Via Flickr:

After about 6 months of waiting (which seemed pretty out of character) my Panic goods have finally arrived!

-Transmit (FTP client) stylized T-shirt

-”Loading” T-Shirt (been wanting something this geeky for a while!)

-Team Panic T-Shirt

-Full set of 4 Panic faux game boxes (so awesome!)

If you have never heard of Panic, they’re a great Mac software company that has been around since the beginning. Personally I use Transmit and Coda on a daily basis for all my website development work.

jole.ca on the iPad, while still under development

After almost a year of sitting on a fresh design for jole.ca, it’s finally here!

The first thing you’ll notice is the lighter, more magazine-style layout of the site. In some ways it is very reminiscent of my last custom-made theme for jole.ca (the one that came before aerogold), which incorporated the horizontal navigation and emphasis on non-blog content. Since then, I’ve learned more about web design, WordPress, modern web standards and conventions, all ideas that have grown out of working on WordPress sites in the past couple of years, notably with Trevor van Gorp of Affective Design.

Some of the goals for the new design were to include as many modern CSS techniques as possible, which is noticeable in the homepage where all gradients, shadows, rotations and image cropping is performed entirely in CSS. The homepage also uses the “Featured Image” feature in WP 3.0+, along with excerpts from any posts marked “Featured”. The bottom four panels are widgets that can be re-arranged and customized using a simple “Feature Page” widget I’ve bundled in the theme code.

In addition to these web-related features, I’ve also optimized it for viewing on tablets and mobile devices. Most image posts from the past 6 months are scaled so that they remain crisp when zoomed in on an iPhone, for example. The homepage was modelled after Flipboard, and serves as a “front cover” to the site. Text is well spaced and placed in narrower columns to make reading as enjoyable as possible.

One feature that is missing from the site is the Gallery, which has been officially retired. While the “jolephoto” brand is being phased out, my photography will continue to be developed on my Flickr feed. After purchasing a Pro account, I’ve unlocked a number of older pics that are available once more, and I’m working to build up Sets, Tags and Collections. I also plan to post entries on any major contributions to the feed.

Other special feature you’ll notice is better integration with social media and outside services, including the transition to Disqus for commenting. Disqus allows you to maintain a single account for all your comments across multiple blogs, and also allows for single sign-on with Facebook or Twitter.

While a refresh was certainly overdue, this shift also represents a new mission for the jole.ca domain, which is to promote the Joel Adria Technical Services brand. JoelAdria.com has redirected here for a while now, but I can now say it represents my work and brand more appropriately for current and potential clients. Be sure to take a look around, and I hope you enjoy the new jole.ca!

The backend is still WordPress, and works around the same concept as the AD theme, with a few improvements here and there. A number of recent innovations in WordPress will come in handy for next time round however. Featured images help simplify associated a thumbnail with a particular post or page, and content types allow you to separate calendar dates from blog posts within the UI.

One thing I noticed first on this particular WordPress install was that Dreamhost likes to turn off post versioning (presumably to save on database storage, and since disabling it inside wp-config.php is hidden from the user, most people would never notice its absence). However, when you are looking for post versioning and can’t find it, double check that it’s not disabled in your wp-config.php. You might want to turn it on now just in case!

Be sure to check out the Design for Emotion for details on the book and your chance to be involved in the creation of the book.

The product they’re using is called Kintera Sphere, which provides CMS and member/donor management in one. They’ve had the member management working quite well for a while now, but the website kept getting delayed because there wasn’t a lot of time or know-how to get all the information into the CMS for them.

My task was just that, and overall it turned out quite well. Much of Kintera’s management is a bit antiquated, with some interesting interface quirks, and many traces of legacy code that isn’t quite in line with modern standards. The separation of theme and content also wasn’t quite well developed, which meant it was hard to output content in a logical way.

I did however manage to figure out a few of the many tools the CMS offered, and use them to my advantage. The launch was relatively smooth, and now the job of optimizing, tweaking, and keeping the site fresh over the months begins. Congratulations CSN on your new website!

Visit CSNSCN.ca

The move comes from the desire to simplify my workflow, while making the interface to various destinations simplified. Without a doubt, this move to Flickr will mean it’s one-click to get my pics from iPhoto to the Web, and simplify the integration of my photography into WordPress and jole-v3.

The new site design revolves around the idea that all my content will be ushered into my personal website for unified and simple browsing of all that exists in the jole atmosphere, however in order to do this, I need a variety of WordPress tools and plugins that will appropriately fetch items from various social media websites. The problem is, most of these plug-ins are not yet custom-post-type aware, or at least not without modification on my behalf. For example, I can have WP-o-matic automatically bring in all my twitpics, but I can’t tell it to save them as “Tweet” post types (at least not yet.)

Before the advent of custom post types, the traditional method of setting up not-so-post-y post types in WP was to simply give them a designated category, and style it appropriately within the theme when you come across it. I’m beginning to realize that perhaps this is still the best way to go at this point in the game, seeing as even the native WordPress environment is a bit confused as to how the various content types will be delivered through theme files.

Service call!?

Milk crate is super practical.

Hurray for advertising!