Trust WordPress with Live Preview

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…

Joining KPFF Full-time

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.

A Strategy for Custom Colors in the Customizer

The customizer is a framework for live-previewing any change to a WordPress site. It is particularly useful for previewing visual change and has always included a color control and the ability to easily preview custom colors. But the previewing experience has often been a bit slow. This post outlines a strategy for custom colors that leverages instant JS-based previewing in…

Fourteen Colors Gets Instant Live Preview

For anyone still using the Twenty Fourteen theme with custom colors via the Fourteen Colors plugin, now would be a good time to try on a fresh coat of paint. I’ve just released version 1.4 of the plugin, which adds instant live-preview of base colors with all colors updating without a page refresh on a slight delay. This leverages the customizer’s selective refresh API added in 4.5 and is based on the same logic that powers the custom highlight color plugin. I’m leveraging this framework in all of my upcoming themes and will be posting a walkthrough of the code in the coming weeks. Here’s a quick visual demo of the new experience:

fourteen colors postmessage & selective refresh demo

Screenshot of version 1.2 of the Figure/Ground WordPress Theme

An Update for Figure/Ground

I’ve updated my Figure/Ground theme on WordPress.org (which also powers this blog) with a few nice enhancements:

  • All options in the customizer are now instantly live-previewed with postMessage.
  • Add support for selective refresh in the customizer for widgets, and generated colors.
  • There is now a social icon menu.
  • Redraw the background canvas when the page is resized to avoid pixelization.
  • Improve keyboard navigation (although this still needs additional work).
  • Update Genericons to version 3.4.1.

The new customization experience is the most notable enhancement. See every color change instantly as you play with it in the color picker, without any delay. Enjoy!

2015 Chase the Music Concert Videos

I finally got around to editing and posting the videos from last summer’s Chase the Music concert for Ayla & Jayden with the Boulder Cello Project. Here they are, including the world premiere of my composition Awe & Joy. Sheet music for all of the music from the concert is available for free on my sheet music library.

Special thanks to Clark Hodge of Chase the Music and Bill Shauck of the Boulder Cello Project for making this concert happen!

Interactive Geometry Apps

Three years ago, I created several interactive geometry apps while working for Saltire Software. As part of the process, I built the collections functionality for Euclid’s Muse (which I had created the previous year at Saltire), which includes the ability to download a collection of web-based applets as a standalone mobile app that can be processed through PhoneGap and published on app stores. The original intent was to publish a few of these apps on the app store and Google play myself, but I never got around to it. So, I decided to publish them as another site on celloexpressions.com. The five apps are:

I also created an index page based on the pseudo-random experiments page. I’m thinking about turning it into a simple WordPress theme with a fun background (animation off by default), anyone interested?

Featured Audio in WordPress

Featured images are native to WordPress core, allowing themes to represent posts and pages with images. But for many users, there are more important content formats than visuals. As a musician, I’ve explored different approaches to integrating WordPress’ audio functionality with post objects, most recently with the Sheet Music Library plugin. I recently began exploring a new idea — a premium…