If you know me, you might know about my privacy assignment from last year at UOW that involved sock puppets.  It was a creative assignment that I really threw myself into, and I kind of like that it was whimsical.  Whimsical enough that I set my Twitter profile photo to be one of the puppets.

So I figured, since it’s become associated with me anyway, why not rewrite my theme to reflect this?

The current theme uses a plug in to WordPress called Sandbox that allows you to just design your theme with CSS.  Now, I know PHP but the thought of digging through the loop just bugs me.  I like that Sandbox just gives me a clean slate to work off of.  The theme itself is tinted blue, to reflect my mood & personality and every 4 hours, one of 6 different photos from a recent trip to Canada appears.  It was an experiment in Eric Meyer’s ComplexSpiral and using time to change a theme (useful for automatically adding the Christmas logo to your website).

But, I hate it.  It’s too much blue.  It’s ugly.  The files are too large (as I put it to my class recently – I’m moving bathtubs through the internet).  And people don’t get the ComplexSpiral.  They get it, but they don’t GET it.  They don’t notice it, they don’t realise how cool, how special, how different it is.

As someone put it to me awhile ago “Oh yeah, I can do that on MySpace”.  Well, no, YOU can’t.  You’re just selecting a theme.  You’re not doing anything.  It’s like if you directed a movie and showed me the movie and said “see?” and I said “Hey I can do that too!” and I put a movie in the DVD.  I’m not actually making the movie, ya know.

So, here’s my plan, base a theme on sock puppets.  Scan buttons, socks, felt, wool, and start assembling the pics into something cool.

Now just to find the time…

I seem to remember somewhere someone talking about a fix. Maybe I should have paid attention. Yeah….

Okay, don’t panic, I’m sure there’s a fix.

This website is actually running software called “Wordpress“. It’s free, it runs on a language called php and a database called mysql. I’m hosting it through a crowd called mphosting but I’m running a copy on my own machine for development. So this software is a content management system. Means I can put up a post or a page quickly. It’s all pretty basic stuff.

So why didn’t I write my own stuff from scratch? Well, look I am a control freak, but I figured why am I trying to reinvent the wheel. Wordpress won’t do exactly what I was looking for in a website, but it’s close enough.

And here’s where the control freak aspect of me does take over – the style. Wordpress is the nuts and bolts. The look and feel, that’s all me. All my work, my ideas, my creativity.

Well, almost.

Credit goes to the guys who did sandbox, Scott Allan Wallick and Andy Skelton. It’s hard to explain what sandbox is to people who don’t know CSS. Basically, these guys built a nice level foundation.

And I have to credit Eric Meyer. He’s a CSS author and in his book “Eric Meyer on CSS” is where I first saw his “Complexspiral”. It’s brilliant. He’s the guy who came up with the whole scroll-the-text-moves-the-background-stays this theme is based on.

So what did I do?

I showed this to someone here and his response was “Yeah, I saw something like that one Myspace”. Every time I do something cool on the web, there’s always people who say “yah saw it before.” To me, that’s like when my father takes someone on a tour of the house he built and they saw “Yah, I’ve seen houses before.” It’s the fact that it’s a product of my hands, it’s my work that I put into it that I’m showing you.

Okay, so sure, I did get a lot of help from Wallick, Skelton and Meyer. So maybe it’s more like the Adirondack chairs my dad builds from a template he copied from a kit.

They’re still nice chairs.

Sunset at Brooks Beach