Web Site Updates

I recently updated the look and feel of the the site. Everything but the home page is designed and coded by me. In the past I would normally find a theme I liked and just modify it to fit my needs; but my needs are getting pickier.

I created a mockup of the site using Pixelmator. It’s a nice product developed for the mac that uses the GPU instead of the CPU for rendering. This allows you to see effects in real time. If you have a mac I highly recommend that you try it out; there’s a 30 day demo. I have to say it is much easier to create a mockup in an image editor and make changes versus doing the mockup in code. Being a programmer I prefer to just sit down and code, but in the end I usually end up not getting the look I want and scrapping the entire concept. As for the results, I like the new design but I think it needs some work. Keep in mind I am not a graphic designer, so if you think it sucks please keep it to yourself .

As for the home page, this was a concept I took from a JQuery tutorial and I modified it to work with WordPress. While I like the concept I need to rewrite the JQuery from scratch and change how pictures are loaded. I’ve had several people tell me that the images take too long to load. So I would like to have the page load and then use JQuery to pull the remaining 5 images (1 image per featured post). This way, if someone clicks on a post and the image has not loaded yet they’ll get a loading bar versus the entire page taking 30 seconds or more to load. There are a few problems I have with the limitations of some WordPress function calls. At the moment I’m trying not to modify the WordPress code base, this would be bad for future upgrades, but I need to find a better way to better customize the WordPress output. An example is the “[..]” for each except on the home page. You can’t remove this and you can’t make that a link to the full article without modifying the WordPress code. Oh well, sometimes you have to just deal with the lemons you’re given.