This is a complete redevelopment of the previous template, "Seraph" whose rounded corners and other various design elements were all made using images. This time it's all CSS3. If you don't have a CSS3-enabled browser, no dramas, you just won't see drop shadows or rounded corners.

New Homepage Design

I love the Zenpressed plugin for WordPress. It's just so hackable!
Seriously, if  you know some basic PHP you can take Zenphoto images and do pretty much anything. I've demonstrated this fact by creating a jQuery slider that shows the latest 5 posts, along with title and album name of the image.

New Post Types

Tutorials

I occasionally post up tutorials here, and I've never really thought twice about just creating them as blog posts. Now that WordPress has developed custom post types I decided it was time to rethink that and have developed a completely different look for tutorials, to separate them from normal blog posts.

Along with the new look is a custom taxonomy for the application the tutorial is for.

Quick Updates

Sometimes I want to post something quick, that doesn't really warrant a full blog post. Sure, I could always post the link to Facebook or Twitter, but where's the fun in that?

Now I can post small updates that support permalinks and comments, as well an optional link.

Themes with Hover Previews

I wasn't really satisfied with the small circles in the previous theme. All I had to tell the user what the theme was, was the title tag. This time I've added screenshot previews that show up when you hover over the icons.

New Theme: Valve

Loosely based on Valve Software's website, it's mostly charcoal black and dark red. Unlike "Bob", this theme is much more than just a background and colour change.

WordPress Login Page

Something I've never really bothered with templating was the login screen for WordPress. I'm the only user of my blog so I never really saw the point. It really makes the whole thing feel complete

QuickAdmin Panel

My templates have always had quick-access buttons, usually at the top of the page to add a new post or a new image to the gallery.

This time I've gone all out, and added a whole bunch of QuickAccess admin buttons that only admin users will see when logged in.
If you're logged in to WordPress, you will see a blue bar on the left of the page. Simply hover over it and it will slide out.

There are a few conditional links:

• If you're on a blog page, it will show "Edit Page".
• If you're on a blog post, it will show "Edit Post".
• If you're on a art gallery album, it will show "Edit Album".
• If you're on a art gallery image page, it will show "Edit Image".

Portfolio Watermarks

Along with a few refinements to the Zenphoto template, I've started using the watermark feature. For now some images are going to have two watermarks over them. This is an unavoidable side-effect of using hard watermarks in the past and post-effect watermarks now.

ZenPhoto has the option of setting watermarks for each individual image, so I'll go through the serious offenders and turn them each off when I get some time.

I've always wanted a unique looking homepage for my website that shows off both my artwork and my blog. It uses a lot of jQuery, PNGs, a little CSS3 and a few hacked wordpress plugins.
Currently it's only supported in Firefox 3.5, I haven't had a chance to hack up some IE sheets and bugfix yet.

I searched for ages to find a hack for ZenPressed to get a full sized image to use as a background image. In the end I didn't find one and almost gave up, before thinking, "Wait a minute. I'm a webdeveloper. I know PHP." 20 minutes later I had it working

I might still reorganise the "Browse Blog" section in the coming days, since at the moment it's just a wall of links.

In other news, I now have 7 flareguns and 6 ubersaws. This item finding shit in TF2 is lame.

I never thought I'd see the day, but lo and behold, it's been over a year with the same layout/design here at dBaines.com. This design, titled BreezeEasy, or Volume 4 depending on who you ask, was created in September of last year and put online on the 1st of October. Since then it's had a few tweaks and such, as you can expect, but the core design hasn't changed one molecule.
Considering I used to change designs almost monthly back in the day, this came as quite a surprise to me.