gatekeepeR's Blog

I spent the better portion of an hour and change this morning grabbing most of my photos off of the livejournal gallery and moving them to my newly established gallery here.  (Nevermind how much of a pain that was to get working).  You’d think that as big as LJ is, they’d make it easier to get the pictures in a simple download rather than having to go to each full-size one and saving it to the hard drive.  That’s what really took so long.  Getting them here once they were downloaded… pretty easy.   (Read More…)

Since shipping off HalfTon 1.0 to the twins over the weekend, I’ve spent the last few days getting even deeper into the intricacies that are Wordpress Theming.  I think it’s safe to say at this point that I’m addicted.

Since Saturday, I’ve done quite a bit of work to the theme for their site.  It’s enough to me that I’ll wind up actually increasing version numbers. =)

I’ll provide a laundry list of changes:

• Internalized most of the Java to use the WP-packaged binaries (you mean I don’t need to include over 50k of scripts?! No wai!)
• Re-formatted the post comments area
• Created an additional admin area to include “regular” post data that they generate – Restaurant Info, post thumbnail, etc.
• Created a theme options page where they can change the variables for the links.

Those last two items are huge.  As I’ve been discovering, the theme options are what really makes a theme stand out, especially in the “premium” category, where it’s about the only way to distinguish yourself against the competition.   There are some really amazing theme option pages out there.  And some others that truly suck.

All of this work has led me to want to start in on another theme – but right now, I’m kind of lacking in the “graphical inspiration” category.  I suppose that’s what I get for spending too much time on the code aspects of my reading and not the design aspect.  =/

BTW, if you see any random theme changes around here, don’t despair.  I’m just looking through the various themes to get an idea of popular theme options.  I’ll be back to the regular BlackPress theme here soon.

Just a quick note – Matt & Dan have gone active with the new design over at halftonreviews.com.  Head on over there and check it out.  =)

It’s required a bit of extra work on Matt’s part to get it working (editing a lot of post info).  But it’s there.  =)

The site is heavily enabled with javascript (to hide some elements and make others “pop”).  I was going to actually add a few other things, one cool one would have been a script that would automatically add in a google map based on any location info within the page.  The problem though, would come when the page itself had multiple cities on it (like the list of all posts).  Bit of a pain given their setup, but would have been workable.

We’ve had 48 hours to hear all the news about the new Apple iPad (and God forbid, we’ll hear more about it in the near future more than many of us would care for).  Many of the pundits are calling it a true rival to Amazon’s Kindle and the e-reader market.

I came across a brief article the other day that asked the question “Is the iPad a game-changer?” (CNNMoney.com article)  The article lists a few valid points about the ultimate question of where the iPad fits into the computing scheme of things.  After taking some time to digest the specs and capabilities, as well as read some of the drivel (for everyone’s sake – there have been a few good ones out there) that many reporters have spouted about the iPad, I don’t think that it will be some huge seller or success like the iPhone is.  (see this CNNMoney article for the analyst’s predictions.)

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