This site was built by myself (Kyle) in WordPress. I know… ewwww! PHP? Gross! WordPress? Even worse!
I actually enjoy working in the platform and pushing what can be accomplished on it. I’ve built a few plugins available publicly on WordPress.org, as well as several more available on Github. I’m of the mindset that you can develop with WordPress and still generate clean and maintainable code. This site uses a completely custom theme along with a few custom plugins. I maintain a very-stripped down base theme for purposes like this. It combines a Gulp build process for frontend assets along with configuration options available in a JSON file. Various filters are hooked into that automatically create styles, SCSS variables and block/TinyMCE formatting based on the config contents. Side note, not long following my build of this feature, similar functionality was released in WordPress core.
The initial drive behind creating this site followed a Facebook disaster, along with the loss of several years of memories. Much to our dismay, we learned there is absolutely no recourse once an account has been compromised. This was a wake up call that we needed to take our memories into our own (self-hosted) hands.
To recreate some of the features we actually used and enjoyed on Facebook, I created a plugin that enables location tagging of media library items using Google Maps. The theme fully embraces WordPress blocks, and includes a few custom blocks that tie in to the location tagging. It’s fun for Lisa and I to map-surf and remember some of the unique and memorable times we’ve had over the years. By tagging locations and mapping them out, we’re able to better visualize and interact than even Facebook allowed.
Albums are another idea shamelessly lifted from the aforementioned social platform. Lisa and I will occasionally discuss a previous trip and pull up an album to flip through memories. The idea behind this site was to create a more typical blog format, but retain some of that instant gratification of flipping through a series of photos. To that end, I created a Javascript lightbox/gallery box that works with a page created using WordPress blocks. Combined with the media location plugin, this provided us with a self-hosted version of what we had come to use for documenting our travels.
The primary typeface is Chronicle, with Gotham as a supporting sans.
