Log Cabin 2.0

After a bit of a hiatus, I have put back in action Log Cabin.  I will hopefully finish it for this upcoming Addy awards.  If you are reading this having no clue what I'm talking about, I started a project earlier this year called Log Cabin.  It is a web project of mine where Web designers can come hang out in an outdoorsy atmosphere read articles, check out tutorials in "The Woods", and talk amongst each other in the forum I created, called "Camp Fire". I also threw in a merch section called "Bear Necessities".  When I am finished with this project it will be fully functional on any device making it a fully responsive site.  It has been quite a journey and can't wait to start filling up the site with content.  Can't quite remember the deadline for the Addy's but am starting to feel the heat.  I have probably spent the last two weeks hitting the functionality of the site pretty hard and have finally come to the UX aspect as I can now step back, make it mobile, and think about more aesthetics.  Also got a pretty nifty domain name I'm pretty excited about.  I don't want to give too much away but here are some updated pics below.

Great Web design Resources 2012

I've been neck deep in web design since 2010 and continue to dig deeper everyday.  Here are a list of Web design resources I find either enjoyable or something I reference everyday.

CSS-Tricks: (Chris Coyier)
www.css-tricks.com

CSS-Tricks with Chris Coyier

If you are into designing for web i.e. CSS HTML Javascript and don't know where to start.  Make this a bookmark and check back daily.  Even if you don't find his style worthy he has opened up so many doors to other web developers/ designers, authors, etc.  That it is really worth a minute of your time to do some searching through this site.  This site alone got me to learn HTML, CSS, and start into Javascript not only creating sites but understanding the RIGHT way of managing sites from the ground up.  He has a new series right now called  "The Lodge" where you can go step by step with him on redesigning a site from scratch to Wordpress, where I am now making all my sites 100% responsive do to the 12 dollar one month subscription.

CodePen (Chris Coyier, Tim Sabat and Alex Vazquez)
www.codepen.io

CodePen with Chris Coyier Tim Sabat and Alex Vazquez

This is a great place to "sketch" out some css/javascript/html5 new technologies on the fly.  You don't have to get a server started and create html pages to get going.  This site is also great to reference if you want something flashy on your site but don't know where to start.

Shop Talk Show (Chris Coyier, Dave Rupert) 
You probably know where my main influence is from by now...
www.shoptalkshow.com

Talk Shop Show with Chris Coyier Dave Rupert and other special guests

If you sit in an office/apartment/home all day and don't get much interaction with designers/web dev dudes and chickas, but still fill like your part of a community this podcast is great to hear Chris and Dave along with other special guests answer questions and concerns about the web today. It's great to be able to connect and relate with leaders in the industry and you'll soon find out that most of us out there are all the same.  Most web peeps don't have huge egos or live in mansions, we all love to create things we love and love to teach others how to pursue that passion.

Hoefler and Frere-Jones
www.typography.com

Great Typography

If you are as serious about fonts as these guys and don't have a problem spending some money for some great typography this is the place to go.  I've been in college and realize spending money on anything other than food and gas is about all you got the budget for, but if you do have some moolah hanging around check it out, you won't be disappointed.  Plus how awesome is it that they have (typogrpahy.com) <-- legit enough.

Subtle Patterns
www.subtlepatterns.com

Great Textures with a great UI website 

I reference this...Everyday. This is a one stop shop for Patterns for your website.  They come as .png or .pat for Photoshop.  I am more of a design in the browser guy so I will wire frame my site in what ever I want and build the site in my text editor and just place the .png in my image folder and just add it as I feel, but the .pat files can be downloaded in its entirety at Github. (There's a link on the site) and you can have the full collection to date sitting in Photoshop for you to mess with.  Check back regularly as more are updated everyday.

Lost Type
www.losttype.com

Great Pay what you want fonts

Great fonts for what ever you want to pay for them.  If you just want to mess with them and see if the fonts work with your ideas feel free to download it for free.  Not a lot of fonts to choose from but they are hand crafted and used a lot through the design industry.

Smashing Magazine
(Great reference for great authors and articles)

Smashing Magazine Great for articles and news in web

www.smashingmagazine.com
For me this is the first thing I got a hold of as a web designer, This is a great place to find the web community, everybody that is worthy of anything is mentioned on this site,  I actually got in contact to a local design firm due to Smashing Magazine since they posted a contact form that the company designed.  Who knows if you come up with something clever or worth mentioning it could very well be mentioned on this site.

Treehouse (Tutorials and Quizzes)
www.teamtreehouse.com

Tree house is great for Tutorials if you are learning something and don't know where to start

I am pretty sure I have followed this site from the beginning before it was called Treehouse but nonetheless I have watched this site grow into a fascinating site that covers pretty much anything from opening a text editor to PHP, Ruby, and other server side languages.  If I'm not mistaken students of universities get a membership for 9 bucks.  Great value.  Normal is something like 25 bucks so start digging in if you can.

CodeSchool (Tutorials and Quizzes)
www.codeschool.com

Great for a more advanced approach at learning more difficult concepts

This is a very intriguing tutorial site.  Much more concentrated that Treehouse as it digs more into a technical background of CSS Jquery Ruby and server side languages but they have a way of making what could be very dry information very informative.  The last one I got my hands on was something like "Rails for Zombies" so you could only imagine the analogies accompanying the tutorial.  Great site 25 bucks a month.

Creating your own theme in Wordpress

All of this can be found at the wordpress codex but if looking through that seems to intimidate you, then here is the "spark notes" version of the things you need to get your Child theme started.  But first... you may ask, "What is a child theme?" its basically building a theme that is piggy backed on another so that it may be easier to code, since you aren't coding from scratch.  If you find a theme that is almost perfect but you only need to rearrange some things then this allows for a good foundation so that you don't get half way through it all and realize the site is failing left and right.  With that said here are the 2 thing you need to create a theme.

a Folder that you will upload to the server under your THEMES folder within your wordpress install.
a CSS file with this information at the top.

/*

Theme Name:     Twenty Eleven Child  <--this can be what ever you want to call it.
Theme URI:      http://example.com/  <-- your website preferably
Description:    Child theme for the Twenty Eleven theme <--again what ever you want
Author:         Your name here  <--Give yourself some credit!
Author URI:     http://example.com/about/  <-- credit credit credit


Template:       twentyeleven <--REALLY IMPORTANT spell this right it has to be the exact       name of the theme you are piggy backing
Version:        0.1.0  <--if you are making the theme for others to use it allows them to see how many updates you have given the theme.
*/

After that the theme will show up when you go to the wordpress  admin.  If you want you can upload a screenshot of the theme but if you don't have a design layout yet then you can leave it blank.  The screenshot is located in the theme folder you created as screenshot.png.  It will pull this image and place it into the box where you can see your theme before you activate it.

You can either place this piece of code to help keep what you want of the styling from the mother theme or not include it to start from scratch (as far as CSS)

@import url("../twentyeleven/style.css");

if you are not using twentyeleven as a parent theme just replace with the correct spelling of the theme you are using and all will be good.

This piece of code pulls in all the css from the parent theme and allows you to write over the css you want.

Other files can also be added to help customize your theme even more.

header.php
footer.php
index.php

These are all modules that can be customized once and spread through your site without having to write out the code a million times.  Change something in the header and it gets applied to any page with
<?php get_header?> attached to it.  Pretty nice.

Like I said everything you need to know about wordpress is at codex.wordpress.org but thought this might help for a quick reference as well.

Log Cabin Senior Project

Log Cabin has been coming along quite well... I've created a t-shirt design, a website incorporating a social media site within LogCabin called "CampFire" where all Log Cabin's community can come together create forums, and talk amongst each other creating connections and "talking shop" about either tutorials the site provides or what is happening in design/web at the time.  It's been fun and wish I could put every second of my day into it, but with life, school, and work, Log Cabin ends up getting about 40 percent of my time.  Not bad but I see where extra time is needed.  All good though I really am liking the look and feel of it.  This is where I am with "2 months" aka 50 hours into the machine.  Probably have another 30 hours to go.  In the real world that is a mere 2 week project :) haha

Here it is pretty rough still but will update when I finish.  Enjoy my little hackers ;)

rough T-shirt Design

Home Page

Contact ...DUH ha

Video/tutorial Aspect of site...Description and real videos will be added and categorized later

Register page for Camp Fire

Generic Text template for things like About page.

What you see when you're logged into Log Cabin's Camp Fire :)

There. Its live but not near ready to go.  

COMING THIS MAY TO A VIRTUAL TREE NEAR YOU.

Wordpress CSS interface

I just lost 2 days of work because I thought it was a brilliant idea to just use the CSS interface on wordpress instead of updating my original .css file.  So when I updated my .css by accident it replaced the server based css with the original I had uploaded that didn't have any of my edits on it because I thought it would be faster to edit the CSS in the interface rather than edit the local version and repost it to the server.  NOOB! Lesson learned but Nothing feels worse than sitting on this couch for the past day and a half putting a site up to have it ripped down.  YAY! It was weird too because I was just working on the project hit reload and wordpress came up with 'oops there's no .css file on the server' I was like '?' and went to check it out...saw that it was on there I reloaded the page and it continued to say that.  ..wierd whatev'

...

CHILD THEMES, CHILD THEMES, CHILD THEMES! Why have I never heard of this...I'll explain Later. YES!