The Header

Most obviously, the top header is my actual resume (recreated in Photoshop, but the text is real, check it over at my portfolio site). Thought that was a cool touch :P.

Also, the color bars are an actual swatch from Adobe’s kuler web-app, very useful in web and graphic endeavors. I use it all the time. I was trying all kinds of things design-wise and just wasn’t getting anywhere, so I just plopped it down on the canvas, liked it, and took it from there.

The floppy disk was a funny accident, I was going to make a Polaroid – very simple, very common on websites – and just happened to look at it a certain way and think it looked like a floppy disk. I have bunches of ‘em left over from elementary and middle school, and a purple one just like this was actually sitting in front of me at the time. I looked down, chuckled, and thought ‘what the hell.’

The Body

Pretty standard left-aligned body section. I know, it’s small (only 479px content space, if you’re curious), but I work on a small screen, and since the blog’s mostly about me and I’m most of the audience (that I know of) I figure it doesn’t matter much anyway. Plus, it’ll probably get redesigned in the next 6 months anyway :P.

The ‘Older Posts’ and ‘Newer Posts’ links were cool. I’ve done little page curls in a few designs since these. They look better now.

The mini-business-card links to my AnimiVirtus homepage, the main portal of my animivirtus.com domain and the place I’m trying to advertise the work-stuff I can do for people (if you or someone you know needs something, send somethin’ my way, I’d be happy to help out if I can). The Polaroids are just a cutesy way to get you to email me. About anything. Honestly. I’m lonely.

Lastly, the delicious section is the latest 7 links from my del.icio.us account, freshly collected and totally random. Enjoy the mix :P.

The Footer

Ah, the footer. Somehow it seems either really complicated or I’m really slow on the uptake to get Twitter posts conveniently embedded into a webpage. My method’s definitely not the most advanced, CSS only barely gets its hooks into these buggers, but it gets the job done for a first-time job. Maybe sometime I’ll look into better ways to pull this off, but for now you’ve got my posts, and they look just fine.

Next to that’s my latest work from my portfolio site, updated manually for now but I’m toying with ideas for making that automated. Maybe…

And the standard footer with navigation and info links. I even credit myself for the site design :P.

The Future…

If you read any of the blogs I’ve kept up (or not) over the years, you know I’m good at talking about things and less at making them happen. Well, some good news on that front is I’ve already got drafts of about 5 posts in various stages and seem to be coming up with ideas lately that don’t take away from regular life – often the cause of previous latent posts and unannounced hiatuses and such.

Nonetheless, if something does go amiss and you’re not hearing from me, email me here or with the cooler link above and I’ll try to put something out to assuage any concerns.

Thanks for checking out the blog, I hope you like the new look and feel free to send any comments or questions you’ve got about the design, the content, or anything else, and I’ll do my best to address them. Any ideas for better usability or functionality would be cool to hear too. Let me know, happy browsing :).

It was my first WordPress theme, after which I went on to follow Drew Douglass’s tutorial series on Themeforest.net which is a much more in-depth series getting into the nuts and bolts of making a theme, and learned a bunch more about the way themes work, which gave me the confidence to tackle something a bit more aggresively (thus, the AnimiVirtus redesign was brought to life). Not to discredit the original tutorial I’d followed, that’s great as well, just a different approach.

But all that aside, it’s a new look, an upgraded feel, and hopefully I can start implementing some more exciting widgets and whatnot in the sidebar, give a more social and dynamic feel to the place. I’m hopin’ a Twitter feed, maybe iLike and GoodReads feeds too…who knows, maybe I’ll get curious and learn how to add another sidebar on the right someday…

No…no I can’t do that…I’m a busy guy…I’ve got other responsibilities…

But it calls to me….[Sidebar: Blaaake...Blaaaaaaaake...BLAAAAAAKEE!!]. Oh…that’d be my roommate telling me to get back to work. See ya’ll later, enjoy the new look and keep comin’ back, I’ll keep up with content as it’s been coming recently, and when I get the time I’ll work on adding some more cool stuff to the site. See you next post :P.

userscripts via Lifehacker.

Web Developer by Chris Pederick (who has a pretty awesome website, by the way) is a sweet-ass looking tool for web designers, one of the coolest aspects of which allows them to essentially code with real time updating of the results of said code, and then a simple copy-paste-save ensures a faster, accurate workflow [no more Ctrl+S-Alt+Tab-Ctrl+R to check your code]. Also, you can validate CSS and HTML, and even local versions of those languages while you’re working on them. Tons of other features abound in this extension, check it out online and fiddle with it a bit. I promise you’ll be happy :P.

Chris Pederick via Themeforest.

Oh, and if anyone figures out how to use Chris Pederick’s other extension, ‘User Agent Switcher’, let me know. I was excited at the prospect of checking IE rendering results on my Mac, but was slightly confused and disappointed when it seemed that wasn’t what the extension was for.

Enjoy the goodies!