oro en paz, y fierro en guerra
Gave a talk at WordCamp Salt Lake a few months ago, and thought I would link to the slides. I created them using the slide framework that was developed for Google I/O. My talk was titled Bootstrap, Responsive Theme Development. I talked a lot about generic HTML/CSS things, with a few WordPress specific tricks. Turned out pretty well, I hope to do it again someday.
Just a little wrap up from WordCamp Vegas that was this last weekend. I had a great time, I am always impressed with the WordPress community. Open, caring, and would literally give you warm cookies just for driving down to Vegas.
This trip was a lot of fun. The conference was great, lots of really good, relevant talks. Highlights included Brandon Dove of PixalJar.net gave a great presentation about Child Themes vs. Theme Framworks. Having built a bunch of custom themes and child themes, personally I have stayed away from frameworks, but after hearing him, I kind of want to dig into Thematic and see what else there is to learn. Also really like when we looked into a site and he said, “This filter applies to all the single ladies.” Kind of a WordPress joke…
I had the opportunity to present myself, and was really happy when John Hawkins invited me to come down at WordCamp Utah. I spoke on the Loop, on how to build custom queries, template tags, and working with custom post types. My slides, similar to the WordCamp Utah ones below:
I also enjoyed hearing the flamboyant Eric Marden and hearing him speak on DevCraft: Best Practices for WordPress Teams. I never worked professionally as part of a dev shop, so his comments were interesting on a lot of levels. Taking a lot of his critique and commentary to heart, hoping to become a better developer as a result.
I guess this brings me to the crux. No one is a perfect developer. For all of the WordCamps that I have been to, (been to eight now in the last two years) there is always something to learn. For the $20-$30 that they normally cost, there is no better way to spend a Saturday learning from everyone around you on how to be a better developer, better blogger, or better designer.
Hope to see you at the next one!
So, in the last few weeks, I have been doing a lot of WordPress theme development. When I see something cool on the web, I want to implement it a new a cool way. Skulls is basically the end result of some tinkering on the web. Here are some of the methods that I used in this theme.
I read a great article on CameronMoll.com called Exploring Cufón, a sIFR alternative for font embedding. Cufón is this rad javascript library that will exchange text with a font resides on your server. A friend of mine, Tyrel Kelsey showed me an example on a site that he designed using the script, and from there, I was set. Immediately, I knew that I wanted to create a grungy WordPress theme that I could use this on.
Nothing terribly revolutionary, but after staring at Facebook everyday, I wanted to put a persistent footer, that would have a couple of quick links in it. To create a fixed footer, simple add the following code to your div.
Make sure to add some bottom-margin to whatever div is going to be above it. You want to make sure you do that, so when you scroll to the bottom, you can see all of your content.
[css]
#footer {
margin:auto;
position:fixed;
margin:auto;
left:0;
bottom:0;
height:40px;
width:100%;
background:#242424;
z-index:1999;
}
[/css]
There are a couple of issues that in IE6 (Go figure…) But they can be resolved by adding this:
[css]* html #footer {
top:expression(eval(document.compatMode && document.compatMode==’CSS1Compat’) ? documentElement.scrollTop +(documentElement.clientHeight-this.clientHeight) : document.body.scrollTop +(document.body.clientHeight-this.clientHeight));
position:absolute;
}
[/css]
I mentioned already the font replacement. I found some cool vector packs that had some skull designs in them. The post headers have a banner that overlays the other divs due to some negative margins. One thing to be aware of, if you follow a similar design, is to make sure that links have the coverage that they might need. I had them squeezed a lot tighter, but it was hard to click on the post links.
So, all in all, I think that it turned out to be a pretty cool theme. Not for everyone, but I think that someone will get a kick out of it.
I am excited today, to FINALLY release a WordPress theme that I have been working on. In all of it’s glory, A Daring Inspiration.
Daring Inspiration is a theme that I have had kicking around in my head for a long time. For those unfamiliar, there is a great site on the internet run by mac pundit, John Gruber called Daring Fireball. John write simple text posts, and shares them in a link style that lends itself to being more of a link style blog then a traditional one.
With that being said, this theme is GPL licensed, XHTML valid, and rocking in its simplicity.
