This blog was one of the very first things I built when I was learning to code and it was badly in need of a basic upgrade. I like to release things early and well before they are ready so I’ve gone ahead and switched to to the new theme now; as always, please forgive the bugs.
I steal as much as I can with these things so if you are curious, here’s where most of the elements come from:
HTML5 Boilerplate: I’m really not very good at writing PHP code for wordpress themes so the HTML5 Boilerplate wordpress theme is a lifesaver. It’s a stripped down theme with almost no styling but all the code best practices built in. I coded this new theme from scratch in one day, but only because I could start with this great foundation.
The site has a simple responsive layout (re-size your browser width to see it in action) built on top of the Twitter Bootstrap UI framework. Also the nifty javascript add-ons like the “tooltips” over the Linkedin, RSS and Twitter icons come built in with Bootstrap. Very simple and fast.
The background texture comes from Subtle Patterns with lots of free nice textures for backgrounds.
The font stack is PT Serif and PT Sans Serif stack for free from Google Web Fonts. I got it from this great exhibition of beautiful web fonts.
The nuanced colors come from Color Scheme Designer. An awesome free tool. The makers just ran an unsuccessful Kickstarter to create a new version so if you like it and find it useful, feel free to donate using their Paypal link.
If you switch to a responsive layout, which looks great on mobile, you’ll often run in to trouble with embedded iframes and video (e.g. youtube or vimeo). Here is a clever trick to make them automatically re-size to fit the page.
For comments I’m using the new Disqus which absolutely the raddest commenting system out there. They have a super simple WordPress Plugin that sets everything up incredibly easily.
And that’s it. Any suggestions for improvements please drop them in the comments for me or if I can be helpful with any of the above resources.