Downloading and tweaking one of the many themes of Wordpress is all fine and good. But what happens when you want to extend your blog/site past what someone else’s theme can give you? The truth is - this is a realm where most users are terrified to go. While I understand those fears, they aren’t totally warranted. Building a Wordpress theme can be quite easy, given the right process.

I’m freaking out man!

Building a Wordpress theme can be broken down into three steps; design, front-end development, and lastly the Wordpress implementation itself. I’m not quite sure how others do it, but the following guide is a detailed look into the process I have developed for building Wordpress themes.
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Popularity: 100% [?]

Me!

I had a colleague ask me about this site, asking if it was mine. While I do live in Portland, I do love CSS, I am shocked that Google would bestow this honor upon me. And as James Hall, a CSS guru from The Good Harvest, told me, blogging about the fact I am known for Portland and CSS will make my Google Search ranking even stronger for those terms!

So here I am. Feeling fancy! Indulge me in my narcissism and run a search for portland and css. Oh happy joy day.

Ok, back to the code.

——

Update: Ok, no longer number one, stupid Google! That lasted all of 20 minutes.

Popularity: 20% [?]

After a late night at a Deerhoof concert, we all awoke fairly sleepy. I am surprised I have made it this far without a nap. Today was the first day of the SXSW panels. As with any conference, there are times slots and multiple panels available. Thankfully they release podcasts of each panel so that I still may get the information I missed out on.

There were five panels I attended. Each of them offered a different insight into the topic they were covering. More than anything they made me inspired, warm, and fuzzy. I think SXSW draws all of the rockstars in the industry and they do as good of job being in the audience as they do on their panels. It’s refreshing to know that they are still out there seeking knowledge from their peers.
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Popularity: 10% [?]

Traditionally, when cutting up a Photoshop layout, we all used to think of the entire thing like a jigsaw puzzle. Overlapping elements were an illusion because the element that appeared to overlap was really being cut up and then fit back together.

And then came the png. While the PNG most definitely has issues across the different browsers, there are ways to get it to play nicely with whatever site being built. Yes, it usually involves a CSS hack. No, it does not validate. However I believe it is more important to start thinking of a layout as a series of layers overlapping, versus the traditional jigsaw puzzle.
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Popularity: 19% [?]

Nicholas Galanin is a good friend of mine from Sitka, Alaska. He designs beautiful Tlingit Art and Jewelry as well as runs HomeSkillet Records.

Galanin has been bugging me for awhile for a new site. He’s been on his own hustle and utilizes the web really well. The only problem was his last website I built (long before eleven3 came about) was only editable by me via email updates. That and the fact it was built in tables, wasn’t everything he wanted, and was just getting dated. For a while now he has been due. A few weeks back I got inspired and started designing. I’m happy with the outcome. It still needs some polish work, but I like to think if you build a good framework for a website, expanding and enhancing it is the time you spend on it, versus doing email updates.
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Popularity: 7% [?]

Ever since I was pushed to figure out the IE PNG filter hack in CSS it has become essential to my website building. Although it does allow a lot more flexibillity when designing and building websites, it has its quirks.

Slowly I have been feeling out the parameters of the png hack. There have been about three times where I must have spent between 3-5 hours trying to figure out why either it wasn’t working, or it was causing other weird issues. Namely the linking issue. There is a thorough guide here, a lot more thorough than anything I would write on the subject. I’m just here to complain, oh and my own solution is listed as well.
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Popularity: 10% [?]

Personally, when going to edit one of my old stylesheets, I get disgusted with the amount of scrolling I have to do. No matter how well everything is commented, it still builds a long file with an overwhelming amount of code.

About a year ago I was dealt the task to code Music In Every Direction for Konami (Keep in mind many people have been in this system since I coded it originally). They had multiple color schemes for their different game series, yet the layout for all of them was the same. That is when I stumbled (a little bit of A HA! and a little bit of I probably saw it elsewhere) on a practice of creating a global stylesheet and stylesheets for color scheme. Whereas HTML and CSS are split by content and design, respectively, splitting a CSS stylesheet up gets broken into layout/positioning and color schemes.
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Popularity: 6% [?]

One of the really cool things about this latest web boom (I think I shall coin it web 2.0 (-; ) is RSS feeds. Granted they have been around much longer than all of this new stuff, but they have really started maturing over the last two years or so. The ability for any jackass, such as myself, to create a flickr or youtube account and subscribe to that data is totally awesome.

To take it one step further, we can also take sed RSS feed and pull it into our own blogs/sites. Kind of like the homepage of this site. What one sees is the parsing of three RSS feeds, one for del.icio.us, flickr, and last.fm.

I added those on there because I wanted all the time I spend doing other things on the web to reflect on my blog. Yet, in doing so, I ALMOST had to sacrifice something else that was very important to me. Standards.
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Popularity: 13% [?]

As guilty as I am of pasting these at the bottom of my sites, I think they will probably be similar to the Netscape Now buttons of the early web. It’s kinda like repping your hometown or team or whatever. Yes we rep XHTML/CSS because we all believe it’s the right thing to do; we know it is the right thing.

In my last post I talked about the entry fee for getting a job at my company required being up to par on web standards. Yes, we recommend one uses firefox with the web developer toolbar as well. Oh and there is also the useful Measure-It! extension. With all of these tools in one’s pocket, the question becomes, why haven’t some people caught on?

Microsoft Internet Explorer. This would require an entry in itself.

Perhaps one day all sites will be coded in valid css/xhtml and the validation links at the bottom will seem innappropriate and unecessary. Either way, Microsoft has a lot of making up to do to those of us in the web space. Perhaps they could make their browser standards compliant, and make something as appropriate as validation links go away.

Or they will just be Microsoft, and we will have to fight the good fight for the long run. I hope they come around.

(Checking out IE7 soon, somewhere I saw a dual install for both IE6 and IE7, so what happens to my IETab extension??)

Popularity: 13% [?]

I am in the middle of a project where I am combining two sources of old school code, one really bad rat’s nest of code (that has gotten much better thanks to the counterpart who I am working with) and the other just remnants of the old school bad.

The reason I bring this up is the fact I am becoming a bit of a code snob. Ugly, sloppy code really grosses me out. There was some code pulled up on a projector today and I had to turn away. So when did this happen for me?

I was introduced to the wonderful world of CSS about two years ago now. Before that I was building sites like everyone else, tables and spacer gifs. I can completely understand the necessity of those means before CSS came along, but now I can’t bear to work like that. Seperating design and content is essential to get past any sort of design changes one has to a multipaged website.
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Popularity: 14% [?]