The site is back up after quite a bit of downtime. I was working on reconstructing a large portion of the site, and ended up having to shut the site down so that I could work on it without running into problems with people visiting an entirely broken website. Well, now it’s back up and running and better than ever! What’s new and different? Here, have a bulleted list (because I love those so much):

• It looks better. I basically took the layout I had before and refined it. It’s not a total from-the-ground-up kind of thing, but it’s been heavily reconstructed and looks tons better, I think.
• There’s actually content on the Web Design section now. Before it was pretty much nonexistent and didn’t actually show any of the work I’ve done. Now it’s done with individual pages for some of my more notable web design works.
• The web log doesn’t use a separate wordpress installation now. There’s no notable difference on the surface between before, it’s just that now it’s a lot easier to manage because every single aspect of my site is all in one place rather than having a separate wordpress installation just for the web log.

The site is currently incompatible with Internet Explorer 6. A lot of work is going to be necessary in order to get it to look and function properly, so I decided to hold off on that for the time being. It is, however, compatible with just about every other browser I’ve tested it with, including Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, as well as Safari.

Looking awesome Sporky! Thanks alot for putting a link to my site, that’s very nice of you :D. Speaking of which, I moved it to a new server today. If you could, update the link with this: http://mekworx.phenomer.net/

BTW, I’m curious as to how you have a blog for your site updates and for you web blog. That’s something I’d really like to have on Mekworx. Could ye possibly let me partake in that knowledge?

21 May. 2009 at 5:06 pm

Updated the link. :D

What I used to do in order to have two separate blogs on my site was to actually have two separate Wordpress installations running at once, with the main site being separate from the blog section. It was virtually invisible to the user, but there were some complications when making modifications to the site where I’d have to go and do the modifications twice so that they’d be applied to both installations.

Recently I figured out a different technique, which has everything on one wordpress installation. What I did was make all the blog posts under one parent category, and used the Advanced Category Excluder plugin to exclude every post under that category from being displayed on the main page. Then just have a link to that particular category somewhere on your site, and voila!

Hope that helps! :D

22 May. 2009 at 3:19 pm

Awesome! That helps alot, thanks Spork :D

22 May. 2009 at 11:45 pm

Thanks again for your help Spork! I don’t mean to bug you to death but I’m having a problem. Let me see if I can explain what I’ve done so far properly.

I installed and activated the plugin (version 1.4.3). Then I went under “Categories” and hide my “Site Updates” category from the “Home” section (I assume this is correct). Then I made a new page that would link to the “Site Updates” category. I think the problem is around here. I’m not entirely sure if I’m linking it correctly. I tried various different ways and none of them seemed to work the way I wanted it to. I tried “/?cat=5″ and “/?cat=siteupdates” and also “/category/siteupdates/”. The first and last links would link me to the archive for that category (which isn’t what I want). The 2nd didn’t work at all from what I could tell. Though instead of sending me to an empty page, it would just display the same as the home page. I can tell that the plugin is doing it’s job though; all of the posts under the “Site Updates” category are hidden. The problem seems to be that I can’t figure out how to link to the category correctly. Or it’s also possible that I’m doing something horribly wrong somewhere else.

Any ideas?

13 Jun. 2009 at 3:07 am

Well, I’m not entirely sure what to suggest. It could possibly have something to do with your site’s template files. For my site I added a “category.php” for that specific purpose, which is pretty much identical to my main index template. Beyond that I’ve never had any problems with using “/?cat=5″ for linking to a specific category.

13 Jun. 2009 at 8:58 am

Hmm, ok I’ll try a few other things before I give up. Guess I can try to make that category.php and see if it works out (oh boy, trial and error time!) Thanks again for the help!

15 Jun. 2009 at 9:35 pm

Hooray, I got it working! I tried something that I thought would be sorta silly…but it worked. I didn’t have a category.php with the them I’m using, but it did have a archive.php. So I took my index.php, rename it to archive.php, and it display just like the main blog! Hopefully that change didn’t unintentionally bork anything up, heh. Ok sorry, I’ll stop blabbering about this stuff on here. Thanks yet again for your help :D

16 Jun. 2009 at 3:36 am