PatCavit.com

Sunday morning I had a few too many skittles after waking up and decided I wanted to build an actual landing page on patcavit.com

So then I started on it, I had grand plans. There were even icons that I was going to grab from… somewhere. That part of it was rather poorly planned. After doing the basic layout I spent about an hour trying to find the right icons. Eventually I threw up my hands and just dropped the whole idea.

Here’s what I’d planned for it to look like:

Notice my awesome hand-drawn icons…

Today I was feeling more up for a challenge though. I did some reading and decided to use YQL thanks to Chris Heilmann’s screencast illustrating how he used it to pull multiple sources of data together. After deciding to just ditch the icons I picked a few colors for the top-level sections instead, and here’s what I came up with.

I like it well enough. Still wish I could’ve found icons I was happy with.

Mroth was asking me about minimalistic blog themes today, and I linked him to a few I had seen linked a while ago at http://www.plaintxt.org/. I was looking at them and then thinking of my own dark blue scheme and broken flickr badge when I decided I wanted to make my own custom theme again. It’s been quite a while since I did this and I was pretty rusty at WordPress templating. Thanks to the impressive documentation at the WP Codex I was able to get back up to speed pretty quickly.

After being linked (again by mroth) to an article on http://evhead.com/ I was inspired to take his modification of the Flickr-style “all the shit is at the bottom” design and then corrupt it further into the abomination you see at the bottom of each page. Really most of that stuff is used about never by most people, so I don’t think it’s much of a loss. The Flickr badge is a bit of a riff on what Veerle did. I just simplified it a bit because styling is difficult and my artistic sense is about as close to zero as possible.

This theme is really basic but it appeals to me in some way. Part of the benefit of going so barebones is that it looks exactly the same in IE and Firefox without me doing any extra work! Massive thanks go out to the YUI team at Yahoo!, their reset and font styles are a huge help when designing this kind of thing.

Dragonforce concert was insane, highly recommended.

I’ve added a del.icio.us badge along with a flickr badge to the sidebar. Too bad they’re cocking up the layout over there. Not having done much with this theme means that I don’t have the necessary knowledge to fix it easily.

I wish I could say I cared enough to fix it. Maybe later.