Welcome
Say hello to TeaBass.com
This is going to be my personal website now that Fishbitt.com is becoming the website for my new business venture. There are still quite a few little things I have to finish, like the styles for comments and single pages.
This is the first wordpress theme I have created from scratch, it’s really quite easy. I designed a sign page in XHTML and CSS then copied sections of the code into header and footer php files along with some wordpress tags to generate a number of things, then put “the loop” in the middle part (index.php) and tweaked a few of the tags to get it how I want it.
It’s lacking in content at the moment, but visually everything is finished, the speech bubble at the side is going to show only my most recent post in the “thoughts” category, kind of like a tumblelog, which you can view here: http://teabass.com/category/thoughts/, the main area, where you are reading this, will be for longer articles and posts with more structure and time put into them.
I’m still trying to work out where to put my flickr photos… any ideas?
You may have also notice a few special links around the page; “About”, “Extras” and “More”, these links activate a little bit of javascript and make hidden divs unhidden, have a go! I wanted a clean look to the site, but to still have functionality where needed. So all the validation, admin and wordpress links are hidden away in the extras div.
So it goes without saying that Javascript is required for this site, if you turn off JS and come to Teabass you will see a little message telling you to turn on Javascript to get the most out of the site.
On the same theme, if you can, try viewing TeaBass in IE6. You’ll notice a nice little message to all the IE users telling them to get firefox. If you can’t get to IE, you can see the message if you look at the source code of this page.
Despite my message, I’m sure there will be some people who can’t or don’t want to switch, so I have made Teabass look exactly the same in IE as Firefox. It took a little bit of time and caused some confusion but I did it, you’ll need javascript as the speech bubble is done with pngs… IE6 doesn’t do them well, so I’ve put in a bit of javascript to force properly PNG support. If your using IE6 with Javascript disabled the site won’t be at its best!
I’ll be filling out the content in the next couple days, and posting about “Project R” and how I’m getting on with setting up my business.
I want to stress that Teabass will be a journal, rather than a blog.
I feel at the moment “blog” does not sum up my style of writing. I’ve been doing many posts about me and personal thoughts and “blogs” imply to me that you should post useful articles and opinions on current tech news, I’m not really into that at the moment.
Loads of people are already doing and doing it very well, I don’t think I need to do that to with my site anymore.
So if you see anything broken or have any suggestions for Teabass they are more than welcome.
I’m still tweaking, some sections so if anything seems broken it should only be like that for a short while.
I’m pretty happy with the comments section now, just got to add some content to a couple pages and put something a bit more meaningful in the bubble.
Andrew on June 25, 2006 9:37 pm
Damn, I feel like I’m chasing you around the Internet lately!
Brad Kellett on June 26, 2006 1:58 am
Hi Andrew,
small typo (DISABLED) in your no Java error message:
Warning! You have javascript disbaled, some bits won’t work for you.
Loving your sites …
Thanks!
Tom.
Tom on June 26, 2006 8:27 am
Yeah I have been a bit all over the place, I’m going to keep my personal site here for a while, I keep losing my google and technorati ranking every time I move.
Fixed that typo tom, cheers
Andrew on June 26, 2006 8:51 am
your site makes my coming site designs look like crap. Oh Well.
stabani on June 26, 2006 1:40 pm
I take that as a great compliment Stabani, I think you site design is very slick.
I’m still tweaking and adding to the theme here (still not sure if i like how the comments look) but it is coming along nicely
Andrew on June 26, 2006 1:43 pm
Andrew, you should look into using k2. making themes with k2 is quite slick.
stabani on June 26, 2006 7:03 pm
At the moment I’m trying to create as much of my own stuff as possible.
I learn lots of things each time I make a new site and Teabass has been no different.
I’ve been tweaking the theme quite a bit today and I’m very happy with it, just working on a 404 page at the moment.
Andrew on June 26, 2006 8:29 pm
aah, not a bad idea. I’m using it as the base for my new theme, mainly cause it’s easy to edit, and I’m sick of making my own hand coded themes.!
stabani on June 27, 2006 5:15 pm
So, I like the journal idea, but I have one gripe, I can’t get back to the main page from the Links page. . . no link lol.
Jeremiah on June 28, 2006 4:31 pm
Fixed that, I’m still not finished with the links page, Lauren is down for a few days and i have more interesting things to do
Andrew on June 28, 2006 4:44 pm
Hey Andrew I´d like to know where you got this cool background pattern because I´m also working on a design from scratch so that I have no real sources for those design things…
Patrick on June 28, 2006 5:51 pm
I forgot where i found it patrick but feel free to use it: http://teabass.com/wp-content/themes/TeaBass/images/back.jpg
http://squidfingers.com/ has some cool ones too
Andrew on June 28, 2006 5:55 pm
Yeah, glad to hear that we will still get some of your thoughts even if they are not on a “blog”! I love the Pro Firefox logo for the IE6 folks. Looking forward to your continued writing.
Dewayne Mikkelson on June 29, 2006 1:03 pm
Thanks dewayne, always good to hear that one of my first blogging friends is still following me as i bounce between websites!!
Andrew on June 29, 2006 2:07 pm