January 2009
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Wed 7th
Update: Spider, Frog and Turtle
Late last summer, I blogged about 3 critters my girlfriend and I had found nearly drowning in a pool filter. Since then, the story has gotten some exposure.
December 2008
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Sat 20th
A Twitter I Would Pay For
To be blunt, I’ll admit: I’ve poked fun at Twitter since the very beginning. Because it seemed like fluff, like noise, because it reduced smart people to oversharing narcissists, because it created strange, artificial, disproportionate popular kid/unpopular kid/cult leader/sheep hierarchies. I felt dorky just saying the word Twitter.
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Thu 4th
Effectively Advertising an RSS Feed
Google Reader’s popularity is surging and the number of people consuming web content via RSS readers has grown overall, but no one’s claiming RSS is a mainstream concept just yet. It’s mostly the geeks and early-adopters who know what it is and what to do with it, thus they don’t need to be sold on whether a blog offers an RSS feed…
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Tue 2nd
Dreaming of the Portable Workspace
For ten years, I’ve wanted the ability to develop websites comfortably on any system. This means traveling to South America somewhere, sitting down at a public computer in a coffee shop and having all my bookmarks, RSS feeds, applications and development files available. I’m pretty picky about streamlining my workflow, so a truly portable workspace would be ideal.
October 2008
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Wed 22nd
Creating Custom Listings with Expression Engine, Part II
In Part I of the tutorial, we learned how to use Expression Engine’s control panel to set up a custom field group which powers our “Homes” listings. In Part II, we learn how to upload, resize and display images in a variety of contexts.
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Tue 21st
WordPress as a CMS: Making Your Content Unbreakable
It might surprise you how infrequently I build WordPress sites intended for actual blogging. More often, I’m building 15- or 20-page websites for businesses who need a bunch of static content displayed in a variety of ways. Some of this can be accomplished with plugins, but the rest must be inserted in the post-edit screen, making things messy for the client.
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Fri 3rd
Improvisation in Design
On days when I’m not designing mockups, I’m creating paintbrushes and downloading textures and editing Kuler palettes, organizing them all in a central library, plus writing documentation, chipping away at baseline PSDs, CSS and WordPress frameworks, and generally streamlining the process. Setting the Rules and Regulations for the design department is part of my job description. This can be a double-edged sword.
September 2008
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Thu 18th
Exploring WordPress Frameworks and Child Themes
If you’ve been keeping up with Ian Stewart’s ThemeShaper blog this summer (if you haven’t, you should be looking deep within yourself to ask why not), you’ve seen loads of documentation for his WordPress framework, Thematic and the various child themes which inherit their power from Thematic’s mothership functionality.
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Sun 14th
Notes on the Agregado Theme
Since Agregado launched on Monday, we’ve had about 3500 downloads plus a lot of questions about how it works and why it was made. Here’s a bit more documentation to add to what Smashing already published.
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Wed 10th
Agregado 1.2 Released
More feedback, more changes to the theme, thanks again for everyone’s testing and patience.
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Tue 9th
Agregado 1.1 Released
The response to the Agregado release has been fantastic and the folks at Smashing were great to collaborate with. Here are some changes we’ve already made
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Mon 8th
Agregado Lifestream Theme for Wordpress Released
Agregado is a WordPress theme by Darren Hoyt and Matt Dawson, commissioned by the folks at Smashing Magazine. It features a built-in lifestream module and contact form with with custom control panel options.
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Mon 1st
All the Way Down
At the swimming pool, Wistar and I sometimes poke around in the filters to see what animal carnage might be swirling around. Usually it’s frogs, Japanese beetles, dragonflies, grasshoppers or some combination. This is especially true during summer storms, like this week’s heavy rainfall which surely killed hundreds of animals unlucky enough to be trapped in small spaces.
August 2008
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Wed 27th
Back to School Sale on Mimbo Pro
On September 1st, Pro Theme Design will be having a 30% off sale on all copies of Mimbo Pro. How does it work? Follow my Twitter feed and be on the lookout for a tweet containing the special coupon code. The sale only lasts 24 hrs, so mark your calendars.
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Mon 25th
Creating Custom Listings with Expression Engine, Part I
Compared to just three years ago, more and more of Category 4’s small-business clients have become comfortable maintaining their own website via CMS. We’ve built many of these sites with WordPress which clients have overwhelmingly loved. But more and more, larger projects require finely-tuned content management and custom data-types that can be diversely displayed. The obvious choice lately has become Expression Engine.
June 2008
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Tue 24th
Designing for the Empty-Handed Client
I’m in the midst of a drafting a long post titled “Making the Most of Mediocre Content”. As you could guess, it’s about molding client-submitted materials into something more organized, focused and attractive. But what happens when a client has nothing to submit — no photos, no taglines, no logos, no text, no identity?
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Wed 11th
Displaying Related Category and Author Content in Wordpress
View any single-post page from Mimbo Pro and you’ll notice two sidebar modules called “More from this category” and “More from this author”. Learn why they’re valuable for keeping visitors on your site longer.
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Tue 3rd
The Rise of Visual Browsing
This time last year at the annual TED conference, Microsoft Live Labs demoed an immersive media-browsing tool that literally caused gasps in the audience. Seadragon/Photosynth is exactly the kind of ‘3-D web’ experience people were hyping in the late 1990s, along with VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), as though they were poised to go mainstream.
