Building this blog

Prior to putting up this blog, my main website had been “under construction” for more than two years. Updating it/putting anything at all on there was just something I never got around to given how busy I am. With the new year approaching (actually at about 9pm on New Year’s Eve), I decided to do something about it.

First I revamped the main website into a landing page or personal nameplate, with links to social media, my resume on LinkedIn, and this blog. While not quite responsive, the design looks good on both desktop/tablets and mobile thanks to the thin content section. I had to play around with the CSS3 background-size property to make the image fit perfectly on any screen resolution.

Then came time to build up this blog. I already had a WordPress multisite installation up and running for my WAB project sites, so I just created a new subsite and mapped the domain blog.czlayer.com using the Domain Mapping plugin.

The theme I chose was Pinboard, a nice and customizable responsive theme. I originally wanted to build my own theme for my website (hence the two-year delay) but having already done my landing page from scratch and with not much time to spare for it, I settled on customizing this theme instead. On the plus side, Pinboard has so many different options already built in that, together with the Jetpack plugin from WordPress.com, I haven’t had to install any additional plugins or write any extra code to get the site functionality I want.

To get some content in here I imported posts from my blog at school, which also runs on WordPress multisite. However, the images didn’t automatically transfer (there is supposed to be a built-in function to download images but this didn’t seem to work), so I ended up using the Import External Images plugin to bring them all into my installation. With that done I went about doing all the other usual customization, creating categories, etc. The final result is this blog you’re reading right now. Mission accomplished!