When I started work on the Wordpress theme for this blog I did so with thoughts of eventually releasing it into the wild but at the time releasing it was by no means the immediate goal. I wrote the theme myself because I wanted a reason to dive into some PHP as well as because I knew familiarity with (one of) the most popular blogging platforms could only be good for me. I started work on it around the time Wordpress 2.5 was released and github shows my first commit on 10 May 2008 though I know I started working on it prior to that because the first commit contains a pretty recognizable set of files.

After working on it for a while I it got to a point where I was more or less satisfied with the way it looked in my primary browsers of concern¹. I largely ignored IE(Internet Explorer) because to be honest I didn’t expect much traffic and what traffic I figured I get I didn’t believe would be using IE. As a result I was content with my theme and while I realize it’s not a pillar of web design or anything I think it serves it’s purpose and features the important part, the content, prominently.

This all brings me up to about a week ago² when I decided I could use some supplementary income and at the time I thought things looked ‘ok’ in IE and so it would be quick to polish things off, get it uploaded and wait to see if it got approved. However, once I read the information available on themeforest and realized what files where required and that there was an approval process I realized I had to take this a little more seriously. Not to mention that when I actually looked at the theme (and hence this site) in IE I realized how wrong I had been about the couple of quick fixes and then upload.

Knowing someone was going to be reviewing my work also made me a little more critical of it. I had included some MooTools in order to accomplish some pretty basic things. I did this mostly out of laziness and so upon looking at my work critically I knew this needed to come out because the 7 or so lines of JavaScript I had written using MooTools were certainly not enough to justify the library’s inclusion (as much as I do love me some Moo). So I took out MooTools and rolled my own native JavaScript to handle things like IE6’s lack of :hover support and IE’s general lack of :last-child support.

There were also some pretty nasty float bugs to clean up and in the process of all that I decided to take a sip the CSS3 Kool-Aid and smarten my suckerfish menus up for browsers supporting box-shadow. After the bugs were squashed and a little CSS3 was tossed in there I had to do something I never thought I’d have to do for a Wordpress theme; write documentation. After documentation it was just putting together zip files and taking some screenshots.

All in all I think developing this theme was a good experience³ and I’m actually looking forward to creating another theme as soon as I have a good idea for it.

About two months ago now a friend of mine asked me to help him out by building him a website for a startup he was working with. Naturally I asked for some more information about the company and he told me they were going to do roadside barbeque and catering. For me, living in New York City, this seemed like a crazy idea but then I took a step back and considered where he was living (Central Pennsylvania) and thought this could work. Fortunately he wasn’t asking me for money or any kind of investment save some time and expertise.

What he needed was a web presence for this company and what I needed was a project I had heavy front-end involvement in but didn’t sit behind a login screen. There were not a lot of design assets for the company or website, basically a color scheme and a logo. The major feature he needed was a calendar to quickly illustrate where the company affiliated trucks were going to be. So I went with a fairly simple design which resembled a business flyer but provided plenty of space for content.

Since the calendar section was the big piece of dynamic content I spent the most time developing it and considering how the interaction would play out. Overall I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. The catering section of the site is, as yet, incomplete but since the company kicked off sales on the first of May they were a little anxious to have some kind of web presence even if they didn’t have the catering content ready yet. So as of this writing the gallery section has no images (but they just need to be dropped into a folder on the server to work) and the catering section is under construction, however, my first solo freelance project has gone live and I wanted to share.

Check out the Banty Brothers website