This past weekend I had the honor of participating in the fearsome hen race that was Node Knockout. For those who don’t have serious geek cred: Node Knockout was a 48 hour competition featuring teams of hackers each pecking away at a web application that should be somewhat complete-ish after at the end of the two days. In our case, we tried to build a fairly full-feature music player in 2 days (yeah lets see how that turned out)…
If you, like me, are working on your first Drupal theme, a big question can be: Do I really need a base theme or should I start from scratch? This is an easy question to answer: start with a base theme. Why? Because even if you start from scratch, you really aren’t starting from scratch. Drupal loads in a bunch of CSS files for you. And the styles they apply make far too many assumptions. And as my 9th grade Geometry teacher loved to say: assumptions make an “ass” out of “u” and “me.”
So if you’re going to go with a base theme, which to chose? There are a ton out there, but the two I was most intrigued by were Zen and Tao, and I’m going to tell you why Tao totally beat the heck outa Zen in a very Buddhist way.
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I’m not sure if it’s been done before, but I may very well be the first GitHub stalker (hold your applause, please). Who is my target you ask? Vision Media, aka TJ Holowaychuk on GitHub, author of ExpressJS, a Sinatra-inspired Web Framework written for NodeJS.
After cloning and examining a lot of his repos (Use the Source!), I found out in an endnote that TJ had published a book entitled Advanced JavaScript from DevMag. It’s a short book, but one that opened my eyes in a surprising number of ways.
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Node.js is one of the most intriguing projects I’ve seen in a while. For some reason, I’ve never truly enjoyed programming until I started programming in JavaScript. I did the usual BASIC programming as a freshman in high school, and actually tried learning C a bit earlier when I was 12 (let’s just say it didn’t go over well, except that I did win a C “competition” in high school based on that knowledge).
But when I could start hooking up my designs to really cool functionality, such as dmMonocle, my jQuery plugin for viewing images, I loved the combination that was possible. I could not only make beautiful designs, I could make beautiful web applications. My code could react to the actions of users — or in JavaScript lingo, the events of users.
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I’m not promising this blog is gonna be hot and spicy all the time, but It’s been a while since I posted, and I thought I would make it something geeky — performance tests! I swear I’m working on a new template for this site, and naturally it’s going to revolutionize web design. Unfortunately, skiing and learning to play the Ukulele keeps eating up all my time! But I digress…
I’d like to welcome you all to my first series of blog posts, where I’ll detail the steps I’m taking to customize my WordPress theme and plugins, turning this bland old default theme into a well designed site. I’ve never worked with WordPress, had a dusty old portfolio, and decided it was time to jump right in to the icy cold water. In this first part I’d like to talk about what I’m doing as I get ready to theme this site!
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