Frontier Web Design

The wife and I were excited to find out today that we’re having a boy!

The ultrasounds are impressive these days. You can see the videos on my family site.

Matt, founder of Automattic and creator of WordPress has raised 29.5 Million.

Automattic had raised a whopping $29.5 million in a Series B Round of funding, including a strategic investment from The New York Times Co. Previous investors True Ventures, Polaris Ventures, and Radar Ventures also invested in this round.

This sounds pretty awesome, and all of Matt’s hard work seems to be paying off nicely.

So what does Automattic need the money for? After all, from what I know of the business, Automattic has been bubbling around the break-even point for a while now. Matt explains that they are going to roll out newer, hosted services such as BBPress (forums), and will expand their other product offerings, such as Gravatar and the spam-protection service Akismet. The money will be spent to hire more engineers and build out a more robust infrastructure.

And I’m excited to hear they’ll be working to expand BBPress. It think it has so much more potential.

Just wanted to say thanks to WeLoveWP.com for featuring Frontier Web Design in their gallery of hot WordPress sites.

And I would like to also thank WPcube.com for recently featuring FWD, and a couple other sites I’ve done.

This is a conditional body tag for the header.php in your WordPress Theme. Naturally, be sure to add the opening and closing php tags.

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< ?php 
 if (is_home()) {
  // we're on the home page so just show a basic div tag
   echo '<div>';
  } else {
   // every other page can have this ID in the div tag
  echo '<div id="nothome">';
 } // That's all, folks!
  ?></div>

Why would I want this? Well, lets say you are using your WordPress site for more than just a blog. And the home page body tag has a different background style than any other page, this would allow you to apply different styles to them.

I just used this for a recent project. The home page has a large “feature story”, and the body background image is lower than any other page, to line things up with the feature story box.

But why not just use a div? No reason, really. This just leaves less code in your source.

It’s that time again. The last FWD theme didn’t last very long at all. I originally set it up, with plans to start blogging more often. And that fell through the cracks, as time is something I lack severely in these days.

So I was influenced by Small Potato’s Showcase Theme, for a couple reasons. Firstly because it just gives you the meat and potatoes. Not a lot of writing, and content to confound the user. This would help get me off the hook on having to update the blog. Even despite my attempt at losing the blog, nearing the end of the development, it happened to find its way back on. Don’t ask me why, or expect frequent updates for that matter. Maybe it’s in anticipation of having something truly great to say, some day.

I really had fun with this particular theme. Learned a few more tricks with the_Loop and such. Even now I’m still working out a few minor bugs. For example, the front portfolio will normally show 6 project thumbnails, but when I add a new entry to the blog, the loop will only show 5 thumbnails. It was either that problem, or not having the paging buttons work.

Hopefully this theme design will last!

Speckyboy put up a great post linking the top 25 icon resources.

Ian Main has some nice looking CSS menus up for grabs.

Anthony Eggart has a nifty CSS only branching menu available for your downloading pleasure.

CSS Menu Maker allows you to customize the code for output.

Here’s a bunch of CSS Menus links too.

Interested in dropdown/branching menus for your WordPress template? Try out this bit of code for your main navigation, along with some of the above CSS designs.

List Page by Page Order

< ?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>

You can also use ’sort_column=post_title’ to list your pages alphabetically, whereas menu_order will list your pages according to their ID number.

Exclude Pages From List

< ?php wp_list_pages('exclude=17,38' ); ?>

For more ways to control the output of your pages, check out the wp_list_pages in the codex.

It was a day that started out like any other… but ended horribly. Well, not too horribly, but it was by far the most intense in regards to servers going down and the pressure brought on by clients.

Around 10am, the Drudge Report linked a breaking news article that Pat Dollard had posted. It was a grunt marine’s response to Harry Reid claiming this war is lost. It had made it to the top 5 news stories in the nation for that day.

So with the Drudge link, came certain doom for the other 50 clients that shared the server with Pat. As a project manager and tech support both fit my job title, next to being a designer… I got to take all the cussing from clients who’s business is down since their email is down. I got to take all the cussing from Pat with his site being down in his day of fame, and of course I was the one to handle the migration of Pat’s site to it’s own dedicated server.

The adrenaline never did stop that day. I had to leave work early, to douse my mind in cold beer, which seemed to be of no avail. Eventually all the hype had settled, the clients were back up, and the day came to an end with my complete exhaustion. All in a day’s work. I love my life.

Jason Bartholme put up a handy post indeed. 101 CSS Resources to Add to Your Toolbelt of Awesomeness. Don’t forget to bookmark that badboy!

So here it is. The place was getting a bit out of date, and was in serious need of an overhaul. I’ve just been so busy working on projects for friends and clients that I came to neglect this place. And a growing family always takes its toll on personal hobbies as well. A few months ago our first born came along. Emma Jane been nothing but perfect for us.

Back to the site, I’d like to spotlight a recent change in the FWD logo. Every good company deserves a good logo to represent itself, so I went to work and produced the result that you see in the banner of this site. Originally, I had the oval in a vertical position. As that didn’t fit very well in website banner, I decide to knock it over on its side as a variation of the same logo.

As for the website, it is still powered completely by WordPress. As a WordPress junkie, I wouldn’t have it any other way. The new design here features a index page with multiple columns that all display specific categories. This was a new attempt for me, as it is mostly a hack. So far it has proved a very useful one.

I know time is a constraint for me, but I’d really like to be able to post here regularly on web related topics. I’ll also try to spend more time releasing some free WordPress themes. I seem to go through themes like I go through boot socks. I know I have some on my machine that I can release, once I clean em up a bit. Stay tuned!

American Soldier has just returned from the sandbox, after narrowly surviving a roadside bomb. Welcome home soldier!