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Introducing: scorchedarchive.com

I talked previously about my new hobby, saying that I would keep you updated with my progress. Rather than clutter up this blog with a whole load of posts I decided instead to create a brand new blog dedicated to Warhammer 40,000.

Scorched Archive is another site built on good old Wordpress. I am still really enjoying working with Wordpress, it just seems to be able to handle anything I can throw at it. It helps that there is such a large community churning out fantastic plugins and I made use of a large number of these during development, I listed all of them below for your consumption, some of them are real gems.

• Akismet
• Feedburner Feed Replacement
• Gravatars2
• Markdown
• SRG Clean Archives
• Ultimate Tag Warrior
• Widon’t

This is the first Wordpress development where rather than taking an existing theme and hacking it about I have started my theme from scratch. This has meant a much leaner template which does exactly what I wanted nothing more, but nothing less.

Another first for this project was creating a Wordpress plugin, though it is not good enough (or even useful enough) to ever see the light of a release like Little Flutter did it was useful for keeping together helpful little snippets of code which in turn helped to keep my theme a little bit more organised. Things like adding a filter to the_extract() to render it wrapped in <h3> tags made it into the plugin which I have dubbed a Personal Utilities plugin. I hope to expand on this idea in another post soon.

In terms of design for the site, I wanted to keep it clean, well organised and content focused. Heavily inspired by Garret Dimon’s latest design, I wanted the content to be as clear and readable as possible. The colours went through several iterations, but with help from Colour Lovers I finally settled on the red, grey and golden brown combination which you see now. The golden brown on the comments section was really an after thought but really added some warmth to the otherwise cold grey pages that could of been.

That’s a basic run down of Scorched Archive, I hope you all like the site please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

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