It's kind of harsh, but my office mate wanted a bumper sticker with the "59 million dumb" headline from the London Daily Mirror, so I created the 59M Dumb Cafe Press store.
I don't know. This is like a sign that reads "break my windows".
I made some subtle design changes to urlgreyhot. The template has similar design themes carried over from the previous skin, but I'm trying to make the skin a little quieter. I've avoided completely getting rid of borders and graphics on the site, but I can see the skin going more and more in that direction as I try to reduce and distill the page elements to the necessities. Mostly this effort has been to get the site to match the style of my presentations, which are quite minimal.
I'm still having a few problems. In PHP or MySQL I'm trying to figure out how to get the first n words out of a field rather than the first n letters to try to come up with a decent teaser that's about 20-30 words long. Not having much success with that. Tried to put the words of the field value into an array using explode and then pull them back out using implode, but I'm not getting that to work.
I also just discovered ADOdb, which makes PHP/MySQL searching and caching extremely easy. I don't know why it took me so long to find it, but it works extremely well.
I'm doing a redesign of this site to consolidate my portfolio (studioid.com) with my personal stuff and weblog (urlgreyhot.com). For now, I've created a separate theme called "tricorder". The skinnable "utility" theme is still available to registered and logged-in users. To access those, you need to log in, go to My account and then select utility.
The new theme is still under development. The "Professional" section now only points to studioid.com until I incorporate that site's header/footer and CSS to use the new style sheets.
The tricorder.css proved to be a little more troublesome to implement than I had hoped. I like coming up with different problems with the goal of solving them in CSS, but this one was harder than the previous skins. The button navigation at the top of the page was fun to figure out. I knew how to execute it essentially, but had trouble until I set width and height values to the div. The buttons do not scale when the browser is used to force the font-size to be larger. I'm still not sure how to deal with that.
I also had problems with the inner borders for the content area disappearing on Win IE 6- and Mac IE 5.x. To fix the problem I had to resort to using background images for the borders. It works consistently in my target browsers, so I'm satisfied for now.
I think everything else seemed to work out well with regards to CSS. I remain increasingly annoyed at IE's CSS quirks, though.
The visual design is spare, as are most of my attempts to design this site. True to the domain, the inspiration came from the little handheld reading tablets I recall from Star Trek Voyager. I actually haven't watched any Star Trek in years (I only liked TNG and early Voyager), but I always liked the simplicity of those little hanhelds they carried around. The design actually mimicks the reading tablets more than the tricorder and looks nothing like a Tricorder screen does. It would be fun to do one like that some day as well. I also put a placeholder image in the top of the page -- the face drawing -- until I come up with a better graphic for that area and figure out what I will use for the "Professional" section.
I am going to find out how to contribute themes to Drupal.org so that modified versions of all of my previous utility.theme skins are available.