transmothraHere’s a new desktop wallpaper i made. You can use it.
Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.
Here’s a new desktop wallpaper i made. You can use it.
In the year 2309, Earth's moon has been terraformed; New Cincinnati is depicted here as Earth looms large overhead. Sources: NASA, Wikimedia Commons: Derek Jensen (Tysto)
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Here’s a list of cool resources for web design and development, including cheat sheets galore.
I’m sure there are more I have bookmarked somewhere. I’ll add them as i find ’em. Enjoy!
Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.
Here’s a list of cool resources for web design and development, including cheat sheets galore.
I’m sure there are more I have bookmarked somewhere. I’ll add them as i find ‘em. Enjoy!
Look out for my B.U.T.T.! I’ve just finished uploading some tweaks to make the Big Urgent Wish theme a little nicer. Please, as always, wear your helmets, and let me know if anything falls on your head. I could always use a good laugh.
I hope to have a sanitized version available soon.
The B.U.G. hunt is on! See if you can find all the problems with my new layout… I’ve already identified the ugly 3rd-tier dropdown menu thing on the navbar at the top, but I haven’t had much time yet to test everything out. fixed Later tonight I’ll tweak it and try to get it to behave itself a little better. Please post your comments here (be sure to include your OS/browser). And thanks!
(Things are bound to be a little on the messy side for a few days while I convert this thing over to the new theme.)
EDIT: Yikes! Single posts & pages are also totally unstyled! fixed
This is the color chart I made for orchestrating and managing the background images/colors when using both a style switcher and a browser sniffer to determine which background, exactly, to display for each area of the page. You might even find it useful for your own layouts. The key is below.
Note that the header isn’t really used, and that the content and sidebars (sometimes), and the drop-downs, post meta-data, and my-own-comments boxes (always) use the same background CSS (once for each subtheme).
In all there are 6 × 3 = 18 different CSS inserts for what ended up being one of 4 types of user agents (1. browsers that cannot handle PNG transparency, 2. browsers that can and receive special message A, 3. browsers that can and receive special message B, and 4) all other user agents).
So, yeah, you can tell that this is becoming a bit of a logistical nightmare for me! Nevertheless, I’m pretty confident that once I’ve got the thing done, it’ll be easy to extend.
I’m trying to make the learning curve for anyone else as shallow as I can. Here’s how it breaks down for anyone wishing to add their own subtheme:
styles.incsniffer.inc
header.php so that cookies don’t retain old style names (there must be an easier way to do this; maybe someone will come along and improve this step so it’s automated; nevertheless, it currently only requires inserting the style names into two lines of existing code, towards the top of the page)Not too terribly bad, I think, all things considered.
Key:
| (A) | header |
| E | navbar |
| B (+C+D) | content |
| (C+D) | sidebar |
| F+G+H+I | contrast |
| J | comment1 |
| K | comment2 (alternating) |
Big Urgent Wish 3.0 is nearing readiness! The third subtheme has been completed.
Done:
if (function_exists()) or if (class_exists()) loops) for several useful plugins, including Browser Sniff, CustomComments, Gravatars, Landing sites, Link Indication, Now Reading, Now Watching, Popularity Contest, Related Posts, Sociable, ThickBox Plugin, Ultimate Tag Warrior, Viper’s Plugins Used, WP Random Title, WP-EMail, WP-Print, iTunesSpy, muTunes:hover and background: fixed tricksTo do:
Additionally, I’ve decided that it’ll probably launch with just three subthemes, due to time constraints; however, more subthemes will be available later.
Screenshots:
Still working on the new theme. Actually, the theme’s done, it’s the subthemes that are killing me. I’ve got the first one about 90% done, and almost as much on the second. The main thing is separating the stylesheets into usable, selectable chunks.
Boy, is this gonna be purty!
I’m also gearing up for some podcasting for the nearish future. Should be interesting. More details to come….
I think I’m getting carpal tunnel syndrome. Nevertheless, I’ve been doing a lot of typing lately. I just submitted my first batch of CD reviews for the Chickenfish Speaks, a terrific local entertainment zine run by Grog, the former bass player for local rock legends the ¡Oxymorons!.
Also, I’m still hard at work on Big Urgent Wish 3.0, my first real WordPress theme. (My current theme is based largely on the Ice theme.) It’s coming along nicely. I’ve completed the first of three subthemes. But first, a To Do: separate stylesheets into color/layout (possibly separating these further), font size, and font type (serif or sans-serif). Then I need to clean up what I’ve got and then I can finally start to work on the other two subthemes.
Haven’t been feeling 100%, so I’m working on making my own WordPress theme from scratch (though I’ll admit to scraping a little code from other themes). My current theme is called “Big Urgent Wish 2.0”, and it’s based on another theme, but i’ve decided to reuse the name and call it 3.0. This one will be a three column layout.
It’s coming along flamingly so far. It looks beautiful and has tons of really tasty hover effects. Works very well in Firefox, Opera, and IE. It’s a plush, spacey theme, with burnt oranges, ambery peaches, and velvety browns.
I’m also planning on having it support style switching, Widgets, and all of the plugins I currently use. AJAX is under consideration as well.
This will most likely end up being my first public WordPress theme.
New color scheme available. To select, look for the little purple square at the top left of any page on this site.
Using Rob Ballou‘s Styleswitcher, the previous version of which i used on my last site, i’ve uploaded a new PHP-driven stylesheet-switching system. You can see on the left hand side that there are now options for the color scheme, the font size, and the font face (serif or sans-). I also changed the default from a black background to a white one to make it look a little less like a 13-year old Marilyn Manson fan with some design potential did it.
Not very friendly towards IE6-, but IE7 is around the corner, and you should be using a better browser anyway.
Finally! My online portfolio is nearly finished… The only thing left to do now is to acquire the main files from my most recent project and remove all proprietary informations.
I thought i’d NEVER get that shit done. That last one was a bitch to nail down – it turned out that it made much better sense to lose the damn b2evolution blog and just write in static content.
Well, it’s been taking forever, but finally!, my portfolio is online and pretty much more or less all (well, most) of those old dead sites are recreated and re-animated and essentially living again, albeit with synthetic blood this time around. Don’t look them too closely in the eyes, as there is no more soul in them as there is in an idiot, slack-jawed goldfish.
It’s been quite a learning experience… in fact, it really is amazing that i got away with such junk HTML in some of those sites. Actually, on the most prominent website i ever did, i actually used double-quotes within inline CSS. Which effectively turned off succeeding CSS rules, and invalidated the whole mess. It’s quite lucky, i’d guess, that anything worked at all in some cases.
There’s just a couple more sites to put up.
I’m working on getting my legacy sites ready for an online portfolio to be presented here on this site.
The unfortunate thing about being a relatively-inexperienced web designer/developer is that most of your clients will be fairly small outfits and that much of your work will be necessarily pro-bono, or close to it. This means that many of them won’t be around for a very long time. In my case, none of them are. I think the Tecumseh Local Music Boosters may still maintain a site somewhere, though probably one with tildes in the URI that i’ll never be bothered to really track down, because it’s probably no longer my work being displayed there.
On to the point: this means that i have to re-build all of those old sites from the archives. Which, in turn, means trying to get code written a pretty long time ago (by www standards) to work. That’s not much of a problem, in most cases, because i at least had the foresight to include some useful future-compatible functions, the most underrated of which is the doctype declaration.
Regrettably, i don’t remember how some of the functions worked, and i don’t have much time to figure it all out.
The worst part, though, is that the one of the coolest sites, for a sadly defunct print magazine, won’t work locally, and i think it’s because i no longer have any idea what kind of a server environment it was written for.
So take this to heart, fellow amateurs: always, always, always include copious comments in your PHP, and archive a copy of the phpinfo() that you generated at the time (when you were literally losing sleep trying to iron out that one nagging bug). Mirror the damn thing live if you have to. This will save you in the long run, when the site goes belly up, and you have to prove to potential employers or clients that it existed outside of the sick, narcissistic fantasy world inside of your head. You won’t look like a blowhard when you can at least produce a working copy. Right now, i’d settle for just some screenshots of that magazine site.
Speaking of which, i can at least produce a static HTML version, using archive.org for the markup and my backup image files for the graphics. So all is not completely, irretrievably lost.
But i’d rather get those bugs ironed out. I just need a lot more time than i can actually come up with lately.
cleaning up the layout a little bit. no more yucky slowdown in IE: i figured out that IE doesn’t like to repeat a background image, at least one with transparency, too many times; so instead of using the smallest possible denominator of pixels to show a grid, i simply repeated the pattern within the image itself a few times. in this case, i changed the grid to vertical lines; but where i might have liked to use, say, 2×1 pixels to repeat across the element, i used something like 2×75 to reduce the overall repeats. not sure why this strange behavior isn’t better known or more widely documented, but i may have to experiment with it more in the future.
also fixed a couple of positioning errors on my part. the sidebar isn’t the most consistent, because some of my sections there have heading elements within list tags, while others don’t, possibly owing to different plugins having been created for different versions of WordPress, or for different themes, and so on.
I’ve re-positioned some elements (see navbar on top) and re-colored some text and images. Hopefully it will make the site more functional and readable, although there are still a few little bugs that i’m none too happy about. But until browsers are 100% standards compliant, i’ll have to learn to live with at least some bit of rendering lousiness. Some of it i can clean up and tweak; as for now, it’s off to bed with me. I’m too tired to make any links at the moment, so good night, and i hope you like the layout a little bit better.