Realignment
Well, that didn’t work, let’s try it again
I relaunched this site earlier this year mainly to have a place to show my work of the past three years, but also in the hopes that it would trigger me to write more. Partially because the format I chose was very restricting and while it wasn’t obvious to begin with it became apparent to me the more stuff I added to it. That frustrated me and that frustration led to me not wanting to do anything with it. In the months that followed it languished and eventually I stopped posting anything there - including new work.
A Return to Form
So I’ve spent the past week or so putting together this new WordPress theme which is a return to the grid based layouts of my websites past. To keep things simple I made it a pretty basic grid with 8 columns plus a little more for padding on the sides - it’s probably not a true grid, but it’s close enough for me that I’m ok with the minute differences. This gives me room to play with the layout on different pages (see the Portfolio section vs. a Portfolio entry) and it also gives me room to grow as I add more things to the site.
Not only is this theme a return to previous design forms, but with copious amounts of help from Chris Pirillo and Matt Brett, in the form of the Social Me functionality, it’s also a return to sharing social media. I’ve been using del.icio.us, flickr, digg and last.fm for what seems like forever and with ‘new’ services like twitter, jaiku, plurk, brightkite and others I’ve got a lot of stuff to share that I just haven’t been. So this theme takes full advantage of Social Me and allows me to put any feed from any service anywhere I want so no matter what page you’re on you’ll see what I’m up to and if you want to follow/friend me, there are links to all of my services in the footer and if you don’t want to follow me then just periodically check out my Social Me page where you can see everything that I’m doing on the web, in one handy place.
With this theme, everything you see is a post within the WordPress system so if you subscribe to this site’s RSS feed you can see when I post a new article or new portfolio project which means that if you see an article or a portfolio project that you really like/hate, you can leave a comment and tell me what you think. It also means that it’s super easy to update, which is important because I know myself - if it’s not easy to update and make it work then I’ll push it off and it’ll never happen.
I also paid extra attention to the homepage - one area that I feel was lacking with the old site. You’ll also notice that it features the last portfolio project I added, plus my four most recent flickr photos, links to my last articles, tweets and delicious links so even from there it’s easy to see what’s going on and the most important social stuff is always in the footer, so no matter where you go on the site, you can see what’s going on.
Bugs and Business
There are still some bugs I still need to squash around here so if you notice anything out of place, don’t worry I’ll find them, kill them and their children. Anyway, that’s the end of this quick little tour, if you’d like to leave a comment, I love hearing from people so please, comment away!
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