Slideshow Pro with PHP, CSS and JS

Well not exactly, but close enough to warrant the title I would think.

I know that I was supposed to publish another tutorial before this one, but I hacked this up last week, and thought it was cool enough to preempt the other post.  So at work the new design we just launched called for a rotating, hyperlinked slideshow, with cross-fading.

Normally it would be "To the Flash Cave!", but I was feeling extra crotchety so I decided to basically recreate Slideshow Pro in PHP, CSS and some JS-foo.  Nothing to spectacular, but it is shiny.  Be warned, this is a very long tutorial... use at your own risk. Read the rest »

Pro WordPress Development

For any of you who signed up to be updated as to the release date of this book, ignore the emails from Amazon you are getting.

The publisher and I parted ways months ago, and there is no book to buy.  I have the 11 of 12 chapters I wrote, and I hope to one day have it published; either through another tech publisher or something like LuLu.

Again, if you get an email saying my book is to be released on the 16th, ignore it.

My thanks to Shawn for bringing this to my attention.

More AJAX hotness

If you haven't yet noticed, there is a new version of the Flickr website.

There are some things that I think are a step down visually, like removing the box around individual images, but for the most part I am impressed with the changes that have been made.

My favorite change so far has been the new 'Organizer' which is now completely powered by AJAXy goodness.   No more flash... feels good.

Custom Excerpts for WordPress

So I have already been asked a couple of questions about the new deisgn; namely how do I make WordPress give me the entire commenting history for an individual commenter, and how am I doing my excerpts in the recent entries column.

I thought I would cover the second question first, since it is the easier of the two.  I toyed with using the function the_excerpt(); built into WordPress, but after much deliberation I decided to roll my own so that I could have more control over the output.

Basically my excerpt function takes two variables, the ID of the post, and how many characters to display from that post.  Not too complicated.  I decided to create two seperate functions so that I could maximize flexibility.

Read the rest »

Lookey what I found

Found this on flickr, through some strange circumstance.  Blog Design Solutions at Piccadilly Circus:

Go on to flickr for more sweet shots.

Where am I exactly?

I am sure some of you are wondering where I am lately, and what I am up to.  Quite a few irons are in the fire currently, let me show you a couple of them.

On the book front

Hot on the heels of my Blog Design Solutions experience I was offered a book deal of my own by Apress. I am 5 chapters in on a book that covers development with WordPress.  Aren't you all excited?

Read the rest »

Well look at that!

9rulers sweeping at SXSW this year.

It looks like some congratulations are in order for some friends.  Veloso, brought home the gold (blog design of the year) as well as 9rules as a whole and Mike won designer of the year.

I will let them hoot and holler in more detail later, but I just wanted to say congrats from me.  Well deserved all around.

Thoughts on organizing information

So at the day job we are dealing with how to effectively organize and structure our data so that the largest majority of our visitors can find the content they care about... quickly.

The mantra today is 'everything within two clicks.'  But how realistic is that?

Being the webmaster of a college/university website means that you have to build your structure well enough to accomadate 2-3,000 pages of unique content.  Anyone else sick to their stomach right about now, or is it just me?

Read the rest »

Buy my book!

That's right people the time has finally come.  Blog Design Solutions will be released on February 20th; now is your time to pre-order your shiny copy.  Andy Budd, Simon Collison, Michael Heilemann, John Oxton, David Powers, Rich Rutter, Phil Sherry and I worked pretty hard to craft this into a useful book.  Let us know if we succeeded.

From the publishers site:

In this book, a team of renowned web designers take you through the ins and outs of putting together great blogs. They waste no time harking on about the philosophy of blogs, or the community behind them. Instead, they get straight to the practical details, showing how to set up a basic blog in some of the world's most popular blogging engines – Movable Type, ExpressionEngine, WordPress, and Textpattern.

That's right, you heard it here first... I am a 'renowned' web designer!  Another phrase for the ol' resume.

Help a brother out, my baby needs... stuff.

A couple of gifts for you

As this year draws to a close, your friends here at Sillyness would like to give you a couple of gifts.

When I moved from my previous design 'Fresh and Clean' I had decided to package it up as best I could and release it as a free theme for WordPress.  Today that dream becomes a reality.

Also, as many of you know, I had been working on a new theme for Sillyness code named 'Believe'.  As I have stated elsewhere I came to realize that I have shifted artistically back to the world of paint and charcoal; I gave up on my new design, and you guessed it, decided to package what I had up and release it as well.

Read the rest »