Making it Lovely

Tag: blog

  • Seven Years

    Seven Years

    Our first house was ninety seven when we bought it. Our Victorian was one hundred and twenty two. My marriage and corresponding wedding ring will turn ten this year, but it’s also the year my engagement ring turns one hundred. August will be three next month, and in April, Eleanor will be five. Today, Making it Lovely is seven years old.

    Wil We Have Rainbows
    I designed that print a few years ago, and you can download it here, for free. It’s hanging in the play room on the third floor, which I haven’t shared with you yet!

    Seven years ago, I started this blog as Brandon and I moved into our first home. It feels really good to still be writing here, in a new (even older) home now. The kids, when we talked to them about moving, wanted to move to “a rainbow house.” We found it. We’re here. And I get to share everything about transforming and personalizing a home with you again, from the beginning.

    Thank You!

    Thanks for following along, day after day.

  • The New Site Design

    The New Site Design

    I’ve finally finished the redesign of Making it Lovely!

    Well, that’s not entirely true. There are a million and one little tweaks and additions that I’d still like to make, but the changes are ones that don’t impact the overall look and function, so I can add them in over the next few days/weeks.

    I do all of my own designing and coding (I used to offer web design as Smart & Lovely), and this time around I built these themes off of Standard Theme for WordPress. It’s been been great to work with. I made a lot of changes visually, and a few changes to the core PHP files, but for the most part it gave me the structure I needed. And as for the pretty? I have Moglea to thank for the custom floral illustrations in the header, and I used a couple of elements from Pugly Pixel as well (the glitter and the honeycomb). The background floral pattern is a licensed image, and the logo and all the rest were done by yours truly.

    Hold up, did I say themes in that previous paragraph? Plural? Yep. Remember the whole minimal vs. maximal debate I’d been having in regard to the new design? Jessica left a comment suggesting both with a theme switcher, and that was a genius idea. I’d forgotten that was even a possibility! So the default is the “Lovely” theme, full of pattern, but if it’s a bit much (and it may be), you could choose the “Minimal” theme instead. You can switch between the two themes at the top right, next to the social media links. Everyone wins! *

    * Well, everyone will win. Eventually. It’s a bit buggy right now (I’m working on it), but you should be able to switch between the two themes with a hard refresh.

    So what’s still to come? More organization of categories on the backend, making the design responsive (resizing to fit smaller screens for the 7% of you that need to scroll left to right a little on the site as it is now), more post layouts for different types of content, fine tuning the sidebar, perhaps adding to the footer, some changes to the social sharing options, and on and on. Good stuff, but not essential to launching. And I’ve been dying to launch, so it feels good to push on ahead, right on schedule.

    And now, onward! Onward with bigger pictures, interesting new layouts, and different post formats. Onward with a select few new contributors (soon)! Onward with more content, and more awesomeness. And thank you for your patience as I’ve devoted myself to all of this design work lately. Hopefully you’ll love the new look and everything to come as much as I do.

  • IKEA Share Space

    IKEA Share Space

    Have you seen IKEA’s new Share Space site? I always think it’s fun to see how real people take things and use them in their own homes, and this new site is dedicated to that idea.

    IKEA is a sponsor of Making it Lovely, but I’ve always had a lot of love for them. Brandon and I redid our kitchen with IKEA cabinets shortly after we moved into our house, so I’ve added a few of my photos on Share Space. The more people add, the more fun the site will be to browse and search.

    IKEA has also launched their first US blog, Design by IKEA, to go along with the site. Good news for those of us that were previously getting our IKEA fix from their Swedish blog!

  • RSS Feed Update

    RSS Feed Update

    I’ve decided to include the Filing Cabinet posts in the full RSS feed for Making it Lovely.

    If you’d like to though, you can still subscribe to the main section and the Filing Cabinet separately. I’m all about options.

  • Introducing a New Section on Making it Lovely: The Filing Cabinet

    Introducing a New Section on Making it Lovely: The Filing Cabinet

    I am so jazzed. I have a whole new section to introduce to you today! I’m calling it The Filing Cabinet, because that’s where I’ll be filing away all kinds of extra goodies for you.

    I have been working away, tweaking the design and making sure all of the technical details were taken care of. PHP and I have become good friends this week and I am happier than ever with all of the customization made possible by running WordPress. You may have noticed that the sidebar has changed. Check out the new features:

    And when you’re actually in The Filing Cabinet the sidebar will show you images from the latest three posts on the main section of Making it Lovely. It’s all very fancy.

    Here’s what the new section actually looks like. (And if it doesn’t look like this for you, let me know so that I can crawl into a corner and weep fix it. I’ve just finished coding this mere hours ago, so there may be a few bugs.)

    I mean, really. The filing cabinet opens and everything. Is that not the neatest feature? Am I a little too dorky to be as excited as I am about it? (Probably.)

    So what can you expect to find amongst the files? A little bit of everything and anything that catches my fancy. Furniture. Lighting. Fonts that set my hear aflutter. And you can quickly see what’s in each file at a glance. Here’s a peek at the ‘S’ for Shoes file.

    Head on over and check it out. There are already about ten pages of goodies to look through, and I’ll be adding more all the time. The new posts can only be seen in The Filing Cabinet, and you can subscribe separately to that feed to have new entries delivered right to your feed reader or inbox. Yay!

  • Adding Related Posts

    Adding Related Posts

    I’ve noticed a lot of people using LinkWithin to display related posts at the end of each entry. It looks great, but I had a few concerns about using it on Making it Lovely. The stats would get thrown off a bit when using the widget because all of the referring links are shown as coming from LinkWithin. I also wanted something self-hosted for more control (*ahem*), and something that could be cached to avoid slowing down the site.

    I decided to go with Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

    Hooray, it’s self-hosted! And it doesn’t throw off my referring stats! And it caches and works well in conjunction with WP Super Cache! And it’s totally customizable! It even adds related posts to your RSS feed if you so choose. Nice.

    The default display is simply an ordered list. That’s fine for the RSS feed, but I wanted a layout with thumbnail images similar to the standard LinkWithin widget. So then I started playing around with it to make it look nice…

    I quickly realized that I’d have to enable the thumbnail feature that was introduced in WordPress 2.9x. And then go through each of my posts and set the thumbnail, which I had been doing manually. OK. It’s a lot of work, but I can do that. I’m thorough (and compulsive) enough.

    Then I began working on a custom template, delving into the PHP.

    I got the thumbnails to show up! Hmm, but they were lined up vertically. So then I had to create a table-style layout, using CSS.

    The automatic placement stuck the related posts right at the end of each single post’s content, but I wanted to move it down a little. Fortunately, this was fairly easy. I just turned off the automatic placement and inserted a line of PHP into my single.php template of my theme.

    OK, pretty good. But now let’s cut to approximately three months later when it is still bothering me that the text underneath each thumbnail does not play nicely with the layout when it’s too lengthy. #$@&!. Of course it’s been so long that I don’t remember all of the work I had already done up until this point, so I have to refamiliarize myself with the CSS syntax that I set up.

    But I finally finished!

    And you know what? Maybe you would have noticed or maybe not. Maybe I spent hours upon hours, spread out over months working on something that would only make me happy, but I’m fine with that. I’m glad that I was able to really tweak the whole thing to get it exactly to my liking, even if it did take forever. I love a good coding challenge.