My interest in blogging came about by necessity. Publishing my letters online for family and friends while I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Nepal was much sexier (somehow) than writing letters, buying stamps, and finding a post office.
I am an avid WordPress user and occasional contributor. WordPress is a semantic weblog publishing platform focusing on aesthetics, Web standards, and usability. I use it almost exclusively when building websitse.
You may also be interested in my Web design portfolio.
WordPress themes
I have always been interested in how physical aspects of a book, e.g., the words set on the pages, the quality of the paper, the design of the cover, would affect how I appreciated its content. This drives my interest to design blogs and develop themes—to set type on the Web.
I have developed and designed six WordPress themes, which are all licensed with the GNU General Public License. These themes are entirely open source and free to use and modify (all in accordance with the GNU GPL, of course).
To learn more and to download my WordPress themes, visit www.plaintxt.org. You may also view my themes in my Web design portfolio.
My theme blog.txt was rated one of the top ten WordPress themes in WordPress for Dummies, which must be a good thing. My six WordPress themes have been downloaded more than 30,000 times (as of September 2007).
Sandbox for WordPress
The Sandbox is a WordPress theme I co-created with Andy Skelton of Automattic. The Sandbox is a blank canvas, a tool for those designing a personal blog or developing a theme for public release. It was mentioned in Microformats: Empowering Your Markup for Web 2.0 by John Allsopp.
What the Sandbox does is generate semantic class names in the body and in each post div and comment li elements. The class names designers use for CSS hooks literally relate to the content and are not designer-coder mumbo-jumbo.
For example, the body div classes will reflect the post author (e.g., body.author-scott), category (e.g., body.category-news), and time stamp (e.g., body.d22, body.y2007). Using these classes as CSS selectors produces designs based on content.
Sandbox Designs Competition
In May 2007, I organized and administered the Sandbox Designs Competition. This competition had over 30 participants and 11 volunteer judges and raised US$2000 from sponsorships to distribute as prizes. The competition site featured a blog, forums, and a live preview function for the designs.
Two WordPress design competitions were begun in 2006 and both collapsed due to mismanagement. My design competition overcame skepticism to succeed and to reinvigorate the WordPress community. It achieved both goals and awarded prizes on August 7, 2007.
