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% [?]

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% [?]

I had to jump through numerous hoops to get this site to be of strict compliance. I figured I would share to get some dialogue going about different techniques that others have used as well as my own.

Although this list is published, I may add more to it in the future, just because this stuff never ends.

Before the list though, I would like to thank Steve James over at epicunion for keeping me up to date on the good, the bad, and the ugly of web standards. Everytime I think I can teach him something, he ends up teaching me.

Please comment on this post if you have any feelings towards any of it.
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Popularity: 9% [?]