Blog

Probably, at the moment, when you come to this blog post, you will also be able to find older ones… Despite this, this blog post is really the first one! All the older posts were Redmine news, Facebook notes or something else before and have been, in fact, moved to this blog. I had a dream to launch my blog long before this post and, as I did not have it running yet, I used other applications to share my thoughts…

What you won’t see on my blog?

To be honest, there were times, when I hated blogs (this was a very long time ago though). At that moment all blogs, known to me, were sharing jokes, links, fun stories and pictures, or copy-pasted texts from other articles (usually without a link to the origin). So this created a negative vision for blogs for me. Certainly, later I discovered, that good blogs also exist and I became eager to launch the one for myself. Anyway the impression lingered, so you will unlikely see the just mentioned post types in my blog…

So, what should you expect to find here?

The “Expertise”

When some complicated issue raises I love to be able to find blog posts with explanation how to resolve it. I was lucky to find such posts so many times, that I think it’s the time to give back… In addition, I plan to write articles explaining my opinion regarding different technical topics, especially because my opinions is often far from being the common. Thus, for sure, I will write about PHP, Ruby, HTML, JavaScript, outsourcing, coding principles, and much more (I can’t foreknow all the topics right now)…

“Projects”

Certainly, I also plan to write much about my own projects and the projects, I am involved in. Thus, some of my projects contain unique powerful features, which are, however, underused. Of course, the reason for this is the lack of information on how they can be used. So, I hope, blog posts about such things will help.

The “Opinion”

I have strong and quite uncommon opinion not only for technical topics. I also have many ideas, which, I believe, are quite interesting. So, I will use my blog to share them as well. These thoughts will be related to many topics, therefore, I do not want to list any examples here now…

The “Personal”

Additionally, of course I would like to have some personal stuff here. This can be stories about my life, daughter, cats, etc. Probably, I will separate this stuff from the other stuff on this blog in some time (but not any time soon)…

The “Studio”

I have a kind of a hobby… I wrote “a kind of” as it is much related to computers. This hobby is photography. Some time before I also tried myself as a webdesigner. In addition I have some painting and drawing skills… All these are not my main occupations, but still these things are to some extent interesting for me. So, I may (and probably will) share some thoughts and/or works done in these areas too. The special attention, I believe, I will pay to doing such stuff under Linux (my working OS).

Few words about my blog implementation

To launch my website, which is based on Redmine, I created a theme and 6 plugins. Of course, instead I could just install the pure Redmine, but that’s not the way I work. The similar way I could just install WordPress… But I wanted my site to look consistent.

Generally, as I already had the website, I needed to add a blog to it (or migrate to the blog). This way I came up with the idea of Redmine and WordPress integration, you are now looking at.

This blog is using WordPress but its layout is very similar to the Redmine’s one. This is done using the RedWord theme for WordPress, which is not a usual WordPress theme – it’s a layer making Redmine themes compatible with WordPress! Thus, I’m using my Red-Andy theme for the blog – the same theme I use for Redmine. Therefore, my Redmine and WordPress look consistent.

I addition, for both themes I also use customizations (e.g., to add the logo) – i.e., custom plugin and child theme – for Redmine it’s AndriyLesyuk and for WordPress it’s Word-Andy.

But the same look-and-feel is not an integration. Thus, I also needed both systems to share sessions. This part is done by the RedPress plugin for Redmine on the Redmine side and by the WordMine plugin for WordPress on the WordPress side.

Afterword

I noticed, that many bloggers also write a few words about themselves in blog posts like this one. But I doubt, anyone comes to this blog without knowing anything about me or that the ones, which come but do not know me, will start looking for my first blog post to check my biography… Anyway it is better to write the autobiography in a dedicated post (and, maybe, I will do this later). Nevertheless, what speaks about people better than their thoughts?..

I hope, you will find my blog interesting! Welcome!