New Site, mat.tc API and Wordpress Plugin

// January 10th, 2010 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

Unless you’re reading this via RSS, you’ve already seen the new site I’ve rolled out. I really like it and hope you do as well. I did more than just redesign the way it looks though. It’s more than a pretty face.

I spent some time trying to clean up the information on the site too.  Specifically, I shortened the about page and really over hauled the portfolio page.  The portfolio is way better than it was:

I think the new page is a lot cleaner and because there’s SO much less text, it should be easier to read and understand.

I also thought I’d play with some APIs and get into Wordpress a but while I built the new site.  I certainly brushed up my PHP and also learned a bit about Wordpress Plugins.  I wrote a plugin like Twitter Tools from Alex King – except mine uses my own http://mat.tc url shortener.  Obviously to do this I wrote a simple shorten API modeled after bit.ly’s API.  It works wonderfully.  I can tweet from the site when logged in.  Automatic new post tweets also use mat.tc now which saves me the extra steps.

Twitter Tools doesn’t use OAuth though, so I had to rewrite a bit of the code so Twitter would recognize my calls and show the correct “From: ” line for tweets.  But that wasn’t too bad.

To round out the new site, I created a new logo too.  The old logo (in the image above) was just a simple play on my initials.  While exploring new ideas I came back to this ‘letters in my name’ idea.  So the little dude is made up of letters in my name (the m, c, and 2 l’s).  I added the tie because I thought it clarified it was a person – plus the business tie-in worked (sorry).  Font is Insignia.

Anyway, I’m really glad the content on the site is updated.  The new design, logo and mat.tc/Twitter integration is also nice.  I threw in a little flash on the login page for fun too: check it out.

Enjoy!