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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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March 2008

• Thu 13^th

  Mimbo Pro, The Day After

  Just wanted to thank everyone for the nice reviews on Mimbo Pro so far, and also for their patience today. As mentioned before, Plimus, which manages the secure transactions and affiliate stuff, takes a fairly proactive stance toward fraud and spam. As a result, they hand-process the first batch of orders to ensure all transactions are legitimate….

• Wed 12^th

  Mimbo Pro Magazine Theme Released

  Mimbo Pro is a powerful and feature-rich theme for Wordpress, developed by Darren Hoyt and Ben Gillbanks and released through Ben’s Pro Theme Design marketplace…

• Tue 11^th

  A WordPress Theme for Barack Obama Supporters

  We had a departmental meeting last month at Category 4 and realized that 1) we all liked Barack Obama, and 2) we wanted to release some free Wordpress themes since we use Wordpress for so many of our smaller projects. The combined result is Probama, the first freebie of what I hope will be many…

• Fri 7^th

  Mimbo News & Customizations, Part IV

  First things first — with Wordpress 2.5 due out on Monday, we’d like to give the community, and ourselves, at least a couple days to install/adjust before launching Mimbo Pro. Otherwise things are going great and we’re finishing up the last of hosting and commerce issues….

• Tue 4^th

  Microsoft IE8 Team Reverses Targeting Policy

  Zeldman cautiously supported the IE8 team’s previous strategy of default version-targeting whereas Jeremy Keith argued passionately against it. In the end, supporters of Keith’s argument prevailed in getting the IE8 developers to change their minds…

• Sat 1^st

  Additional features and custom controls for Mimbo Pro

  It’s been a very productive week with very little sleep, but things are progressing nicely with Mimbo Pro. Ultimately, our goal is to create a CMS-like theme that requires no manual template editing. To achieve that so far, we’ve added to a growing list of features which are handled through a custom control panel tab. During testing this weekend, we had a few more in-the-moment brainstorms…

February 2008

• Wed 27^th

  How does your blog display RSS info?

  Back in the relative old days of 2003-2004 when orange RSS icons started appearing in the sidebars of websites, very few users knew what to do with them. Jeff Veen said said…

• Sat 23^rd

  Development of Mimbo Pro is Wrapping Up

  Barring any major snags, the Mimbo Pro theme will be released in less than two weeks. It will be sold exclusively through a new WP theme marketplace run by a blogger/friend who also contributed some fancy programming to Mimbo Pro’s control panel options. Here are some features to look forward to…

• Wed 20^th

  Tell Me About Your Town

  After thinking about it for awhile, I’ve committed to renting out my house for two months this summer so I can live abroad and work remotely. The plan is to find a room in some beach town, work on what is hopefully a reliable and fast connection, and otherwise travel, surf, read, write, drink in bars, and clear my head for awhile…

• Fri 15^th

  Advanced Streamline Techniques

  You wouldn’t be able to tell judging by the tardiness of Mimbo Pro (ha), but I’ve always been (unhealthily) obsessed with finding ways to do things more efficiently. It’s what inspired this previous post (“Streamline Your Process: RSS Feeds, Bookmarks, Frameworks, Design Resources”).

• Tue 12^th

  Creating Two-Tiered Conditional Navigation in WordPress

  Here is a common navigational scheme, with parent pages on top and child pages (if they exist) on bottom…

• Sat 2^nd

  The Life Cycle of a Blog Post

  What happens as your posts get published, ping servers, get indexed, get scraped, get syndicated, linked by other blogs and finally consumed? If you want to see the life cycle demonstrated in an awkward, unnavigable Flash format, Wired magazine has your number.

• Sat 2^nd

  Combining Featured Posts with the Standard Loop

  I recently had a client who requested his blog display posts similar to GigaOm.com — one featured excerpt, three featured headlines, followed by the standard Loop and pagination…

• Fri 1^st

  'Exutoire' Blog Offers Video Tutorials for Mimbo

  A French blogger named Yves has created eight (!) video tutorials which demonstrate basic configuration, adding images, CSS styling, tabs, and overall homepage setup for the Mimbo theme (English translation here).

January 2008

• Tue 29^th

  Publishing External RSS Headlines to Your WordPress Site

  I wouldn’t advise republishing content from any old RSS feed, but sometimes there’s a reason…

• Sun 27^th

  Easy Date-Based Image Mastheads

  Around Christmas, I had a client ask for masthead imagery that would automatically swap in/out based on the time of year. Here is the HTML/PHP I used…

• Sat 19^th

  Mimbo News & Customizations, Part III

  This week, the total downloads for Mimbo surpassed 13,000! If I didn’t work for the company that hosts darrenhoyt.com, I’m sure I would have already received an unaffordable bill as bandwidth usage has exceeded 15GB/month. I’m also amused to see how all the Mimbo backlinks have skewed my Technorati rankings.

December 2007

• Sat 29^th

  Preliminary Sketches of Mimbo Pro

  At the beginning of this month, I mentioned I’d be developing a paid version of the Mimbo theme while continuing to evolve the free version. My original deadline was the end of this year, but…