Posted in Design, Development by MB on 12/31/07
I’ve created my own Wordpress Theme (coinciding nicely with the 2.3.2 upgrade).
When I kissed RapidWeaver goodbye, and re-familiarized myself with Wordpress, I didn’t want to spend time customizing a web site design…I just wanted to fix the problem of me not posting very often. I discovered the Ideal Website theme - which is pretty nice looking but the HTML which is ultimately generated is pretty much tag-soup (nee Crap). Also, oddly, the website advertising the theme boasts all this “openness”…but the license that ships with the theme is fairly restrictive…silly, dubiously legal, software boilerplate legalese which only sort of applies (How much can you really copyright an open source template API and standard HTML implementation if you’re just giving it away?). Needless to say, I don’t want to be encumbered by that noise. I might want to change the typeface or something.
So, with the holidays in full pause, I had time to rework things. I’m reusing a very old background image from one of this site’s previous incarnations along with my classic logo. I did steal one idea from the Ideal theme…the contact form at the bottom of the page. That’s a clever idea really. Why should that be a separate page? As I continue to tweak things, I may make that collapsible so it’s only visible when needed…but I like not sending a visitor off to another page to ask me something.
I’m taking advantage of the nifty Blueprint CSS framework to simplify my layout needs. The framework is really quite nice, I’ve been using at work for quite a while now. It greatly simplifies your page layout work, and also makes it simple for me to do more ‘designed’ blog posts by taking advantage of the framework’s existing CSS class names.
The layout is based on a simple vertical grid, with classical proportions: 8×5x3. The center column (5) appears as whitespace wherever more focus is desired (viewing a single post or page, for example). Type is set on an 18 pixel baseline grid which gives everything a nice rhythm and makes it easier to read.
As I continue to tweak this, I’d like to:
The flickr question
Flickr sucks. I spent a few hours playing with it…It’s slow. The tools don’t work very well (e.g. odd, useless error messages with raw xml strings. Great. Thanks.). I decided that if I want to share photos with people I’ll use Google’s picassa, and otherwise I’ll just post any worthwhile pictures in the blog.
And here are some honeymoon pictures.
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