by ·Comments Off on It’s alive!

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.

by ·Comments Off on Kindle vs. iPad…

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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Over the last few weeks, I’ve been working pretty heavily in theme design, specifically for WordPress.  After taking the time over the Christmas trip home to learn CSS, I dove right in.  (It’s a testament to how long I’ve been playing around on the web, as CSS was still in its infancy when I started, and dynamically driven pages/sites and CMS’es were hardly around, but I digress.)

Running three different CMS softwares over the last year and change, I’ve come to some basic conclusions about the two most prevalent – Joomla and WordPress.  I can appreciate each one for the differences and likenesses they possess.

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by ·Comments Off on Yay! New Theme is HERE!

So, if you’re seeing this here (at the site, I mean), then you’re checking out my new theme. 

The theme’s name is BlackPress – it’s a variation of a tutorial done by Richard Carpenter over at hv-designs.co.uk.  The tutorial just covered the Photoshop mockup, not the slicing and coding necessary to turn it into what you see here.  

I think that there’s one or two minor things that I’ll need to clean up, but otherwise, I’m calling this one done and moving onto the next project…

The quarter-ton duo from halftonreviews (Matt & Dan – half of the halfton quartet) are letting me work with them to really change their site around from this rather repetitive wordpress layout into something a bit more to their liking.  I think it’s possible.  With what I’m picking up from the WordPress Codex and other resources, as well as practice, everything should be good.

by ·Comments Off on Another new look on the way

I finished a mockup of a new theme last night.  I’m in the process of converting it to use for WordPress.  If you want to take a look at the general layout, head over to http://www.the-gatekeeper.net/misc/blackpress for a look. (A word of warning, it looks fine in FF, Chrome, Safari, and IE8, IE7 looks horrid.  I’m probably going to include some code in the final page that forces you to upgrade/use a different browser.  I just don’t like having to code for IE7 and earlier.)

It’s not my overall design.  I was following along on a tutorial for making it in Photoshop.  About the only thing I’ve really done differently is color and a bit of positioning.  But it’s really good, because there were a lot of elements in there that I had no clue how to make, and it’s helped me get my Ps skills better.

If you can’t tell, I tend to favor clean and somewhat “minimal” design looks.