A friend of mine, Jim Kieffer, the President and Co-Founder of Brightegg.com and Digiwize.com has a new venture called LoopPress—a showcase of WordPress sites, blogs and themes.

From the site:
If you’re like me, you love Wordpress and want to know how other developers and designers are using it, designing for it and adding to it. LoopPress is a gallery devoted to beautiful websites, blogs and themes built on the Wordpress platform.

So if you have a WordPress powered site, head on over and submit it to the gallery.

I realized that I didn’t clarify how to do this very well. Sorry. Anyhoo… For single pages, you’ll want to use the following but change the name for each sidebar page you want to be different. So if you have different sidebar content for you about page and your portfolio page this is how it would look:

1. < ?php if (is_page(about)) { ?>
2. < ?php if (is_page(portfolio)) { ?>

I learned today how to use one sidebar page for multiple pages with different sidebar content for each page. It may come easy to most of you but for me it was a great revelation. It’s fairly simple to do and why I hadn’t learned it before now is beyond me. I guess some days things just click.

Anyway, if you use Wordpress as a CMS (which I encourage anyone to do) these are the steps for having multiple sidebar content in one sidebar page (sidebar.php).

This method is only for using a static homepage and a static blog page

For the static Blog Page

1. < ?php if (is_home()) { ?>
2. CONTENT GOES HERE
3. < ?php } ?>

For Single Pages

1. < ?php if (is_page(about)) { ?>
2. CONTENT GOES HERE
3. < ?php } ?>

It’s that simple and the content you want for each individual page shows up only on that page. I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this all this time.

I realized that I didn’t clarify how to do this very well. Sorry. Anyhoo… For single pages, you’ll want to use the following but change the name for each sidebar page you want to be different. So if you have different sidebar content for you about page and your portfolio page this is how it would look:

1. < ?php if (is_page(about)) { ?>
2. < ?php if (is_page(portfolio)) { ?>

I learned today how to use one sidebar page for multiple pages with different sidebar content for each page. It may come easy to most of you but for me it was a great revelation. It’s fairly simple to do and why I hadn’t learned it before now is beyond me. I guess some days things just click.

Anyway, if you use Wordpress as a CMS (which I encourage anyone to do) these are the steps for having multiple sidebar content in one sidebar page (sidebar.php).

This method is only for using a static homepage and a static blog page

For the static Blog Page

1. < ?php if (is_home()) { ?>
2. CONTENT GOES HERE
3. < ?php } ?>

For Single Pages

1. < ?php if (is_page(about)) { ?>
2. CONTENT GOES HERE
3. < ?php } ?>

It’s that simple and the content you want for each individual page shows up only on that page. I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on this all this time.

AKA, How Not to Lose Your Mind!

As I’ve discovered recently things sometimes slow down in the freelance world (of course I knew that before it happened but that sentence made a good segue). In my situation, I almost, almost, had to start hocking stuff to get money to make rent and car payment and I considered a “real” job briefly. I have no staid advice on how to make things pick-up but what I can offer is these two gems—save money and buy lots of peanut butter. That’s the only thing that got me through the last couple of months. I have both checking and savings accounts and never touched the money in my savings account… that is until I absolutely needed it recently. My savings account is almost all but depleted but I’m handing in my rent check tomorrow.

When There’s Nothing to Do… What Do You Do?

In the interim, I’ve developed some bad habits in my “down time.” I’ve begun watching, obsessively mind you, television, reading fan fiction of all things and not eating properly as well as completely screwing up my sleep/work schedule. This in turn has caused me to be slightly depressed, makes me not want to leave my home and when work does come in, it makes it a bit harder to get in the groove. So I’ve decided in the future when I hit slow times, I will continue to design things whether there is a need or not, just to stay “in practice” and save even more money in cases of emergency.

In hindsight I could have spent more time blogging to keep my head in the game. I could have gone to bed before daybreak and I could have gone for a walk instead of watching so much television. Oh well, you live and you learn, trial and error and all that jazz. I’m just happy that things are turning around and I didn’t have to get, gasp, a real job. How would I ever get used to dressing in something other than my pj’s to work?