Category: Web Design

Ever since I heard WordPress was going to release 2.0.x; I’ve been planning my upgrade. Unfortunately RL kept interferring. Once I got my RL mostly settled down, I started working on those upgrade plans again. But then so many new/cool/wowser themes and plugins were coming out that I ended up scrapping and restarting my plans multiple times. I’ve finally decided to stop scrapping my plans and implement one of them, though this means all my faithful readers will be treated to some sort of blog insanity as I get everything upload, altered, activated, tweaked, upgraded and running the way I want it. After the disruption, I look forward to sharing some new features on this site with you.

And yes, that’s a teaser to make sure you come back once the dust settles around here.

ICON is a local science-fiction convention that is run by some people I know. In previous years, their website has been a monstrosity built using M$’s Frontpage (similar to their parent org’s1 current website). However for the next ICON2, the comittee (con-com) running the con includes people I personally know and who I was able to con persuade into doing something a bit different. You see, I had this vision of a website that the con-com could log into and update themselves. This would free up their web person to simply cook up a pleasant3 design and allow the site to be updated whenever the con-com needed it vs. whenever the web person could get around to it. Since I know the main man of the con-com for ICON 30; I proposed the idea to him and he seemed interested in the idea. So I cooked up a site that I ran on my little home server to give him something to look at. Later he stopped by for an evening and said that the site looked good to him. Shortly thereafter, I got the site posted and now ICON30 is running WP to keep people informed about the con. There are a few customizations and plugins that have been added onto the site to make it work the way we wanted, but overall I’m very pleased with it.

What my next step? Why to redo the parent org’s website of course! Though, I’m thinking that they might want/need something a bit more involved than what I cooked up for ICON.

1The parent org is Mindbridge
2ICON 30, Slaying the Dragon of Tradition! October 28 – 30, 2005 in Cedar Rapids, IA
3Naturally said design would need to be based on valid XHTML & CSS.

I was off reading Adam Gessaman‘s site and noticed that Firefox had tossed an icon that I’d never noticed before into my status bar. I clicked on it and was presented with a list of alternative style sheets to use in viewing the site!

Ok, maybe this is only cool to geeks like me who enjoy web design but wouldn’t it be nice if every site offered you the ability to change your style sheet at will? And didn’t require some crappy Javascript to pull it off?
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AWelkin,

I’ve made some more changes to that template which is posted on my site for your review. You can use the same information that I’ve already e-mailed you in order to access it and see the changes. If you look at it now; you’ll see that I’ve restructured the nav menu. I did this because when you mentioned you wanted a section for Bryon and I quickly hacked one page to show how it could look. Well, it looked bloody odd as it had so few items under it compared to the rest of the menu. Please take a look at it and let me know what you think.