Just because WordPress’ theme customizer shows the results of a user action instantly, doesn’t mean we can avoid properly explaining the options to the user and designing good interactions.
Architecture Precedent: Dutch Pavilion, Hanover World Expo 2000
I did a precedent project on the Dutch Pavilion at the Hanover World Expo 2000. Here’s a PDF of my full display board, which prints out at 30×40″: The colors are inspired by the building and the general aura of world fairs. All of the images are heavily edited, particularly for color (I used the built-in photo editor in Windows…
Cardboard Chair
Full size chair designed to hold at least a 200-pound person. Materials: recycled (salvaged) cardboard (primarily 40×40″ sheets extracted from industrial light fixture boxes from a campus construction project). No other materials or connectors, only cardboard. The primary structure is formed by two interlocking equilateral triangular prisms (yes, I know, this happens to also be the shape of the Jewish…
Create Windows 8.1 Live Tiles for Your WordPress Site in Seconds with Custom Windows Pinned Tiles 2.0
I’ve just released version 2.0 of my Custom Windows Pinned Tiles WordPress plugin. This is no small update, as it brings the plugin from a simple favicon-adding-like utility to an immensely powerful tool to app-ify your website for Windows 8.1 users. Custom Windows Pinned Tiles now creates a live-updating tile when users pin your site to their start screen. All…
Paper Tower
17 feet tall, roughly 300 sheets of 8 1/2 x 11″ printer paper. Scaled plan and elevation are on the wall to the left.
New Theme: Figure/Ground
I’ve just launched a new theme here on the root portion of Cello Expressions (containing the about & contact pages & the blog): Figure/Ground. Figure/Ground is completely different from any WordPress theme (or website, for that matter) I’ve ever seen. The site’s design is alive and quite literally evolving before your eyes, as geometric patterns emerge and disappear in the…
QuickShare 1.4
I recently released version 1.4 of QuickShare, my favorite social content-sharing WordPress plugin. There are several new features, tweaks and bugfixes, in what is the most notable update since version 1.0.
My favorite feature is the addition of a [quickshare] shortcode (that’s the shortcode – it’s just “quickshare”). This allows you to place QuickShare exactly where you want within the post/page, and you can even have multiple instances. The best part is that adding this extremely versatile feature was super easy, it only took 5 lines of code (including the comment). That’s the power of WordPress!
Floating Social Media Links Re-think
Floating Social Media Links had humble beginnings as my first WordPress plugin. I originally got the idea for the plugin when working on maintenance for http://oregonyouthline.org/. We needed a better solution for our social media links and actions (ie, Facebook like) than a column of super outdated icons (including a MySpace one) on the homepage (the old icons ended up…
Fixing a 9-year-old Typo in WordPress
I just patched a fix for a small grammar error in the instructions at the top of the Permalinks Settings page in WordPress (#25210). It fixes a sentence that Matt Mullenweg wrote in 2004 and hasn’t been touched since. I can’t believe no one noticed this over the past 9 years and millions of WordPress installs.
Needless to say, Sergey Biryukov committed the fix within a couple of hours. So, I guess that’s my contribution to WordPress 3.7. I’ve already made more substantial contributions (both in code and discussion) to WordPress 3.8 via Twenty Fourteen, but I don’t expect to touch much else in 3.7 since it doesn’t address any UI components.
Random Colors: Easier Than You’d Expect
I explain the code behind my “random colors” feature.