Zeldman is the cult hero of web standards zealots and advocates the valid use of XHTML, CSS, Javascript and other web technologies.  I have benefited from reading his Designing with Web Standards books.

And, yes, you can just use his last name and people will know who you mean.

Not sure whether I’ll present something about iPhone web development or just stick with WordPress. I hope to use a current project as a case study.

Of course, back then you had engineers building web sites instead of designers who were still heavy focused on print media. We ended up really “cool” sites with clouds and water drops for backgrounds.

Thankfully more artistic designers have come up with some more elegant tiled backgrounds (and some artistic but not so elegant). Here are a few resource links that I have used to find tiled backgrounds.

• Kaliber10000 Pixel Patterns
• DinPattern
• Dromoscopio Libreria di Pattern
• Kollermedia.at Patern4u
• SquidFingers Patterns

Enjoy and don’t get too dizzy looking at all those patterns.

Read all about the new features of the release.

I think my favorite feature will be the ability to update WordPress installations from within the admin area.  This will make my life so much easier.

Cool new admin redesign also!

Over the past few weeks my toolbar had disappeared. I could still get to the developer tools from the Tools menu but the “one-click” love of the toolbar was gone.

I tried Googling and found nothing so I did what any experienced developer does…guess.  I went to the Firefox toolbar customize tab and reset the customizations to the default settings and, voila! my toolbar appeared again.

Turns out it was there all along it just was not displaying icons or text…doh!

Anyway, if anyone experiences the same thing I did and tries to Google “firefox web developer toolbar missing” maybe you’ll hit this page and find the answer.

Now that some more sophisticated theme packages have been developed for WP I wanted to try some out, especially the Thesis WordPress Theme. So, I bought a license for Thesis and installed it on this site.

Programming Hooks

So far, what has impressed me the most about Thesis is the programming hooks. They take a little getting used to but essentially Thesis provides a mechanism for you to customize the CSS and also some programmatic functionality of your site without modifying the underlying core code for Thesis. I hope this will be a big benefit when it comes to upgrade to new releases of the theme.

Administration Options

Thesis has an options admin panel that lets you determine things like what pages to include in the navigation menu and it also has good support for widgets. Another cool feature is the image rotator that a lot of customers are asking for nowadays. After uploading several images to the rotator folder they just start appearing in the rotation (each page refresh).

Search Engine Optimization

Thesis comes with the ability to enhance your page titles (the most important part of SEO). However, I installed the SEO Title Tag WordPress Plugin which offers even more flexibility.

Going Forward

Well, here’s to a good start with Thesis.  Now that I have it installed I have to work on my content and information architecture.  This is one of the benefits of using Thesis.  It is designed to let you focus on publishing.  Let’s see if I can avoid hacking the core.

:p