On my machine, git is installed in /usr/local/git/

In terminal, I found that running: echo $PATH returned:

/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin

This didn’t look right.  After some reading, it realized I needed to make some changes to my profile to update the PATH for git.  To do this, I made sure I was in my root directory:

cd ~/

Then I created my profile since it didn’t seem to be there:

touch .bash_profile

Then I opened it using text edit:

open -e .bash_profile

In the file I added the following line:

export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin

I then restarted Terminal and once I found my development directory and ran a git status, all was well.

When you change a page slug, it obviously affects your URL.  Your old page used to be here:

http://www.yourdomain.com/foo

…and your new page is here:

http://www.yourdomain.com/bar

However, if you were to actually type your old address into your browser, you’re going to get a 404 Page Not Found Error. This matters because there are probably all sorts of references out there (in google’s search results, in your own website, on other websites, etc.) to http://www.yourdomain.com/foo, and you don’t want anyone who clicks on one of those links to get an error message.  You want them to go to your new URL: http://www.yourdomain.com/bar.

To do this, you’ll need access to the root folder of your WordPress install.  Make sure that whatever application you’re using can view hidden files, and look for the “.htaccess” file. Hopefully WordPress will have already automatically created one for you, but if not go ahead and create one.  Here’s an example of what the WordPress .htaccess file might look like:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
</IfModule>
# END WordPress

Leave this bit of code there, and let’s go ahead do a Permanent 301 Redirect from your old page to your new page.  To do this, in our example, simply add the following line of code:

Redirect 301 /foo http://www.yourdomain.com/bar/

Now, if you save the file and then try to go to the “/foo” page, your browser should redirect your automatically to the “/bar” page.  When search engines crawl your site, they’ll update their records with this information as well.

Cheers!

The Gastronautsf.com website was designed by Adam Cahoon and launched in the fall of 2010.  Built for a good friend of ours Nate Keller and his business partner Mirit Cohen, it’s a wordpress theme that allows them to publish menus, update content at will,  and receive catering requests.

Soon it will allow Nate and Mirit to publish private mini-blogs for each of their clients.  It was a fun project and continues to be. Check them out if you need a caterer!

I’m very happy to announce that a new version of the Heard Mentallity theme has been launched!

Coded from the ground up, Version 2 features much more flexibility in terms of integration into WordPress. 

The theme is lighter, faster, and has a much smoother user experience than did version 1.  Design-wise, it stays in the same ‘messages on a cork board’ style, but includes numerous improvements to the overall aesthetics, and even takes advantage of a little bit of CSS3.  Version 2 was built with growth in mind, and I’m excited to see the theme’s flexibility shine as new authors join the ranks Heard Mentallity.

The first version of Heard Mentallity was my very first WordPress theme, and as such, it wasn’t quite built in way themes should be.  It didn’t take advantage of a number of default WordPress functions, and as such many of the http references were absolute and hard coded.  Other mistakes were made as well, but instead of going into too much detail, let’s just say that this new version allows the site owner to update nearly every piece of content on the site and is built the way themes were meant to be built.

Some of the new features are:

1. Flexible Navigation: the horizontal navigation is comprised of pages, and authors.  When the site owner wants to add a page or add another author, those pages and authors will show up in the navigation without any modification to the theme files.
2. Blog header and and tag line are now configurable by the site owner, rather than being unchangeable images.
3. Author pages will pull editable information about that author and keep it stuck to the top of each page.
4. Gravitars have been implemented, so if you have one, it will show up in the comments section!
5. Facebook share button has been added to posts to easily share music with friends.
6. The songs listed in the sidebar from Hype Machine are now pulled from an RSS feed and link directly to the song on Hype Machine.  The first version utilized a generated image and simply linked to the site owner’s page.
7. Caching has been implemented via the Wordress plugin WP Super Cache, which speeds up load times dramatically.

Creating the theme was a lot of fun, and I learned a lot! There are a lot of things that I’ll be improving in future themes, but I’m really happy with the way this one came out.  I’d be happy to hear about any suggestions you may have, so feel free to share.

Cheers!

When David Hoffman requested a web site for his portfolio site, he also requested a site for his current project: Persephone, a Musical Allegory.  Because this needed to completed in time for the musical’s debut, we both sat down one weekend and pounded it out.

The layout of the site is a bit unconventional, and this is partly because we didn’t have a lot of time to dedicate to design.  It’s also partly because of some specific desires on the part of the client. However, for a weekender website, I think it’s not bad at all!

Features:

1. Integration with CushyCMS, a very simple system that allows the client to update most sections of the site.
2. Utilization of the Yahoo! Media Player, which scrapes the page for audio files and plays them in a  media player.  Pause / Play buttons are automatically inserted in front of audio links for direct interactions with the links themselves, and all audio files are also placed in a play list that allows continuous play of all audio on the page.

This site is pretty straight forward, but it seems to do exactly what it needs to do.  Furthermore,  it was fun to see what could be done in a single weekend.  Hope you like it.

Cheers!

David Hoffman is an artist and musician who needed a website to show off his work.  For this project I teamed up with Adam Cahoon for the design.

It looked as though it had originally been coded through the Satan spawn that is “covert word doument to web page.” I exagerate, but not by much: the site was non-functional when I found it.

I decided to recode the site from the ground up, while still maintaining the original design. The client expressed interest in being able to update the site on his own, but because wordpress would have been overkill (and because I wasn’t yet fully comfortable with creating themes), I decided to use Cushy CMS. This worked perfectly for the client and the site, and I’m happy to say that what was once disfunctional and broken is now flexible and uses modern code.

Adam Art Bio was the first real opportunity I had to create a legitimate website for a friend of mine.

Adam needed a website to showcase his paintings, and well, I needed some practice creating sites (looking back, did I ever!).  So we teamed up and using Adam’s design, my first website was born.

It’s a pretty simple site, and perhaps not exactly coded well, but it did give me practice with HTML and CSS.  It was also my first time using a javascript plugin (lightbox), so it was a great learning experience.

I had created a few sites locally just to learn, but this was the first time I actually launched a site to the web.  As a first website, it’s not great, but it’s not bad either!  At the very least, I hope it helps people enjoy Adam’s artwork.  In the future, I hope to give it a feature upgrade so Adam can add more paintings on his own and perhaps add other content.  Until then, I hope you enjoy!

More to come, Cheers.