New Photography Site

I’m launching another new site on celloexpressions.com this summer. Cello Expressions Photography could be considered a photo blog in many ways, but its primary purpose is to serve as a collection of visually stimulating and contextually significant imagery. Bringing my academic/professional interests to Cello Expressions for the first time, this site focuses on architecture, landscape architecture, and construction. Given my current internship at the USC Village project, expect a particular construction emphasis right now. Visually interesting textures and natural landscapes are also featured.

Check it out at https://celloexpressions.com/photography.

The site is using my Arbutus WordPress theme, resulting in a major focus on images and minimal UI. The theme will be publicly available soon, likely as a premium theme but possibly for free on WordPress.org depending on time. Note that due to the heavy use of images, it may take some time for the content to load, but once it does, it’s pretty cool!

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 Unfortunately, theirs uses painfully outdated software that won’t even work in IE in…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…

Twentieth Century Music without National Character

Classical music composed in the years following World War II is known for its high level of experimentalism. With countless new techniques for composition being developed, composers began to place less emphasis on more traditional “rules” and sources of inspiration. The generally more sterile and atonal works of this period feature broader harmonic and rhythmic characteristics than earlier twentieth century…

Stravinsky and Satie: Making Meaningless Music

Music is, by its very nature, essentially powerless to express anything at all, whether a feeling, an attitude of mind, a psychological mood, a phenomenon of nature, etc.… Expression has never been an inherent property of music. Igor Stravinsky, 1936 The classical music world was overturned in the first half of the twentieth century. Various new genres and methods developed,…

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…