I do this all week at work and then on a weekend I keep doing the same things and while I’m outside I think about it as well. Isn’t that crazy? And while I walked and thought about my WordPress Theme, I realized that I have to get to that point with making movies. Be so involved with it that I keep thinking about it every free minute.

Just some thoughts before I try to enjoy the last few minutes of the weekend not doing anything website related.

Work has been started on Seven

February 9, 2020

SoaPatrick, Theme, Wordpress

I took a long walk today through Basel and actually continuing with my New Years’ resolution from 2019. And during that walk, I thought of all the things I want to improve upon with the new version and when I arrived at home, I created a new repository, cloned my starter theme and made my first commits.

I also decided to use git-flow, might as well try it now, might be useful in the near future. I’m kinda pumped about where it all leads.

But just to clarify, the idea with version seven is to recreate this exact theme here but with a much more improved structure under the hood, there are no plans for a redesign. But I know myself, I will code a few things differently and in the end it might look different, I don’t know where the road to Seven will lead.

I’m torn between coding and filming

January 30, 2020

Filming, SoaPatrick, Wordpress

for a year now I’m working full time and I notice that time in between work and sleeping is tight and in that free time I’d like to work on things that I love. There is the passion for making movies. Now you might say that

For something that is your passion you don’t seem to spend a lot of time on it.
Everyone reading this blog

That is true, but then making movies for me is still very time consuming and like the title says, I’m torn between doing two things. Because during the last year I learned a lot about Webdesign, Online Marketing, WordPress and a lot of frontend related things. And somehow I’d love to include all that knowledge into this place here, meaning optimize the hell out of SoaPatrick.

I’d love to rewrite the whole page with a much more organized SASS structure, use CSS Grid whenever possible and use more mixins and functions and play around with SASS Maps.

Then I’d love to clean up the PHP structure because it’s a mess. Kick out stuff I don’t need and really trim the fat of the theme, make it blazing fast.

I’d love to play around with AJAX or load stuff through REST API and maybe work a bit with Vue.js. Yes, I’ve even played around with the idea of going headless (JAMstack sounds very cool) but that might be a bit much for now.

But all this would keep me from actually making short films because I cannot get better, faster and more efficient without actually doing the work. But after a long day of doing all the frontend stuff at work, I love to work some more on this place right here, put the stuff I learned to good use here as well. It all feels so easy and natural and it just flows and you see results right away.

Compare that to making movies, it’s hard to come up with ideas, find the time to film something, edit it together, record sounds effects, mix it, add color corrections and then after a million of small changes actually render it and see another small thing you’d like to fix.

But I love the filming aspect of it so much, the rest is something I need to get better at. And I know that I’m making a lot of excuses but the funny thing is that I don’t make these excuses when it comes to coding stuff.

So like I said I’m torn, and with the little time I have every evening I find it hard to do both. These words might turn out to be a bit confusing and are all over the place, but maybe it’s good to actually write them down. Maybe something productive will come out of it.

Cleaning House

January 29, 2020

SoaPatrick

I did some house cleaning for the last 2 days. Moving some subfolders I had on my server to their own place in a subdomain and cleaning up old Databases. The main domain is much cleaner now, there’s only this place here and nothing else, might also change some site speed issues? Since apparently there’s a difference between page speed and site speed. One measures the speed of a single page and the other the speed of all pages combined.

Anyway, I like the new clean smell of this place, let’s hope I can keep it up for some time and don’t start to clutter everything up again.