Twelve Hours of Power

Hello 2006. Bring it.

I won’t get into a huge retrospective, but the past year has been pretty damn good. Some highlights: moving to WordPress, graduating from Teacher’s College, the popularity of the flickrRSS and myStatus plugins, having site designs appear on a number of CSS Gallery sites, Alanah moving in and receiving a Digital Rebel for Christmas.

As they say, the new year is a time for growth and rejuvenation (but I could be wrong, maybe it’s Spring they’re talking about). In the spirit of growing, it’s time to rip the site apart and start again. If you’re new to the neighbourhood, it happens a lot.

At this point, I have nothing. Not even a colour scheme. Twelve hours from now, I aim to have some semblance of a new and functional website. Odds are good it won’t be completely implemented, but we’ll see how far I can get.

I will make some effort to document the process via screenshots in my flickr photostream. To keep tabs on the design process, check the status page for regular updates (although it could suffer WordPress collapse) and the changelog.

It is currently 3:30pm EST (20:30 UTC), so my Twelve Hours of Power (12HoP) will end at 3:30am or 830 UTC tomorrow. For those in Europe, you’ll be able to wake up to the new nightmare that is eightface.

As an added incentive to return at some point, flickrRSS 3.0 should be released tomorrow and Fork (a theme for K2) sometime thereafter.

Screenshot Updates

Screenshot: Hour 0 – 3:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 1 – 4:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 2 – 5:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 3 – 6:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 4 – 7:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 5 – 8:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 6 – 9:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 7 – 10:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 7 – 10:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 8 – 11:30pm
Screenshot: Hour 9 – 12:30am
Screenshot: Hour 10 – 1:30am
Screenshot: Hour 11 – 2:30am
Screenshot: Hour 12 – 3:30am
Slideshow – watch it happen

Wrapup

That’s it, twelve hours. Time for bed. Here’s a brief run down of the changes, I may write more later (but there’s more work to be done). I decided against upgrading to WP2.0, I’ll leave that for a bit later. The theme has been named Giza, after the first of the Ancient Wonders of the World (leaves room for six more :)).

Found I wasn’t using the sidebar much after the failed attempt to put comments there, so eightface is now one-column. No sidebar means the quickposts have been integrated into the main column once again (kind of like reading the feed).

Couldn’t settle on a colour scheme, so we’re looking at non-colour once again. The hint of colour peeking through is the venerable #600 red. Everyone’s doin’ sans-serif fonts these days, so we’re kicking it back Georgia styles, with solid Helvetica for the headers.

There are lots of bits and pieces left to take care of, the biggest thing being the tag pages. Also want to put a bunch of effort into the footer on the main page. I’m off to bed, look for flickrRSS tomorrow.