I’m a late entrant into the world of practical employment, and however fun playing Diablo II is, it does not pay the bills…at least, not in this country. So I am now productively employed at Caroline Collective (under the wonderful Erica O’Grady), a place brimming with pugs and cupcakes. Alright, there’s only one pug — and he’s absolutely adorable — but sometimes, the eyes play tricks…

I thought, at first, that a design job would entail some sort of formulaic precision on my part — sketches, wireframes, prototypes, communication with wolves, and late-light voodoo rituals. I have stolen no souls yet, nor have I followed my lupine brethren into the night, but I have been tremendously productive. The White Stripes and a laptop will do that to you. In the past few weeks, I’ve designed two sites, exported two others into Wordpress, and I’m currently procrastinating on finishing a third (it’ll be done in a few days, Matthew!) because I don’t know whether the best colors to use on a site about Houston are bright blue and green. It’s a real pity that there are no known hexadecimal equivalents for “Smog” and “Metro Bus” — although there are plenty of interpretations.

Working with Sandbox

I’ve always used Sandbox for WordPress themes because the templates are minimalistic enough that I can pretty much remove everything except the template tags and still end up with a functional site. I’ve only ever run into problems working with the sidebar. On the sidebar, I always have to edit out the wrapper <ul> and <li> tags that separate the different sections, like the archives and categories, etc. I always end up going into functions.php and removing the before_title and after_title snippets. Still, I’m sure that from a semantic standpoint, the nested lists are marginally better, but I’m not exactly sure why. I could probably even save myself the trouble and just throw in a few lines of CSS. But knowing me, I’d probably just sit back and cycle through all of “Elephant” until something obvious hit me in the face.

Necessary commentary

I still say that Movable Type is the best CMS for templating, but WordPress is a million times more reliable if harder to work with. Sometimes, I’ll sign into cPanel and find out that Movable Type’s been dumping giant steaming piles of core files in its home directory, so I have to rub its nose in the mess and yell at it loudly on a biweekly basis. But one hundred extra megabytes of useless core files on a hosting plan as “small” as mine is no laughing matter. I say useless because, although core files are snapshots of the server at the time of an error and can help to pinpoint exactly what went wrong, I can’t open them or access them with anything. Each core file has an extension composed of random numbers, and no two are alike. There is no directory of core extensions, and there are no entries in my error logs. At face value, there is nothing wrong with my installation. But I know that just a foot below its bubbling exterior is a volcano ready to destroy my island paradise and tempt archaeologists for years in the future to dig up the remains of my strawberry cheesecake ice cream and say, “Here was a civilized race.”

Read 2 comments (Leave a comment?)

Jorge Quinteros said:

New redesign looks great. I’m personally a huge advocate for Minimalist design that puts forth more emphasis on content. Nice and clean!

Posted on July 26, 2008 8:34 AM; Permalink

Ranjani said:

Thanks so much! I love minimalistic designs, so this is my shoddy imitation. I’ve actually been trying to make a nice design that’s more black and white in nature, but I can’t get away from beiges, browns, and bright colors!

Nice to hear from you again :)

Posted on August 1, 2008 2:32 PM; Permalink