Cello Expressions
Cello Expressions has existed in its current form for nearly six years. After briefly serving as the website for my high school cello quartet, it has been the home of my various digital projects for most of its existence. As this site and its content reach a level of relative digital maturity, it’s time to update the status if its…
As I create and publish more and more plugins (I now have 25 on WordPress.org), my increasing focus is to keep each plugin as simple as possible. My first few WordPress plugins suffered from bloat from the beginning and are still paying the consequences, including poor usability, untenability, and a likely path toward abandonment. With simplicity as the priority, a…
WordPress 4.9 includes a new experience for discovering, installing, and previewing themes in the customizer. It is now possible to set up every aspect of a site except for content within the customization workflow with live preview. I’ve been working on integrating themes with the customizer for several years. Back in 2014, when I was deep into the process of…
The capstone project for my Bachelor of Science in Civil Engineering (Building Science) was a semester-long team project to design a mixed-use development featuring mass timber. Our project was formulated around the 2015-2016 Timber in the City competition, which prescribed a mid-rise development at a New York City site (that will actually house the Essex Crossing development). The program included…
As a student at USC, I worked at the Annenberg Digital Lounge for the first two and half years of its existence. Coinciding with the opening of Wallis Annenberg Hall in 2014, I served as a WordPress expert in the development of training programs for students and the organization’s online presence. In addition to master-planning online content strategy and building the current iteration of the website, I authored a number of WordPress tutorials. These are primarily aimed at communications and journalism students; however, many are more-broadly useful for newer WordPress users. Check out my tutorials here.
For the final individual project in my undergraduate Building Science studio program at USC, I designed a mixed-use building on a constrained site in Los Angeles. The program includes twelve studio and one-bedroom residential units, parking, and a small retail/commercial space. The project meets the zoning requirements for the actual site and considers the context of the surrounding neighborhood. Project…
I worked at the USC Annenberg Digital Lounge from 2014 – 2016 as a resident WordPress expert. In addition to written tutorials, I created several video tutorials and workshops to help communications & journalism students create WordPress websites. These are tailored to students and paired with the in-person helpdesk available at the (physical) Digital Lounge. Here are a few selections:
These videos cover specific tasks and troubleshooting that come up for lots of students.
These videos serve as complete workshops for students to follow along with when setting up a site.
I also built the website for the digital lounge: AnnenbergDL.org. It hosts numerous resources similar to the tutorials above across a range of design software, authored by staff experts. The author and tool pages showcase the power of WordPress taxonomies. And there is even a (mostly hidden) course registration and management system that could eventually become available as a WordPress plugin. The Digital Lounge team will continue to build out this library of resources for USC students and the general public.
Twenty Seventeen is the first bundled theme to provide a way to create multi-part pages with WordPress, via a front page sections option that features multiple pages on the front page. This is useful for largely single-page sites, but limits the functionality of a front page as a showcase for and gateway to content throughout larger sites. For sites with…
When most of us walk into a building, we assume that it’s safe. We trust that it’s built to code and structurally sound. And we trust that the engineers and architects behind the building know what they’re doing. If a room is too hot or cold, bright or dim, spacious and sprawling or tight and cramped, many people are uncomfortable…
I’m excited to announce that I’ll be joining KPFF‘s Portland office full-time starting in January doing structural engineering. If you’re familiar with my work in WordPress or music composition, you may be surprised to learn that I am not pursuing a career in either field. I enjoy making things; software development and music composition are both ways that I can quickly create and iterate on projects (and I’ll continue to do so in my spare time). Building design and construction requires a much slower and more complex process, but the creation of physical space is ultimately the most rewarding design process I’ve experienced. For that reason, I’m trilled to embark on my full-time career designing building structures.