2015 Boulder Cello Project/Chase the Music Collaboration Concert

This weekend I’m partnering with the Boulder Cello Project and Chase the Music to put on our 3rd annual concert for children in critical situations. This year’s concert is for a brother and sister and will feature a bold musical celebration of these two amazing kids.

My latest composition, Awe & Joy, scored for Flute, Horn, Percussion, and Cello Ensemble, will be premiered at the concert this Sunday, August 9, 2015 in Boulder, CO. The concert is free and we have plenty of room in the hall for guests. Details and RSVP here: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/concert-for-ayla-and-jayden-tickets-17769911283.

USC Village Live Webcam

I’m working at the USC Village jobsite this summer as an intern for Hathaway Dinwiddie Construction Co. This is a huge project – 15 acre site, 6 buildings, over 1 million square feet – and USC has set up the usual webcams to monitor the construction progress. Unfortunately, theirs uses painfully outdated software that won’t even work in IE in…

The Customizer is the Future for Themes and Theme Options

There has been a lot of backlash from the WordPress community recently over the theme review team’s decision to require theme options to be implemented in the Customizer. But this decision really is in everyone’s best interest. WordPress 4.2 shipped with the ability to switch themes in the Customizer. When theme-installation is incorporated in a future release, the entire theme…

Twenty Fifteen, no sidebar

Twenty Fifteen is another great default theme that can be easily customized. I recently had to put up a quick site for my new themes site on halsey.co. I only wanted one or two pages, with a super simple layout. I decided to just remove the sidebar (remove the widgets first) and center the content area. On mobile, all we need…

New Sheet Music Library: The Story

After nearly two years of planning, false starts, and development, I finally launched a new sheet music library. In this post, I’ll discuss the development and implementation process, design decisions, and how I created this project in a way that the source code will be available for anyone to use for free. History I started posting my cello ensemble compositions…

New Plugins: Chromeless Widgets Page and Basic Funding Tracker

I just published two plugins I developed for projects this semester on WordPress.org. Chromeless Widgets Page offers a quick way to build and iterate on a custom page that’s external to the web portion of a site. I developed it for the USC Annenberg Digital Lounge (where I’m the WordPress Specialist), where we used it to build an events page that’s…

Proposed WordPress Customizer Theme-Switching UX

This is a proposal for how theme-switching and theme-installation could be incorporated into WordPress’ Customizer. This will eventually be attempted in some form as a feature-plugin to later be merged into WordPress core. The goal is to soften the distinction between themes and theme options and to make theme switching a fast, streamlined experience built-in with other Customization options in…

Three Etudes for Cello Choir

Since the Boulder Cello Project is facing a shortage of accessible, mixed-difficulty-level sheet music, and I’ve been wanting to do more short compositions, I’ve decided to write a series of etudes for cello choir. Each one has a hard one-page limit to keep things well-scoped, and to force my ideas into succinct presentations that could be expanded into full pieces at some point.

Being for cello choir, they’re designed to work best for large groups of cellists (I’d generally consider at least 3 per part to be a good threshold between “ensemble” and “choir”). Being mixed-difficulty-level, they’re most appropriate for groups of cellists with widely differing abilities and musical backgrounds (Boulder Cello Project has adult beginners, professionals, and everywhere in between).

To keep things interesting, I’m attempting to do one etude per day. And to also record each one (multi-tracking so that I can cover every part). So far, it’s going pretty well, other than the every day part. Here’s what I have so far:

Sheet music is available in my sheet music library:

Cello Expressions Sheet Music Library

WordPress 4.0 Customizer API Improvements

I cross-posted much of this post to Make WordPress Core before WordPress 4.0 Beta 1. I’ll be updating this version with more examples throughout the beta period. WordPress 4.0 features several new additions to the Customizer API (see also Theme Customization API). In this post, I’ll discuss the improvements in detail. Customizer Panels The Customizer now includes a new way to…