Winter '010
Sunday, 28 February 2010 17:17
Old man Winter was pretty quiet most of the season until this week.
Here our oil tank is totally covered.
I managed to dig the mailbox out. The box was popped off and under a couple of feet of drift. Now I can receive bills! Hooray!
Joomla Update Manager
Sunday, 03 January 2010 00:14
Kind of excited to find this. It's an automatic update tool for your Joomla install. Reminds me of the updater you can get for Wordpress. I just used it to update to 1.5.15 and it worked great!
I did run a quick Joomlapack backup before running it of course.
Here's the link: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/core-enhancements/installers/9332
Joomla Zen (Naked) Theme
Sunday, 13 December 2009 22:02
I kind of left this project on the shelf for a bit. Tonight I worked up a bit of a stripped-down version of what I had in mind. This I think will be useful as a bare-bones framework for building a theme. It's fixed-width (960 pixels wide) but with a little adjustment it can be any width.
The main divs inside the fixed wrapper include a header, footer, left column, and a main column with an optional right column. The main column ID name depends on whether any modules are positioned in the right column.
I'd like to push this a bit further with the next version. It would be great to make it so the user can select in the Joomla template manager whether to make this a fixed or fluid-width layout. I'm looking at how the ja_purity template handles this. I would draw some inspiration from how the Wordpress theme Thesis works. That idea could possibly take me into an entirely different direction.
So at any rate, you can download the current version (1.0.0) here.
EDIT: 1/02/10...
Completely reworked this theme. Made a few improvements and adhered more closely to Joomla's stock template's module positions. I think this gives you an even better starting point.
Download it here.
Shodan Test
Sunday, 13 September 2009 11:38
I took my aikido black belt test back in May at the Spring seminar in Monteal. It was hosted by Aikido De La Montagne. That was my second trip up to that particular seminar. This time I brought my wife and kiddos. Except for tromping through the rain a bit we had a great time.
The video was taken by my son Remington. It's kind of blurry at times because the camera is very temperamental.
Oh and I passed! :D
Joomla DayCaring Theme
Sunday, 02 August 2009 20:42
I'm still in the process of developing a template/theme along the vein of Drupal's Zen theme. I took a break from what I have so far and also used a bit of the process to cook up my first "shared" theme. The idea behind this design was that it could be used for a child-themed website.
I named it DayCaring.
It's pretty simple, not a huge amount of graphics which should lend to a fast load. A good deal of the graphics load went into the header where I used a sort of "parallax-effect" I wanted to experiment with. I used this page for inspiration and to see how it could be done. Because the look of the site is kind of flat/cartoony I didn't bother blurring the layers to reinforce the illusion of depth of field. Check out the preview and resize your browser window to see it.
Another sort of special effect I wanted to try out was using JQuery to enforce the height of sibling divs. I think it worked out pretty well. This is a design problem that a lot of XHTML/CSS designers run into when creating a tableless layout. How do you make the shorter div with a colored background extend to the length of the page when the column next door is longer? Usually you cheat.
I tested this on Firefox and IE 8 (and 8 in compatability mode) and will probably run it through Safari and maybe IE 6 if I'm feeling particularly masochistic. It seems to work pretty well with all the content in the standard Joomla "sample content" output. I tried where possible to make allowances for WYSIWYG editing, adding images to content, and so forth.
Click the screenshot below for a preview of the flat HTML version I built before the template. Template zip link below...
Download the template.
Edit: 1/2/10...
I made a few tweaks using my latest zen theme this changes the template positions up so they reflect more closely Joomla default module positions.
You can download it here.
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