Social Bookmark Icons

So I have added several links to social networking bookmarking sites to each of the pages within the theme..  I really wasn’t sure which ones most folks used so I went with the 4 that I knew the most.. I’m sure I’d be better served by adding twitter, google and others.. but really I’m not sure which ones most folks use.

I had thought of using an addthis.com bookmark button but I don’t know that I want their button on my site.. it’s kind of ugly plus I don’t know that I want to link to them.  I think they do popup ads and I’m not really keen on that..

If more networks are required I’ll likely create my own button system to house them all..

Wordpress OS7 Theme

So I have been using Windows 7 for a while now and I really do like it.  It’s no Snow Lepoard but it’s what I have.. heh  Honestly, its not bad at all..  I also have been using wordpress for a goodly while with the same theme “Microblue” a theme I created a year ago.

I’m getting bored with Microblue so its time for a change and I thought it would be fun to combine Windows 7′s look and feel into a wordpress theme.    This lead me down the road that I had started with my jQuery Windows post and posed an important question;

Do I implement a windows manager within a webpage?    God what a pain in the ass..

I could easily just create a static theme that looks sorta like windows 7..  Or.. I could create a much bigger and deeper product which would in essence be an entire windows manager..  In a  web browser..  I’m still pondering the route I want to go..

I’m not sure wordpress can handle some of the stuff I have in mind.. It would require some back end ajax work in order to take advantage of everything I want to do and I’m not sure I want to write that part of this..

The other issue here is that I’m going to be using a LOT of PNG files in order to take advantage of the alpha channel.  So older browsers will have to be waved off..  No matter which way I go this will be true..

I would like to try some effects that I don’t think you can do yet with PNG’s.. I want a PNG to be able to blur the image below it.. but I don’t think you can do that yet..  That will require some research..

I’m going to be working on this project for a bit outside of wordpress to get the basic look working then work on adding it to wordpress.

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Saturday, Jun 20th 2009 – So I have been working on my initial run at the WPOS7 theme.   I find it painfully ironic that IE8 can’t display it.  It works perfectly in Firefox and Safari but epic fail in IE.

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Sunday, Jun 21st 2009 — Well I spent the majority of the weekend working on my OS7 theme.  I have gone the windows manager route and am using this experience to learn more about jQuery.. What’s interesting is since I’m going this route, I’ll be able to apply my knowledge to Build Forge and the new UI that we are going to be creating..

It’s coming along nicely and works perfectly in Safari and Firefox… And to be honest, its working better than I would have thought..  IE8 is still an epic fail.. I mean dear god.. what a piece of crap..   I’m going to have to write some special jQuery stuff just to get IE8 working..  Assuming that doesn’t fail completely too..

I’m also going the route of writing it such that it will activate those windows that are created by the HTML as well as instancing new ones..   My reasoning behind this is for my work.. I am considering the creation of a new UI that would sit on the existing code base..

We’ll see.. I want to make this sucker as functional as possible..

You can see my progress here:

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

I’ve run into some interesting javascript foibles that I have had to deal with and have also taken this opportunity to start on my own javascript toolbox.

Every artist has his favorite paintbrush or pens, every carpenter his favorite hammer, and every plumber his favorite ass crack pants.. I’m using this project to develop my own javascript toolkits. For now they are largely unfinished and designed to be used for .. well this project.. but it is a start..

With regards to the theme, I’m working specifically on getting the colorchooser to work. Right now it doesn’t choose colors, and I only got the slider/picker cursors to work today. But only on clicks, you can’t drag them yet.

I’m hoping to have it work better than the Chromatophore stuff, and so far the one thing that works better (in my opinion) is the way the chooser slides out. Firstly from a purely javascript profiling stand point I win hands down;

The Chromatophore theme makes 454 javascript calls to “slide” their colorchooser down, where as my version only makes 88 calls.. 454 man! I have no idea what they are doing of course because they obfuscate their code and I don’t feel like eval’ing it out and running tidy to figure it out..

My color chooser will also be fixed once down so you can scroll around the page and have the color chooser open to see how your changes work live on the page, instead of having a mini-preview — right now this isn’t the case but it will be.

I’m still very excited about this and working on it.. but this is taking time.

To that end I have decided to convert (or redesign) the Chromatophore Joomla theme into a combined wordpress / invision power board theme. I decided to go with this look because I very much appreciate what the folks over at RocketTheme did with the Chromatophore theme. To be honest if I were using Joomla I’d buy it, but since I’m not I must create my own.

Instead of just cutting and pasting their html, js, css, and images into an already created wordpress template I have decided to recreate the theme from what I see alone. Without looking at their source — at all.  (So far I’ve only peaked a couple times)

It’s been a challenge to be honest. One that I am up to for sure as my webdesign-foo is strong, but they have done some pretty neat kungfu hackery here that I really like. Not sure who the lead ninja was on this one, but he did a very good job. (Why do I keep referencing martial arts?) You can test my progress here;

http://info.rsow.com/projects/fffredesign/

As you can see I’m a long way off yet, but its coming along nicely. I have to get all the various bits working across the board and then try to apply it to the template system in wordpress .. then try to apply it to the even more convoluted template system in IPB. I have to admit the later one is gonna suck. I appreciate what the IPB folks were trying to do with template designs but they went WAY over board with cutting things up and making one’s life a living hell.

Also, most likely for the forum itself the left column of stuff will either have some form of minimize toggle or it will simple be hidden via css, I havent decided yet. I don’t want to crowd the forum. It’s had a full width layout for years now and shrinking it might annoy folks.

I really like how you can control all colors and what not in the Chromatophore theme and the same functionality will eventually exist in my theme.

It makes me think that there might be a market for folks who do nothing but convert themes from joomla to wordpress or to IPB.. Not a job I’m volunteering for as this is severly cutting into my game time.. but still a market all the same.

As of this posting, its the theme I’m using and I plan to release it to the wild once it’s fully working. I also will be releasing the PSD that I used to create it so you can take it one step farther if you like.

For icons I’m using either using famfamfam.com silk icons or taking those icons and modifying them in some way.

The theme uses widgets exclusively to add stuff to the various bars. I plan to make a fallback for them, but haven’t done that yet.

Update:

• I have created two custom widgets that add functionality to the theme:
  1. One allows you to use pages as tabs as in the top bar “Info, About, Resume..etc.”
  2. And the other allows you to add blog roll like functionality to the bar bars as a multi-widget and allows you to specify which parts of your links you mean to use. This one needs some polish.
• children of the current category will be displayed beyond 1 level in the left nav — I plan to make the current category icon yellow or something, but haven’t done that yet..

TODO:
1. Fix next/previous links
2. Fix “Pages” links within a single long post
3. Use JS to set the min-height of #page to either 600 or #rightmenu height !!
4. Get search working
5. Go through and tag all posts in order to make tag cloud useful
6. If not logged in make comment form display correctly
7. make child of child list items appear correctly
8. Add CSS changes for opera to fix the little stuff

More as I get to it.