Author: Brandon Moeller

Is it Spring yet?

Cleaned up the garden, though there is still a lot more work to do.
Cleaned up the garden, though there is still a lot more work to do. Why yes, that is a butternut squash in the corner.
I bought some asparagus roots at the Fort Bend County Master Gardners' Fruit Tree sale this weekend. Planted one here.
I bought some asparagus roots at the Fort Bend County Master Gardners’ Fruit Tree sale this weekend. Planted one here.
... and the other one here.
… and the other one here.
Bluebonnets that were planted back in September are healthy.
Bluebonnets that were planted back in September are healthy.
I bought this dwarf key lime tree at the FBMG fruit tree sale. I think I'll keep it on the patio.
I bought this dwarf key lime tree at the FBMG fruit tree sale. I think I’ll keep it on the patio.

See more photos in the Gardening 2013 album.

Jim White seconds my motion, all in favor please don’t shoot

Jim White, whose 2012 record Where it Hits You was one of my favorite listens of last year, is pretty active on Facebook these days.

I’m pretty sure it’s him and not just those annoying marketing personnel who update Facebook pages (yeah, I’m one of those so I can say this).

Anyway, he said this today:

jimwhite-said

A lot of people commented. So did I:

brandonmoe-said

And then – and this is where the story gets good, people – Jim White responded!

jimwhite-said2

In case you can’t see it above:

Now thats out of the box thinking Brandon!

Thus concludes my story about my brush with fame today, or at least my interaction with a great singer-songwriter on the only social network everyone cares about.

Post Twenty Twelve

I’ve been hacking on the new Twenty Twelve default theme for WordPress since before it was released.

The great thing about WordPress is that as soon as the open source community begins working together to tackle a problem – they begin releasing the code publicly for beta review and to allow people to begin testing or forking it. I started looking at it in June because I was intriqued by its new simplistic approach to a responsive menu.

On Sept. 27, 2012 – the new Twenty Twelve theme was officially released. As soon as it was, I knew I would want to base my BrandonMoeller.com redesign on it, as I previously did with the Twenty Eleven theme.

Here’s some screenshots of my website with the Twenty Twelve child theme I designed:

ikea-post
The standard post page
The photos page.
The photos page.
The contact page.
The contact page.

Here are some details about the new Twenty Twelve child theme.

Fonts

I’m still using the Franklin Gothic FS family of fonts that I bought from FontSpring.com two and a half years ago.

Franklin Gothic FS Medium Condensed continues to be the web font for the Site Title “Brandon Moeller” up top in the header, while I’ve chosen the Google Web Font Oswald. Right now, I’m using it for my post titles.

Here’s an article that explains the method I used to alter my functions.php file in the child theme to add Google Fonts to my website.

The new Hire page

I completely re-thought the Hire Me section of the website.

I renamed the page “Portfolio.”

I moved it to its own WordPress site within my Multi-Site installation.

It stayed at the same URL: https://brandonmoeller.com/hire/

It mirrors the look of BrandonMoeller.com except it has a unique menu and the title of the WordPress website is “Brandon” (not “Brandon Moeller”). It shares the same theme — but with one difference.

In the BrandonMoeller.com website, I have to edit the CSS via JetPack (thanks, version 1.7 ) to hide the .site-title-secondary class I created to display “Moeller” on the Hire site. (( .site-title-secondary { display: none; } ))

The Hire site’s portfolio page is a new design that incorporated the Toggle function of the Jquery library as well as shortcodes and styles I added to the child theme and the visual editor via
TinyMCE.

All that being said …

I won’t go into what I did to customize my child theme to personalize Twenty Twelve in this post. Honestly, I never found the time to finish and I’m looking forward to WordPress 3.6 and the new Twenty Thirteen theme which is expected to improve the post format UI.

Even though I am releasing this child theme to download; I’m not completely satisfied. It does look nice the way it is now and I won’t be making any more changes to it.

I think I’m looking forward to the new version of WordPress, expected in April, which will contain the new Twenty Thirteen theme.

Life is keeping me pretty busy right now. Which is a very good thing.