Day Two: Balancing Priorities & JQuery Conflicts

I just completed the second session of site improvements. It’s actually been more like two weeks since I set up the site. With all the work I had to get completed, my own site got pushed to the bottom of the priorities. Keeping my own self-promotion a priority has been challenging. As a full-time employee and freelancer it’s tempting to get lazy and simply take what work comes your way. Maybe that’s the best part of the recession — it wakes you up from the slumber of excess. So here I am after so many years of building websites and designing print pieces and advertising for clients, I’m finally getting to myself. I think it’s about time.

It’s been fifteen years since I graduated from Savannah College of Art & Design. I’ve been keeping my portfolio updated with my best pieces until the last three years. When the kids started arriving shortly after marriage is when my priorities and free-time went wacky. It’s not that I have more free-time again… (probably the opposite) but my wife and I have refocused our priorities. Now I think I’m out of survival mode and back into the move forward and conquer phase. I’m getting dangerously close to my forties so I’d better start covering some ground. The good news is that my family and I are healthy, smart, motivated & dead set on accomplishing our goals.

So, with a good balance of clients and self-promotion again, I’ve made a few small improvements to the site setup. I installed a simple, yet safe, contact form. Which immediately broke my slider and lightbox on the portfolio content. I knew right away it was a conflict with the javascript. A quick check confirmed that the new contact form calls a different version of jquery than I used in the basic site. I used the support page for Contact Form 7 to disable the loading of the three new javascripts for the form. It worked like a charm but I wanted the form to work as intended. So I dug further and found another fix to selectively load the scripts on the form page. This fix gets added to the theme files rather than the wordpress code which is a plus. With the second fix in place I went back and removed the first fix since it wasn’t needed.

With the form tested and ready, I could then sign up at the wordpress site to get my wordpress api code which allows the activation of the Akismet spam filter on the contact form and user comments. Nice!

I had so much time left in my two hour “me-time” that I added a recent website project to the portfolio. Looks like I’m getting back my balance of priorities.