Blog

Just launched the new maestroknows.com for my man Levi Maestro, designed and coded by yours truly. We created a place for all things MK, including a custom, Vimeo-powered episode viewer as well as a full re-tooling of his blog. Shouts to jQuery, Wordpress, and Vimeo for providing the necessary technologies. Oh, and check out the initial sketch Levi had me go off of: mk.com design plan.

Adventures In Space has been featured on siteInspire, by far my favorite CSS gallery out there. Much thanks!

Small snippet of jQuery to center anything within a relatively positioned element.

$(function() {

	$(element).each(function() {

		var h = $(this).height();
		var w = $(this).width();

		var h = 0 - (h / 2);

		$(this).css({
			'height' : h,
			'width' : w,
			'margin-top' : h
		});

	});

});

Just launched homegirl Stephanie’s new portfolio site, sicbusiness.se. I’m using timthumb for auto-generated thumbnails and jQuery for all the loading magic. You’ll notice I ditched the traditional “lightbox” effect for a smoother and cleaner approach that gives each image full focus when selected. Also, I’m utilizing James Padolsey’s Pulse plugin for animating the opacity of the preloader graphic.

Stephanie’s blog: swedeniscold.com/blog

As of late, I’ve been experimenting quite a bit using jQuery’s Ajax/load feature with Wordpress templates. The results are great so far.

The first implementation was a DOSS project, Adventures In Space. AIS is an inspiration gallery curated and managed by Craig Sprecher and myself. It’s still in an infant stage at this point, but the proof of concept is there. I basically capture the default pagination links and load them using the $(element).load function. This in combination with grabbing the URL for proper linking really showcases how Wordpress can be used to create a quick and dynamic site. Also, since you’re just hijacking links and containers, it’s completely unobtrusive if the user has Javascript disabled.