Free Simplelog Theme
I know, it’s been a while. Since the end of March and my last post, I’ve been exceptionally busy and distracted with a lot of thinking, analysis and conversations about the shape and direction of my career. Due to all that thinking, I expect my haphazard blogging to fragment shortly, into more concretely defined side-projects. I expect this blog will continue quietly, as a connection between my projects and as a collection for desultory topics. I’ll post about those side-projects when they’re ready for real use, of course.
In the meantime, my work on those side-projects spawned my first “free theme” contribution to a CMS system! Woo! Wait, let me back up a bit…. Blue Flavor recently added Garrett Murray to their roster. I got a chance to meet Garrett at SXSW, and learn a bit about his own awesome side-project, a Rails-based blogging CMS called Simplelog. Being a Seattle geek, and friends of the Blue Flavor guys, it was, in effect, a challenge to start using Simplelog. So that I might rock Simplelog on my side-projects (and someday soon this blog, too), I had to learn a bunch of things I’d promised myself to learn—terminal access via a Mac, server installs via DreamHost, MySQL and a bit of Ruby on Rails. A secondary goal is to use my side-projects on Simplelog as a springboard for learning more Rails, too.
After a bit of an uphill battle to get Simplelog up and running in a few places, the obvious next-step was to customize the UI and layout. UI design brought in a secondary goal of mine—doing a bit of design work, and building a CSS base that used em-based grids, em-based scaling, vertical rhythm and some of the latest/greatest CSS practices. The task was really rewarding, because I’ve struggled with vertical rhythm and grid design in the past, trying to add it onto and existing project, rather than starting with a grid as the base. Much better to start, rather than add.
Without further ado, I give you “Stripes”! It’s linked within Simplelog’s wiki, so hopefully some folks might adopt it as their design, or as a solid basis for CSS-based sites that want to use a vertical-rhythym/baseline grid system, too. In the meantime, you can see it in effect on the pre-launch of one of my side-projects, too: The Society of the Tap & Pint.
