As I complete my three-year period involved in the leadership of USC ASCE, I want to add an archival link here to the content I created for its blog. I built the site from scratch my freshman year and it’s been going strong with the Twenty Fourteen theme for three years now. I wrote well over 100 posts on the blog over the past 3 years, easily my largest collection of work to date:
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 Unfortunately, theirs uses painfully outdated software that won’t even work in IE in…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…
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: