Site History

Since 2005, Darren Hoyt Dot Com has been a blog about CSS, content management, client relations and all aspects of front-end web design.

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December 2011

• Thu 15^th

  Wireless Void

  My favorite piece of writing in the last year was “Sad as Hell”, published by n+1. Officially it’s a book review for Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story. Unofficially it’s a portrait of the reviewer’s addiction to media and the struggle to prevent it from derailing her life.

February 2011

• Tue 1^st

  Designing Readability

  The original Readability bookmarklet took on such a life of its own between 2009-2010, it made this week’s launch of Readability.com inevitable.

September 2010

• Thu 9^th

  Current Status

  A year ago I started collaborating with my friend Lawrence to develop custom software that hooked up technical experts with people in need. We launched WPQuestions first, and later, PHP Emergency, Symfony Experts, Javascript Questions and MYSQL Emergency which are aggregated at our umbrella site CodeWise.

August 2010

• Mon 30^th

  Moving Target

  My favorite book on the film industry is William Goldman’s (The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid) “Adventures in the Screen Trade”. What I love is there are no specific conclusions about filmmaking…

May 2010

• Sun 9^th

  Community Expectations

  Dribbble opened to the public last month while generating a lot of discussion about community and exclusivity. Drawar runs a great community of its own where this week users discussed what disappointed them about Dribbble.

April 2010

• Tue 20^th

  Designing with Social Skills

  Raise your hand if you never went to art school. For better or worse I jumped into interactive design without learning design fundamentals. Instead I worked backwards, self-educating intensely, even now.

• Wed 7^th

  Introducing CodeWise

  As WPQuestions has continued gaining users, we’ve also expanded our family of sites to include Javascript, the Symfony framework and PHP, all using a single installation of the custom Q&A software we’ve built.

March 2010

• Sun 14^th

  Tweets to Remember

  Specific blog posts can be credited with widespread influence of opinion. Can microblogging’s limited format accomplish the same thing?

• Wed 10^th

  Obama Theme, Republican Candidate

  Today Geoff Fox tipped me off to something ironic: the website for Republican congressional candidate Daria Novak is using a WordPress theme I designed back in 2008 for Obama supporters.

• Tue 9^th

  Dribbble, Meritocracy and the Open Web

  Last month I was lucky to be drafted into Dribbble by a fellow designer. It’s a private beta site with a lot of buzz. It will eventually grow and go public which got me thinking about the ramifications.

January 2010

• Thu 7^th

  Design Versatility

  At the beginning of each new year, I do some navel-gazing about where I should be career-wise. I look over my portfolio and take note of things I could have done differently.

December 2009

• Tue 22^nd

  Creating Custom WordPress Widgets

  With each new version of WordPress, the argument whether or not it qualifies as a CMS gets a little quieter. In the WordPress core we have widgets, custom fields, custom taxonomies, and with version 2.9, an expansion of get_post_type. Add a few plugins and all sorts of post-types and custom write panels become a reality. [...]

• Fri 11^th

  Feature Suggestions for Gravy

  I released a baseline theme and PSD set called Gravy back in August and am happy sales have exceeded expectations. Just as important, user feedback has shown that the theme speeds up development time and can be used for diverse projects.

• Tue 8^th

  Introducing WPQuestions

  This week, my development partner and I launched WPQuestions.com, a new problem-solving site for the WordPress community, and the response so far has been incredible.

October 2009

• Wed 28^th

  Notes on the Pro Theme Redesign

  Last week, Ben and I launched the new version of Pro Theme Design. For me it was the first opportunity since going freelance to design a concept, logo, layout and content from the ground up, so I thought I’d make some notes on the process.

September 2009

• Sun 20^th

  Better Button and Nav Interactions

  Using a simple button example to remind myself about the fundamentals of user interaction and expectations.

June 2009

• Thu 11^th

  WPTopics: A WordPress Content Filter

  WPTavern had a discussion last week about the huge number of WP developer blogs that have sprung up. As an experiment I decided to build a WordPress content aggegator that would filter only the most useful stuff.

May 2009

• Wed 20^th

  A WordPress Theme for Writers and Journalists

  Traditional newspapers continue closing their doors as more journalists are striking out on their own to start blogs, news aggregators and hyperlocal community sites built on open-source platforms like WordPress.