A Fresh Lick of Paint
Having announced my departure from the “day job” I thought it was about time to update my own personal site to reflect my new found employment status.
Of course I have known I was leaving for a while so have been grabbing a few hours here, a few minutes there to bring this site up to date. There’s still some content to add in, in particular on the new Project Portfolio pages, but it’s slowly getting there.
For anyone who is interested here are a few technical details about the newly revised theme:
- I decided to go full tilt into HTML5. It’s been fun trying to get my head into the new elements. HTML5 Doctor is a good friend.
- I took advantage of Google Web Fonts for the first time. The main title text is in Droid Serif.
- The new Projects Portfolio page uses a custom post type in WordPress. This is the first time I have tried this out in anger and although rather “code” heavy it worked out well. I tried adding in a custom taxonomy but for some reason and despite being an admin I get a “cheatin h’uh” error when trying to view them. This started to happen after I upgraded to 3.1.
- I also added in one level of nested comments. I have been meaning to do this for a while and toyed with the idea of using Disqus. However in the end I decided to stay native as I prefer the moderation tools in WordPress.
- The icons are now culled from the excellent Pictos sets by Drew Wilson
- I have a new logo, courtesy of Mike
- I used the excellent jQuery Masonry to tile the panels on the Projects page
- I toyed with numerous contact form plugins and still couldn’t find a simple enough one that was flexible. Any recommendations welcome.
- Caching is on and it’s running nice and fast!
There’s still a few more tweaks to do and some “bugs” to fix but overall it’s nice to have it live on the site.
8 Comments
Nice! Looking good :)
Good call on Disqus, I used it for a while on my blog and it was sooo ugly.
I like it, Keir.
All the very best with your new ventures.
One question though – what’s with the fascination with limes?!
Thanks Laura – Yeah it’s a great service but I prefer the moderation in WordPress.
Love the clean and minimalist theme and agree that going native instead of disqus was a good idea.
We’ve been playing with jQuery Masonry for a project lately and love it. We found it a bit tricky to get right in conjunction with media queries but once you’ve got the animations and styling nailed it really looks great
Keep up the great work
Love it. Sad your leaving TVM. Hope all works out in future.
Thanks Ric! As for the limes it stems from when I used to live in Limehouse in London. I also used to have a site at fiveandlime.com. It kind of just stuck.
Thanks a lot Sebastian.
Thanks for the feedback Marc. It sounds like you have pushed the boundaries of Masonry much further than me. I haven’t started on any media queries for this site yet but certainly plan to. I know there’s plenty more in terms of animation to. If you have a reference site do let me know.