WP Documentation Project

I’ve been working on WP Documentation on the sites that Stacy instructed me to work on, since he is leaving LAITS :(. The sites are Not Even Past, IC², Theatre Philosophy, Life&Letters, and Arts Portal. Last week with Stacy’s instructions I was able to make a lot of progress with Not Even Past, and this week I’ve been working with Sheryl and De’sha on the rest of the sites. Sheryl is working on Life&Letters and she’s done a great job so far! De’sha just got started on Arts Portal since she was caught up with a different project, but I’m sure she’ll did great.

Today I just finished IC², and I really like how it looks so far. I think the documentation’s outline is pretty clear, and I’ve also included a lot of annotated screenshots to help the user visualize the edits.

“The Russian Brahms”

This week I wanted to recommend a short and waltz-y piece from Nikolai Medtner, perhaps a less well-known composer. I discovered Medtner’s music last year, and I must admit that his music is not the easiest to listen to (I want to say he’s late Romantic, so some hints of contemporary there). This particular piece, Fairy Tale Op. 51 No. 3, is pretty easy to listen to, perhaps because of the lyrical quality.

Prof. Di-capua Website Design

I had a meeting with Prof. Di-capua and Maddy earlier this week on this website design project. Since then I’ve been working on one of the background designs, based on a sample website that the Prof. likes.

Here’s are some earlier iterations.

After some feedback from Suloni and Maddy, here are some drafts that I have that will be sent to the client along with another draft Maddy made if Suloni has nothing else to add to.

Back to Schubert . . .

I had a Schubert phase last year where I’d listen to a lot of his compositions. I also learned his Impromptu Op. 142 No. 2. I sort of got out of that phase for a while until recently when I encountered his collection of the later Impromptus (which are not as well-known as Op. 142 and Op. 90). These are his Klavierstücke D.946. They’re pretty Schubertian (triplets, beautiful melodies, repeated left hand chords), but still there exist moments of (in the words of Ashish Xiangyi Kumar, the YouTube channel I visited quite a bit) “nervous quality.” Nevertheless, I find them quite charming and addictive (I’ve been looping through them too many times these past few days). I hope you enjoy :).

P.S.: my favorite passage is from the second piece, C section, from 20:58 – 26:33. I personally think that these cascading melodies are so beautiful, haunting, and passionate. Pianist Avdeeva’s performance is also very intimate and sweet.

Exploring WP Theming and Customization

In prepping for a potentially new project for me, I’ve been playing around with WP theming on a sandbox site that Relena gave me access to. I changed the theme / background, reformatted some pages to get myself used to the block-formatting, and also located where I can add customize CSS and all other customizations.

Ethics Blog Cascade Help Request

I’ve been working with Cristina on the Ethics Blog Cascade Help Request. The client wanted some organizations / layout formatting for their Ethics Blog site, so I’ve tested out a couple of things.

First, the Teaching Resources page is currently a page with many hyperlinks linking to the articles, which looks like this:

The client wanted something like this:

I was able to replicate this using CSS Flexbox in Cascade, but we’re most likely not going with this option because Tim advised us to go with something that will be maintainable for the client.

Cristina had been working on another solution using tables and the WYSIWYG editor, which is more preferable.

Second, the client wanted to reformat their Blog page to a layout similar to the News page. However, they wanted to be able to use the News functionality through the Web Editor as well. So I’ve constructed a similar layout for their Blog page using just the WYSIWYG editor.

I think we’ve made good progress, and we’ll be ready to show the client soon!