Blaze New Media

Durable has been named the best overall design in the Wordpress Theme Competition.

I am very honored to have been named the winner by the judges as the field contained many great designs this time around.

Well, actually to be honest I am a little surprised. There were designs in the competition that are aesthetically far more pleasing than Durable. I was sure that those designs would have the extra edge over the themes that concentrated on function over form. I guess that was where the multiple categories came into play, my personal favorite was Derek’s very beautiful Foliage Mod Theme which won “Most Creative Design”. Well done Derek.

That begs a question though, are people beginning to pick themes based not solely on the look and feel, but also the bundled functionality? I can’t help but think that people’s feelings towards what makes a good Wordpress theme have changed quite a lot since the Wordpress 1.5 competition. The boundaries of what theme authors can do with Wordpress has been pushed since 1.5, simply because better documentation is now available, and we’ve had more time to fiddle around with the Wordpress code.

Anyway, that was more of a brain dump than anything. It’s just great to see that judges really took time to look at the themes, judging functionality just as much as the look and feel.

Thanks to everyone who put in their free time to make this competition possible, your hard work is much appreciated.

Update: I have released a minor update to Durable. Version 0.2.1 is available for download and decreases page load times by 25%.

The popularity of CSS Tweak has blown me away over the last couple of days. After being picked up by Wired, the number of daily optimizations has gone through the roof!

For people who have no idea what I’m talking about, CSS Tweak is a web based CSS optimization tool. It will take any CSS file and optimize the syntax, grouping your style declarations into shorthand where possible. It can also remove comments, and strip whitespace for maximum compression.

There are other tools out there that have more compression options, but I made CSS Tweak to be simple, fast and easy to use. This meant only including the features that I felt were the most useful. By concentrating on things like making the interface simple and straight-forward, the tool would be far more beneficial for the majority of users that wouldn’t want more advanced compression options.

One major difference from other tools however, is that you can stop it from altering your syntactical layout. Instead it will go through and stick with the code layout structure you have defined, and clean up any areas that are incorrectly formatted. Some other tools tend to reformat your CSS, and move things around.

I’m very flattered by people’s comments, it seems that people enjoy the simplicity and speed the most. Jeffrey Zeldman added the tool to his bookmarks over on Ma.gnolia which has flat out bowled me over! He mentioned that the tool could use a brief help page, which I’ve now added. Thanks Jeffrey.

I’ll be making a few updates to the tweaker over the next little while, I need to fix the pasting option I’ve fixed the pasting option, so you can now quickly paste your CSS into the tweaker.

Also, I need to clarify something – the tool doesn’t check the validity of your CSS. All it does is check that the file you are trying to tweak is actually CSS at all. I guess my error message is a little confusing. I did this to stop people uploading and trying to tweak JPEG’s or PDF’s for example. If you want to validate your CSS, use the W3C’s tool.

CSS Tweak is free and you can find it at: http://www.csstweak.com

Update: I have a forum set up where you can submit bug reports, or suggest enhancements for the tool. This way I can keep track of fixes to make for the next version.

Durable is my first Wordpress theme and it’s a little different from other themes I’ve seen so far. It has been an enjoyable and educating experience constructing it.

Durable puts site users in control of page colors, allowing them to create their own personal themes for the site. Each element of the page is editable in real time; the user can select the colors for backgrounds, text and links.

Administrators of the site can go a little further. Their color choices can either be saved as a personal theme, or saved as the site’s new theme so that all users will see their color selections.

The color selection is done via the “Options” menu, visible in the menu bar of every page, and colors update as soon as they’re selected thanks to the very cool ColorMod color selector.

Durable’s Features

• On the fly color scheme editing for you and your users.
• Live AJAX search for archives accessible on any page
• Drop-down menu sections for Archives, Pages, Links and Search, removing the clutter and giving more space for your articles.
• Dedicated archives page showing a “tag cloud” for Months and Tags/Categories.
• Fluid design, meaning users with larger monitors will benefit from extended reading space.
• The following admin options via the Wordpress administrator interface;
  • Switching between the “Torn Page” effect or solid colors for page sections
  • Text alignment of articles (left or justified)
  • Number of posts to show on front page (3, 5, 7 or 9)
  • Switching color changing on or off

You can check out a demo of Durable by switching the theme of this site;

• Switch to Durable
• Switch to CssDev Original

This will give you an example of Durable running on a real world blog, and not just filled with “ideal” information.

I’d love to hear your feedback (email: andy at cssdev dot com), , I am working hard to fix up any bugs in these pre version 1.0 releases.

Despite being a little premature, I’ve decided to put the new design up. I say a little premature as I wasn’t intending to make it live for the next couple of days.

It turns out however, that trying to run Wordpress 1.5 and 2.0 on the same server was not a good idea.

I wanted to put the new site up into a sub folder, and import all of my WP 1.5 content. Long story, but it ended up mixing up my databases, WP 1.5 went down, and here we are with 2.0.

I’ll be tweaking lot’s of different areas over the next few days, most notably Internet Explorer 6 support, which being on a Mac over the xmas period has proved difficult to test so far. Adding a comment right now may prove to be difficult/impossible as I’m using position:fixed…

I’m also finishing up the contact form, comment previewing and tag archives, all which need a little AJAX love.

So, in true 37 Signals style, here it is, the rest will come later.

After a full weekend of tweaking and hair pulling, I finally have the new design to the point where I can put it up for all to see.

Yes, there are still a few bugs that I need to iron out, I’ve changed my blogging software over to Wordpress as it’s getting fairly decent reviews and also let’s me tinker with it’s source.

I’m pleased with the design, it uses the onion skin technique in order to achive the shadow either side of the white content section – also enabling me to add a fairly descreet gradient to the background either side.

Over the next few week’s I’ll be refining and refining, so expect to see subtle changes. I’m not sure how long this will take – hey it’s Christmas!