WordPress and Web Development › home of Ben Gillbanks
WordPress Developer, Blogger, Video Gamer, and part-time Entrepreneur. All these things describe me, Ben Gillbanks.
Ghost is a project born from frustration with WordPress. Ironically it seems to be mostly WordPress power users who want to use it. The Ghost team - led by John O'Nolan - put Ghost on KickStarter last week and it flew through its goal in just 2 days - and is now over 4 times the stated goal! The original concept of Ghost was to use WordPress as a base and either create a plugin or fork it and create [...]
My first website was terrible. Not intentionally I hasten to add - but because I was told to make it bad... I started university in 1998, the internet was just starting to become more mainstream. It was still a few years before the first dot-com bubble burst - and AOL were still sending everyone copious amounts of drinks mats (trial cds). I was studying digital art - I wanted to be a video games artist - but web design was [...]
So - I make WordPress themes - lots of them Something that's bugged me for a while is that I can't easily use the WP_Query to select posts with featured images. This isn't functionality that's needed that often - but it can be desirable for things like image carousels where you need an image to make everything look good. Today however - I finally found a solution - and it's surprisingly simple. All post data - including the featured image [...]
My main websites (Binary Moon, and Pro Theme Design) are hosted with Liquidweb on a VPS, but I have many smaller sites and I like to run them on NearlyFreeSpeech.net. The service is great, and I like the 'pay for what you use' model, but it's a bit of a pain to update software because I have to log into each site individually, and then upload new versions of WordPress/ new plugins etc. It's only recently that I've started using [...]
I know it's a little bit old but I read an article on Dustin Curtis blog recently about how perfection is a make or break element of a performance or product - and craftsmanship has been lost... and I don't agree. In fact, most creative industries throughout history have had this component, called craftsmanship, and it's a bond between creator and user. But it seems to have been lost, somehow, in the expanding bureaucracy and process of modern companies. Dustin [...]
Recently I have looked at expanding my internet empire. I have all sorts of ideas and never enough time - so I thought I would see if I could buy some websites relatively cheaply, improve them, and then either flip them, or profit from them because of the benefit they bring. Website Flipping? What's That? I don't know how commonly known the phrase is - but essentially 'flipping a website' involves selling a website. The types of people who flip [...]
I'm not that knowledgable about the command line and controlling a server with it. Over the years I have picked up a few bits - I use nano a lot for editing files, and I like to use grep to search my code. Or at least I used to. Ack The other day I was trying to work out how something worked in WordPress, and I was using grep to search the WordPress code base - except it wasn't traversing [...]
Over the winter holiday break I did a bit of a splurge on Pro Theme Design and posted a bunch of blog posts about WordPress and blogging. This is something I want to do a lot more of as I think it benefits my website users quite nicely. Below is a selection of the blog posts I think are most interesting. What's coming up in WordPress - I find it really interesting seeing the direction WordPress is heading in. The [...]
I know that I am most productive in the winter months and tend to churn out a lot more of my personal projects than I do during the summer months. I suspect this is due to the fact that I go out less and so spend more time sitting in front of my computer. It seems others have this condition as well - since the new year seems to have brought with it some gifts. Notably there have been a [...]
The web industry moves really fast and there is always a lot to do - time is precious. Many of us get dozens - sometimes even hundreds - of emails a day. As such it can be quite frustrating to get emails from people who introduce themselves and say they want to talk to you - and then don't tell me what they want. Recently I have been contacted by two independent companies - both wanting to talk about one [...]
