• Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

    Switching to WordPress felt like a visit to the Ferengi homeworld

    This post is the first in a three-part series about migrating from a self-built PHP-based Laravel backend to a managed WordPress backend.

    Part two will detail what motivated the switch, and the final part of the trilogy will round out what recommendations I’d give to others in my place.

    Welcome to Ferenginar. Need to use the elevator to the 40th floor? That’ll be 7 strips of latinum. Need the front-desk to reach out to the person you’re here to see? One strip of latinum. Seating while you wait? 3 Strips. Standing, is just one.

    This largely sums up a significant part of my initial experience with WordPress. Let me emphasize that people deserve to get paid. Just because something is free doesn’t mean it didn’t take effort to make. This acknowledgement aside, I was still surprised at the number of times that a solution to some design problem I encountered in WordPress had a fee attached to it, including, but not limited to:

    • Making the top menu sticky.
    • Using a non-standard font.
    • Listing the latest 3 blog posts.
    • Using a gallery Lightbox.

    For each of these design problems, I eventually found a fee-free solution:

    As web developer myself, I couldn’t help but smirk when I found multiple freemium WordPress themes that all kept the ability to make a menu sticky, behind a paid version.

    Want a non-standard font with your theme? Plug-in time, or change the CSS, or somehow add it to the theme itself, which I never figured out how to do. Pairing themes with fonts makes sense, but text being so ubiquitous I don’t quite get why adding a font to WordPress isn’t natively supported in the front-end.

    As for the 3 blog posts, it was especially confounding to find support for such easy-to-use functionality offered via WordPress.com, but not WordPress.org. In other words, if you pick WordPress.com to manage and host your WordPress site, then you’ll have access to this particular feature via the blog posts block, otherwise you’ll have to put it together on your own.

    WordPress’ success is certainly partially due to its base version being free. It has enabled a thriving eco-system to grow, with WordPress, at the center. As previously stated, people do deserve to get paid for their work. I suppose I would just have preferred a one-time upfront fee to have more features I consider standardized and core to nearly all site designs, as part of the base version of WordPress. Instead, it feels like there’s a coin-slot eager to be operated in numerous places where you’d expect a button or a lever. Not dissimilar to the business model for numerous modern mobile games I suppose.

    I really felt like I was visiting Ferenginar once I left my previously self-manged solution behind and switched to WordPress.

    But it’s still worth it. Find out next week part two in this series, same bat-time, same bat-website…


  • Website soft re-launch


    Hello world. Roll out the red carpet. Bring on the bubbly. Coral the celebrities. We’ve got a website re-launch to celebrate!

    Welcome to… Wait, what? Budget cuts? … How much? … No budget at all?!

    Uhm… Well, then… Return the carpet to the carpet store. Pack up the bubbly. Cancel Steven Seagal’s appearance. Honestly, that last one is probably a win-win for all parties concerned.

    Low budget aside, about a month in the making, I’m pleased to welcome you to the new LasseLaursen.com. Having unshackled myself from the chains of a partially self-managed solution and instead shackled myself to a more managed solution, I hope to make this blog resemble more of a… Well, blog!

    I’ve acknowledged I now wish to spend as little time as possible related to the tech behind the website and instead maximize the time I have to make content and create projects. Speaking of which, my latest open-source project LyricManager is now available in my portfolio.

    Have a look, and hopefully I’ll see you here again real soon!


A website about software, technology, personal projects, and personal life stories.

This space reserved for upcoming captivating content.

Projects

LyricManager

Aligning lyrics to audio is the task of determining the precise time in a song when each individual word is being sung, i.e. the start…

PlanMixPlay

The elevator pitch for PlanMixPlay is a more engaging way of delivering an audio and video performance. More than 8 years in the making, PlanMixPlay…

TapDrag

After spending countless sessions interacting with a larger sized touch display, i.e. ~30 to 50 inches (approximately 3-5 times larger than a modern IPad), we…

Icon Set Selection via Human Computation

Icons have long been a cornerstone of GUI design, ever since the emergence of WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus, Pointers) by Xerox. Given the “Mobile App…

lasselaursen.com

A younger me would have scoffed a bit at the idea of labeling my own website as a project worthy of mention. Now – on…

Post-it Art

In early 2013 I found myself on the receiving end of a break-up and a sudden abundance of free time on my hands along with…

DJ Interface with Remote Audience Feedback

Streaming live performances is common place these days. While the technology to deliver the performance has massively improved over the past years, the methods with…

Registration-based Volumetric Interpolation

Volumetric rendering has come a long way since its first appearance decades ago. Graphics cards have been subject to massive technological advancements and are still…

3D Texture Synthesis

Texture synthesis fascinates me. Particularly 3D texture synthesis because as opposed to 2D texture synthesis, there isn’t a simple alternative to capturing data. To obtain…

Virtual Cuts

Pork is big business in Denmark. Tiny improvements on each individual product translates into several million dollars saved. In 2009, a growing interest in product…

GazeTrain

My previous augmented reality (AR) based project caught the attention of COGAIN. COGAIN focuses on promoting research and development in the field of gaze-based interaction….

Computer aided board-gaming

When I was first exposed to augmented reality, I couldn’t help immediately thinking about how it could be applied to games. I was intrigued by…

GPU Bee-havior

Prior to Nvidia’s public release of CUDA, programming a state machine using graphics shaders was challenging, but certainly not impossible. This project was among the…

Dolores

Dolores is a total conversion modification for Half-Life 2, released in March 2006, as part of the Danish academy for digital interactive entertainment (DADIU) graduation…