I’ll be talking a lot about habits and goals in the foreseeable future, it seems.  I’m in the midst of a “growth spurt”, where I can’t seem to take in enough information from all of the avenues of my life.  I’m reading and listening to audiobooks again, I’m learning new programming languages, and I’m inspired to keep up with my goals.

How my blog post draft went today:

I sat down and said “OK, 5 words.  Just need 5 words.  Heck, that’s just a title!”  So I wrote the title.

“Oh, that’s it?” I thought, as I wrote the first sentence of the post.

“OK, I’m done.  Tired of writing” I said, 800 words later.

I’ll happily ride on the coattails of my motivation.  It’s important to do so, because you never know when it is gonna go away.  I just hope when it is truly gone that my 5 word a day minimum will serve as a rock to get me through and help continue to solidify my habit of writing each day.

So, I made a WordPress theme.  Hopefully I will be able to get it onto the WordPress repository soon.  It is a theme specifically for people who need to show off a visual portfolio, such as photographers and designers.  It would do well with industrial designers, as well.

I built it from the ground up to use every last inch of the available screen space.  I have a 27″ monitor, and it renders beautifully on there.  Of course, it formats on mobile quite well, too.

Independent Sidebar

One of my favorite features is the independent-scrolling sidebar.  The content in the sidebar will scroll at a slower (or faster) pace than the rest of the window, so that both the sidebar and the page end at the exact same time.  This gets rid of that awkward white space between the post content and the end of the document when your blog post is more than 500 words.

Single Post

An individual post displays a prominent header, featuring a huge featured image at the top.  The content has plenty of white-space on either side, which I think breaks the otherwise busy theme up.  When the content is longer, it reads a lot like an eBook, and that makes me very happy.  At the bottom, related articles are displayed based on the category of the post you’re reading.  All of the “Blog post boxes” you see are smart, and will fill the space appropriately if there is an odd number of posts.

Sidebar menu

The menu displays on a sidebar, and will darken the rest of the site when you click on it.  This helps put focus on the menu when it is clicked on.  A company logo can go above the menu, and a google-friendly, structured data address below the menu.

Image Gallery

All Wordpress image galleries will look like this.  I made a point to not use any special code on the user’s end, because I didn’t want to force users to go through all of their existing content to swap out for a new “fancy image gallery”

Mobile

Portrait

Landscape