I’ve been working on something that I like a lot. It’s a redesign of this of this blog and I’m hoping to have it done by Easter. I am coding the thing in HTML5 and throwing in a bunch of CSS3 styling and effects. So far the buildout has been going pretty well. I am learning a lot, using a bunch of new WordPress 2.9 functions, getting into HTML5 and unlearning old XHTML habits. Or at least trying to.

The new design will have a lot more focus on my portfolio, pushing toward getting some freelance projects moving. Not that I really have time right now with the new job and grad school – but I will need something at some point.

So anyway. Here’s a sneak peek.

This week has been absolutely great. I received a lot of good news, had friends over for dinner, got a lot done at work, played LEGO Rock Band… And now I’m ready for a weekend of working for myself.

My first task this weekend is to get the tea@elevensies site up and running. It’s taken too long and I feel bad. But I did have a rough stretch the past six months or so that deterred me from getting it all wrapped up — still, not a good excuse. This weekend is the weekend, however, to bust out this site for Ashley and Char. And then probably see what Ash wants to change (she apparently is over her design now). But at least it will be another project down.

The second issue I’m going to try to wrap up is this site. I’ve got most of a new design mocked up and sitting in Photoshop, just waiting for me to bring it to life in HTML5 and CSS3. So this site will change in the near future. And for the better, I think.

Third, I need get started on redesigning Jessica’s blog. Her new branding is amazing and I want to get it up and running for her, as well as a complete graphics package for her Etsy shop.

It is nice to have some time to work on personal design and coding. Stress is gone, and that goes a long way toward the proper motivation in these sorts of situations. Things are exciting!

Wow.

After releasing Modern Linguist on Friday, Chris Coyier gave me a shout out on Digging Into WordPress. I got a ton of traffic from that, and I owe him some thanks. It seems like those who have taken a look at the theme really enjoy it. I had to make a few modifications after my word counts got entered into the NaNoWriMo site, but it’s working. I did find out that their API is a little slower than I had anticipated. Maybe that a future project to donate to the Office of Letters and Light.

I’m well on my way to the 10,000 words I need by the end of the week. Jessica and I attended the Southern Illinois regional kick-off write-in and I was able to get 3700-something words packed in in the first four hours of noveling. Not too shabby. I’m planning to write another couple of thousand tonight and pull ahead of where I need to be.

I am also considering prepping some of my past WordPress templates for mass release. Some of them need rewrites and I’m thinking that might be a good beginning of 2010 project. Releasing one has got me all into it.

In other news, one major project down, one to finish up. Two of my big day job projects are winding down too, which means I can devote attention to a couple of other major ones that have been waiting in the wings.

We’ve got plane tickets booked for Christmas, plans set for Thanksgiving. It just might be a good end to 2009.

Modern Linguist is a WordPress template designed with National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) participants in mind.  Based partially on Chris Coyier’s beautiful WPTypo theme, Modern Linguist is an all-typographic theme created with easy reading in mind.

The theme has several pretty cool things built in. First off, it’s custom options allow integration with the NaNoWriMo.org word count API, providing dynamic and automatic word count updates pulled directly from the user’s NaNoWriMo profile. The user enters their ID number and that’s it, instant word count updates.

The options page also provides space to enter in a story synopsis and the option to display that text on the front page of the WordPress site. Read the rest of this entry »

ATTN: Those who have read/are planning to read my novel this year:

Oh some things have changed. Yes, yes they have.

When I thought about how messy the whole noveling on my blog process was last year, I made a rash decision. A decision with so little thought put into it that it is awesome. Instead of noveling my progress here, I have set up a completely new site with a completely new theme with awesome features.

All NaNoWriMo noveling will take place here: nanowrimo.thegoodmanblog.com.

Oh but that’s not all. I have built an entire WordPress template especially for National Novel Writing Month – and more specifically for my fellow WriMos that post to WordPress.

The new theme is called Modern Linguist and is based on Chris Coyier’s WPTypo theme, though with some decidedly drastic alterations. Notably, the theme has these amazing features:

• Built-in word counts pulled from the NaNoWriMo API (as soon as it’s activated for 2009, anyway)
• Clean, minimal interface. Not widgetized as to keep it focused on your novel(s)
• Choose-your-own Font Style with 8 (eight!) different typefaces
• Width optimized for online reading
• Typography based – no images in the template by default
• Optional Synopsis display on the front page
• Yearly category navigation (for easy novel separation)
• Special displays for registered/logged-in users

It’ll not only be a better experience for readers, but also for the person doing the noveling.

I’m looking at a launch date of 30 October, just in time for NaNoWriMo (which starts on the first of November). If you’re interested in using the template, let me know in the comments and I’ll make sure answer your questions and email the theme to you when it’s done!

For all of you that had an account here on my blog, that’s all been moved over to: http://nanowrimo.thegoodmanblog.com – you can login with your same credentials and should be able to read last year’s novel still. If you have issues, shoot me an email.

If any of you check out the new template, I’d love to hear your thoughts.

And for those of you who have no idea what I’ve been talking about, read this post.

DeanFields.com

Hey, hey. We just launched a new site built on WordPress and using my Prodigious theme.

I built the site for this guy called Dean Fields. He plays some pretty awesome folk-Americana-alt.country sort of music that you should check out. And you should also check out his fantastic new site.

A couple of things: Contrary to what the listing in portofolio says, we didn’t use the Gigs Calendar plugin (which is fantastic, by the way). Dean had a thing going with this ArtistData.com website and he organized all his shows there. The site was a bit tough to work with but I was able to get a raw XML feed to parse for the Upcoming Shows feature. That’s probably what took the longest. The “all shows” view is just an iframe from Artist Data — which I kind of hated to do, but it was the easiest and nicest looking solution.

As far as browsers go, I haven’t done much debugging for IE7 yet. But if you’re here reading my blog you probably don’t use IE7 regularly. Looks great in Safari and Firefox.

The “photo” on the front uses the jQuery Cycle plugin. It’s super cool and I’ve used it on a couple of other projects.

In any case, go check out his new site and his music!

www.deanfields.com

Super stoked about this one…

I’ve been working on a blog design for my friend Wix for awhile. He came to me in January, I think, and asked about getting a site designed and built for him.

The beauty was that he wasn’t in a rush and so I was able to work on this among all the other projects and sites and work I was doing. I felt kind of bad because it took awhile, but he’s been travelling a lot too…

Anyway, long story short. We hit it kind of hard this last week and have pushed it out for release today!

The overall design style for me is a bit different than what I’m used to. I took it as sort mid-90s + New Wave + Grunge and did a bunch of vector art and half-tone sort of things.

In any case, I’m happy to have it finished and live! Head over whatisawix.com and check it out! Let me (and him) know what you think.

Yeah, that last post. Forget it.

I totally forgot about WordPress’ XML-RPC features and that I could use a service (like PixelPipe) to update it. I looked into using this new service called Posterous – but it was too restrictive in having to verify emails to be able to post that I had to abandon it. Doesn’t work so well when I have 6+ people needing to use the service to update the blog and Twitter.

But PixelPipe offers a common email upload and will update everything including YouTube. So. Awesome. That’s the plan. I’ll have to do some testing (and I think LunarPages breaks the XML-RPC capabilities… I can’t get it to work on this or any blog on my server) to see what the formatting is like, but I think this will be a better solution.

Brand spankin’ new in time for Easter to be ending. This is my new blog design for WordPress, my personal favourite platform to blog on.

It’s been about a year since I debuted a new design and I’ve felt long over due for a new style. I think this design (entitled Keep Calm) better represents my personality. And my Anglo-centrism (yeah, ask me about it).

I’m doing some tweaking to some aspects of it still since I developed it locally without my remote server setup and all its widgets and content. Widgets always cause problems And apparently so will Firefox. (It looks fantastic in Safari and other Webkit based browsers) In any case, it’s mostly solid and I kind of love the way it turned out.

Let me know what you think in the comments! Even if you’re not as ecstatic with it as I am, it’d be great to hear your thoughts.