Thu 31 Mar 2005
I got myself an invitation to Yahoo 360º. Thanks to Kent Brewster who sent it to me (thanks a lot, Kent!). I will extend this courtesy to others who might want an invitation too, so leave your name and email in the comments if you want one. Currently having fun playing with the new toy. 
I currently have 85 82 81 invitations.
UPDATE: COMMENTS ARE CLOSED FOR THIS ENTRY AND I CAN’T SEND ANY MORE INVITES.
Sun 27 Mar 2005
I have just upgraded my version of WordPress to 1.5. and now I’m using the other theme that I entered in Alex King’s theme competition. Do you like i? If you use WP 1.5 yourself, you can use it too: click here to download the ‘Connections’ theme.
Sat 26 Mar 2005
I finally emailed my 2 entries to the WPThemes competition over at Alex King. I feel a bit frustrated that Sadish and I were unable to get other themes ready. We had, as I said in a previus post, 8 themes altogether, but we will still make them all available at wpthemes.info in the near future.
The themes I ended up sending were Fleur-de-Lys, which is the theme I currently use in this blog (which actually has 3 different color schemes, but I sent just one of them) and another one called Connections – and boy, I had such a hard time picking a name for this one! I showed this theme to many people and was surprised to see how many different interpratations each one came up with. Take a look at this screenshot and tell me what you think the top image means. Every single person who saw it gave me a different interpratation. How odd!!! This is why it was so hard to name it, because apparently it means different things to different people. So I decided on a more generic name that, itself, can be interpreted in a number of ways. But just out of curiosity, I would like to know what other people think it means, so please, please leave a comment with your input.
I’d also like to mention that:
Good luck to all of you who participated, but I have a feeling that the big winner here is the WordPress community.
Fri 25 Mar 2005
I’ve read at Simply Geeky about this game and now I’m completely hooked!!! Not for everyone, I guess – you must have at least a little bit of geeky blood running through your veins, think outside the box, be creative and good with puzzles. Some levels are easier than others but so far all I can say is: be ready for giving your brain cells a good workout, use Google and other programs other than your regular browser and if you’re the type of person to give up easily, don’t even bother (this requires some patience and persistence). I’m now in level 8 and have been playing for a couple of hours. I foresee a long night ahead. 
Very cool!!!
Thu 24 Mar 2005
Sadish and i have been working against the clock to have all the themes ready for Alex King’s competition. We might not be able to enter all the themes we have created, though… I’m going through my monthly creative phase righ now, so I just keep new themes coming and there’s no time to code them all. The deadline is tomorrow. We have entered with Fast Track. Fleur-de-Lys is ready and just in need of some minor adjustments. We have the following themes lined up either to be coded or completed:
Those that we don’t manage to send to the competition will probably be released in our free themes section on WPthemes.info.
Mon 14 Mar 2005
I suffer from an extreme perfectionism disorder! For real!! I drive Sadish crazy when we are working together on a project. Poor guy… He’s patient with me, maybe because no matter how annoying I can be (and I am, trust me!!!), the final result is worth the effort.
As I write this, we are actually working on a client’s project that, from the regular user’s point of view, could be almost ready. But I’m sitting here with a list of tiny ajustments, such as:
- move comment icon 2 pixels to the left, it’s too close from the comment text.
- move the date text 1 pixel up, it’s not 100% aligned with the title bar.
Only things of this nature.
The regular user might not notice, but from the designer’s perspective, these things make a lot of difference. Each spacing has a purpose. Each font is there for a reason. From my perspective, attention to detail is what separates the good from the bad designs. While the regular user might not notice that small detail, if you, as a developer, overlook it, the overall look and feel seems flawed somehow. The user might not know exactly for sure why, but have a general feeling that there’s something wrong.
I was once told that I should work in quality assurance. But as much as I try to achieve perfection in everything I do and contradictorily to all my efforts toward that, I don’t actually enjoy this. It is, in fact, a tedious task.
I try at all times not to miss the big picture while doing this. It may not seem like that, but I do. My feeling is that this is a very competitive market and unless you set your standards really high, you don’t have much chance in succeeding. It is hard work, time consuming, but this kind of comitment is well worth it in the long run. That is “not missing the bigger picture”. The bigger picture is not the project as a whole, but the business as a whole. The kind of result clients will learn to expect when hiring us. I will not miss a deadline because of a pixel. But I will fight for the pixel to the last minute before the deadline if I feel it will make a difference in the final outcome.
It takes a lot of commitment from the team to achieve such results. As I said, it’s tedious!!! And that’s when I feel very lucky that I am working with someone that understands my point of view and commits to these standards, even when it seems like I’m missing the big picture. Sadish, I know I bug you a lot!!! Thank you for putting up with me and for having faith in what we are doing. I really mean it!
Thu 10 Mar 2005
Alexking.org is running another WordPress themes competition, this time for version 1.5. There are already 16 themes entered. Sadish and I will enter some themes too.
Mon 7 Mar 2005
Do you think Blogsome should include a link back to theme developers on the footer – and not in some other page of their site – of the WordPress themes they make available for free to their users, considering that they profit from showing compulsory Google ads in every blog?? I think they should… Share your opinion here.
Sat 5 Mar 2005
Sat 5 Mar 2005
I have been working like crazy the past days. Sadish and I are getting many request for custom work from WPThemes.info. There are very interesting projects in the making and still more to come, to the point that we already felt the need for a project management system to organize things before we start losing track of the many requests that are coming our way. This is such a blessing… I honestly did not expect that many requests in so little time.
For those of you who don’t know what I’m talking about: Sadish, from WPThemes.info, and I have partnered to make free WordPress themes. After a while, we started offering custom themes for a nominal fee. It’s a good deal for those who want to stand out from the crowd by having a unique and exclusive theme developed for their blog. We design and code and get everything up and running. So, if you’re looking for a custom made theme for your blog or a regular website, contact us.
You are currently browsing the Vanilla Mist weblog archives for March, 2005.
