I just switched the default theme of this blog to the latest K2 theme by Michael Heilemann at binarybonsai.com. Michael created the Kubrick theme that I was using before (and which was also adopted as the default for all new WordPress installations).
K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.
Check out the cool ajax-powered search dealie – just start typing a query, and out pops a list of matches. Pretty cool. Comment submission also uses some ajax juju, but it’s a bit funky at the moment, and isn’t quite fully baked yet. Still, quite cool.
So far, I’ve lost my fancy schmancy banner image rotator, but that’s not such a bad thing. I’ll work on adding it back in when I get a chance – I have to recreate the images for the new wider design anyway).
Also, while having another less-than-fully-productive day staying at home with The Boy™ while Janice is sick in bed, I was able to download (but not yet compile successfully) the Ming library for creating .swf files. King suggested this during the Pachyderm developer’s conference call (which I missed because I am out today), and it looks like a much nicer solution than Josh and I were thinking of – Ming would provide a nice happy medium, where we just alter how we generate our .swf-wrapped images, and the dozen flash template files don’t need to be any the wiser. The other option is JSwiff, but it’s a much lower-level library, meaning we’d have to be messing with the icky details of the flash file format. With Ming, we just create objects, and tell it to do stuff. Much nicer 🙂
I just switched the default theme of this blog to the latest K2 theme by Michael Heilemann at binarybonsai.com. Michael created the Kubrick theme that I was using before (and which was also adopted as the default for all new WordPress installations).
K2 is a really nice design, with some great thought to functional layout. It supports a boatload of useful plugins, and displays their magic if they are installed.
Check out the cool ajax-powered search dealie – just start typing a query, and out pops a list of matches. Pretty cool. Comment submission also uses some ajax juju, but it’s a bit funky at the moment, and isn’t quite fully baked yet. Still, quite cool.
So far, I’ve lost my fancy schmancy banner image rotator, but that’s not such a bad thing. I’ll work on adding it back in when I get a chance – I have to recreate the images for the new wider design anyway).
Also, while having another less-than-fully-productive day staying at home with The Boy™ while Janice is sick in bed, I was able to download (but not yet compile successfully) the Ming library for creating .swf files. King suggested this during the Pachyderm developer’s conference call (which I missed because I am out today), and it looks like a much nicer solution than Josh and I were thinking of – Ming would provide a nice happy medium, where we just alter how we generate our .swf-wrapped images, and the dozen flash template files don’t need to be any the wiser. The other option is JSwiff, but it’s a much lower-level library, meaning we’d have to be messing with the icky details of the flash file format. With Ming, we just create objects, and tell it to do stuff. Much nicer 🙂
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Nice look, D’Arcy. One of the drawbacks for me for Kubrick was that it was just a touch narrow – this looks a little bit wider so there’s less wasted space along the sides. The ajax-y icing sounds pretty cool too. I’ll have to give this a try sometime.
Yeah. K2 is nice. The main content column is only 50 pixels wider, but that makes a difference. And the sidebar is actually useful now…
Nice change … funny, I was thinking of switching to this myself. But then I thought, my site won’t look like D’Arcy’s anymore … at any rate, looks good. Let us know when you get the banner rotation going again (and share).
Just updated to the latest version – r90 – and am checking to see if the comment ajax stuff is working any better…
hrm. comments work, but the live submission is still slightly borked… Oh, well… That’s why it’s pre-release code 🙂
OK. trying in Firefox. Everything works in Firefox, right?
heh. same thing… and it takes a looooong time for the comment to claim to be posted (and still not displayed unless I refresh the page)…