Lara L. Schenck

Computing researcher, maker of monsters

Category: Tech

  • An Interactive Guide to Blog Typography

    via Sidebar (A daily email digest of the best 5 design links. Highly recommended.)

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  • Remove .php from URLs [Snippet]

    When making custom sites, I separate my code into various php files that each include a consistent header and footer so that I don’t have to deal with verbose, redundant HTML files. By default you end up with gross URLs like mysite.com/contact.php. Make it mysite.com/contact by adding this to your .htaccess file and replacing index|about|..…

  • Pittsburgh Web Design Day 2012

    Just got back from Web Design Day, hosted by Refresh Pittsburgh, Pgh’s web design meetup group. After a day of excellent presentations by some excellent speakers, excellent drinks and snacks were had at Commonwealth Press for the after party. #WDD2012 win, I’m definitely looking forward to next year. Thanks to Val and Jason Head for…

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  • website starter kit

    I’m sure many web designers have created their own compilation of preferred tools and site structure. Well, this is mine! A website starter kit. I figured I’d put it on Github because, why not? Maybe someone else will find it useful, and it will be a worthwhile project to maintain just for myself. In sum,…

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  • Bones has made me like WordPress again

    That’s right, I didn’t like it for a while. Had a pretty scarring experience with a WordPress/BuddyPress site running on 20+ heavy duty plugins, and I fully realized why people say it’s messy on the backend. I had been doing a lot of custom coding, and dealing with WP hooks and filters, misc filepaths, and…

  • Book recommendation: Designing for Emotion

    I’ve been reading Designing for Emotion by Aarron Walter, the lead designer for MailChimp. It’s a quick read, very engaging, and infinitely useful. I’d been in a bit of a creative slump, focusing on navigation patterns, getting inspiration from great work other people are doing, and generally avoiding the being creative part. This book has…

  • Move a ball on the screen with Arduino & Processing

    Here’s what it looks like on the Arduino (with a potentiometer and two buttons): Here’s the code: And here’s what it looks like on the screen: There’s a few things to know about getting the Arduino working with Processing – here’s a link. And, with luck, later I’ll post a better image and description of…

  • WordPress Maintenance Mode

    Why haven’t I encountered/thought of this before?! If you noticed earlier, this site and the WPF2 demo site where giving off some 404s…embarrassing but oh well. Planning to write a post about all of that later. Anyways, maintenance mode is a setting you can turn on to let viewers know things are being changed/updated. There’s…

  • Thumbnails in WPFolio Two

    I recently added 270x270px gallery and post thumbnails to WPFolio Two. They look damn nice in columns of three in the portfolio categories. While working on this, I found that WP’s thumbnail/image attachment functions are not so well documented, so I wanted to be sure to share what I figured out. Here I’ll go over…

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