And thus ends another era in my life. 2010 is turning out to be quite the year.
Tag Archive for 'kubrick'
I met up for an interview with the gracious Tina Daunt in Santa Monica (oh wonderful Santa Monica) during our US roadtrip, first slated for the LA Times, before they started firing people left and right, now up at Huffington Post.
The new 2010 theme is slowly starting to take shape, and I’m very much looking forward to seeing what that’ll be about. Meanwhile my, until recently, neglected second child, K2—a spiritual followup of sorts to Kubrick — just went 1.0 before the holidays, and we’re well on our way towards a great 1.1 release.
I’ve got a couple of other projects I should have started a long time ago coming in 2010, and I can’t wait to unveil them as we get nearer to summer. Yes, one of them is a new WordPress theme.
It was great, while it lasted, honestly pretty crazy for a while, and I very much enjoyed it; but its retirement is timely, if not overdue.
Kubrick, by the way, was born in the summer of 2004, which makes it almost five six years old this year. I would never have thought it could have lived for this long.
Thanks Stanley. And sorry.
It being Kubrick appreciation week, it seems fitting Matt let me know that somebody went ahead and named their dog after Kubrick. Not the man though, but the WordPress theme I did!
Kubrick is named after the default WordPress theme, Kubrick! It’s a really nerdy way of naming our new pup, but my husband wanted to name him with something that’s related to web design and development. #
The fundamentally largest change from Kubrick to K2 is in how the template deals with plugins. For a while Kubrick shipped with a few plugins and some scruffy code, which people could uncomment if they wanted plugin support. Bad mojo.
K2 automatically detects a range of my favorite plugins out of the box, and will upon detecting set them up for you, no hassles. I try to keep an eye on the whole plugin market, but feel free to mail me about your favorite plugins so that I might give them a spin.
Also, K2 will have a configuration file in which you can toggle between two-column or single-column layout, as per popular request.
Other than that it’s getting some nips and tugs here and there and all around; oh, and it is now entirely CSS driven. No more images needed
Turn page. Big bold letters: YEAR THREE
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, friends, family, geeks, freaks, 1337’s and fellow bloggers. Today marks the beginning of Binary Bonsai’s third year as part of the blogosphere. What a ride this last year has been. Holy crap.
Let’s take it from the top
I talked briefly to Matt yesterday about kubrick two, where he mentioned that WordPress 1.5 would be going on within a day. And lo and behold, despite the lack of an official announcement on the devblog, you can now serve yourself to one slice of premium blogging solution over at the WordPress Download page.
This of course also means that WordPress now ships with a brandnew template, namely Kubrick. There is one minor thing that I wish I had had the time to fix: this version of Kubrick doesn’t welcome returning commenters, only people who have logged in… But such are the losses of a secretive scheduling.
I have however made enough headway into kubrick two, for it to see release probably before the week ends.
Congratulations to the team, great job guys and gals; Binary Bonsai is now a fully armed and operational 1.5 blog. Ph34r m3!
I know that there are a few minor remaining issues with Kubrick (like this), and it is my intention to roll those changes into the final v1.3.0. I try to keep up with the forums, but I’m bound to miss something once in a while, so here’s my plea to you:
If you come across a flaky piece of code, or if you have suggestions that would fit into the scheme of things; let me know, and it’ll go into my todo pile. Furthermore, just so you know, the 1.3.0 will be based off of Ryan’s excellent work and include a good deal of code strains from Freya. Now you know :)
Here’s a question for you, Kubrick users: Should I have the sidebar appear on all pages, or keep it the way it is now?
PS: Shout out to Jens, who helped me with some SQL magic yesterday. You’re so the money!
Lying somewhere around the apartment, in the living room I think, I have a stack of sketches with design explorations that I made in the first few weeks of the redesign that has led to what you’re looking at right now. A flurry of attempts at coming up with a new form. Something to break the backbone of the blogosphere; the monotony of header, content, sidebar, footer.
Having played around for a few weeks with the elements that combined constitute Binary Bonsai, I eventually landed on the inevitable conclusion that the revolutionary layout I was looking for was a wild goose-chase, and the inevitable conclusion was to restart the redesign.
Having run this site for a couple of years, I have if nothing else, learned a lot about how I personally utilize it, and the new design needn’t necessarily invent a new form, but rather further the previous one through the experiences I’ve gained.
I hereby present, header, content, sidebar and footer…
Over the weekend, the Binary Bonsai flickr group rounded the 100 member mark and counting. If you haven’t already, please by all means add a screenshot of your Kubrick site to the group pool. Thanks.
PS: With this post I have created a new category, called Milestones. Also, I’ve now added my del.icio.us feed to the sidebar, under Clippings. It’s messy just now, but I’m just testing to see if it works properly for the launch of 4.
PPS: If you experience old entries suddenly cropping up in your aggregator these days, it’s for the same reasons.
I am growing busier and busier, and it would seem that by some degree of irony, the days are getting shorter and shorter. In fact, I have never felt as out of time as I do now. A pity too, as I have never had such a lust for indulging in different endeavors as I do now. So to retain my sanity, I’ve had to make a few prioritization’s in regards to what my day is spent on. These may or may not affect you.
As I promised, today should be the day that finally sees the Kubrick theme set into the open. I’ll of course do whatever I can to make it as standards compliant and cross-browser compatible as I can get away with, but I do expect minor errors to crop up once it gets into your hands.
So I’d appreciate it, if you would let me know of any errors you find and/or additions you make that might be of interest to other people. I can’t guarantee that I roll them into the theme, but the more the merrier.
Update: Actually, I’m going to name it 1.2.0, following the version numbering of WordPress, and incrementing the last digit when making changes.
Also, My apologies for the server being down, it seems that my host decided that today was the day where the IP’s get moved around. This of course results in me not being able to do a damn thing about the Kubrick theme for the last 3 – 4 hours. Luckily I’m all but done.
As I said a few days ago, the Kubrick Theme is alive and well. In fact, I have in a sense been working on it throughout the weekend. So I do hope that you will forgive me the longer-than-anticipated wait, but I want to make sure that this thing is right from the get-go (I hate ‘patches’, they never propagate as far as the original.)
I’ve added a few more items to the list of trimmings I’ve made around here. All things, so far, that I have wanted to do for a long long time. Somehow I found that over the last few days I’ve been able to work extremely focused on this site, and I’m afraid that by doing so I have neglected a few other things, such as content. But you’ve gotta build the boat before you load it with people, right? At least, that’s the way it works in Civilization 3.
So for you people waiting for the Kubrick theme, fear not, since that design and this, are basically the same, all this code clean up will be good for you too.
Here is a list of the things that I have yet to do. One of Rikke’s friends is staying with us until Sunday, and I’ll have a good deal of time until then to work on this, the list of things yet to be done.
- Archives: Archives have been vastly improved, but still needs a little work.
- Gallery: Just like the photo gallery, the other gallery needs to work better. I want to try and integrate it into WP and use it as a CMS, but I don’t know if that’s possible…
- Categories: The categories are a mess. Too many, too diverse, too imprecise.
If there’s something that’s been annoying you, or something you would like to see more of, now’s the time to chime in.
So close. If you would like to test this theme for WordPress 1.2 for me, get in contact with me.
Update: The first beta is literally just out the door. Thank you for all your mails, I am quite overwhelmed :)