News
Back in May of last year, I had begun working on bringing Gadget Nerd back to it’s former glory days of being a busy gadget website. Alas, some family commitments came up and Gadget Nerd got swept to one side (again).
Now that it’s 2012, I’m hoping that I can put much more effort and time into this website. I really do hope that I can build it back up again.
So, a new year and a new design. The new design is a responsive layout that will hopefully adapt to fit the screen you’re reading the blog on. I’m using a modified version of constellation. Using this pre-built theme allows me more time to get down to the business of actually writing about gadgets rahter than tinkering behind the scenes on a custom theme, as was originally planned.
More and more people are using mobile browsers these days, so it makes sense to have a theme that works across all platforms.
Hopefully, this will be the last major change for the website and I can write actual articles that people want to actually read.
Gadget Nerd started re-posting a few days ago and it dawned on me that I hadn’t bothered to setup a mobile version of the site. I pondered over how to do this for some time, should I create an m.gadget-nerd.co.uk site, use a plugin such as WPtouch, or go about creating a new stylesheet and using some PHP/HTML/JavaScript magic.
The path I decided to go with was the last one, create a new stylesheet and use some PHP/HTML/JavaScript magic. I chose this method over the others for a few reasons.
Creating a separate mobile site would have been a pain in the backside, so that option went out of the window pretty quickly. I would have still had to make a mobile stylesheet for it anyhow. Using a plugin would have been the easy option, but I wouldn’t have learned anything from doing it that way.
So, soon the website will have it’s very own mobile WordPress Stylesheet. I’ll keep you all posted, and will probably have a post for when it goes live… Then I’ll tackle the IE version.
Yesterday saw Gadget Nerd‘s first post in a long while. A kind of introduction if you will to the re-boot of the site.
Today I’ll explain a bit more about what’s going on with the site.
I created the WordPress Theme specifically for Gadget Nerd so that I could better control how things looked when they actually appear online, but having said that, there was a lot of learning about WordPress going on too.
I enjoy designing themes so it’s a natural progression from designing websites in HTML and CSS to converting those to WordPress themes.
As the theme is new, and my experience of developing themes is limited, there might be a few bugs in the system. I haven’t actually looked at how the site appears in any version of Internet Explorer yet! So, that will be the next big job and I’m bracing myself for it. It appears to work well in FireFox, Safari, Chrome and Opera, so I’m happy with that.
If you do see anything that’s not right, please let me know! I do read all emails and comments that are left on here.
The articles that appear on here will also be posted to Twitter and the URL shortener that Gadget Nerd will use is Stwnsh. Stwnsh is a Welsh language URL shortener that I created a while back because there was nothing like it available through the medium of Welsh. I’m glad to say that it’s working well and gets used a lot!
The next step is to add “share this!” links to the individual posts. Facebook, Twitter, Delicious and email are the main ones I should add I suppose. I’ve already added a Readability link to each post so that you can use their service.
So, if you can think of anything else, don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Well, it’s been a while since Gadget Nerd has been active, but hopefully with this re-boot, we can become active once more.
Gadget Nerd was started back in June 2008 and would post about all things from toothbrushes to toasters. Those were fun times.
Gadget Nerd was a little pet project that grew to become quite popular and led to further websites being developed. They will probably be back up and running soon too! So look out for them!
Gadget Nerd has also got a Twitter account so follow us on there!
In addition to the Twitter account, a Facebook page has been setup too, but we don’t have the Gadget Nerd name yet, because we don’t have 25 followers! You can help us out by becoming fans and following us on there.
Lastly, Gadget Nerd has a Flickr group where hopefully, pictures of the various gadgets can be uploaded.
Soon, I’ll be adding Delicious to the list and we can all share links together.
So, I look forward to bringing you news about great gadgets in the very near future, I just wanted to post this message to let people know that Gadget Nerd is back!