personal site with custom theme

Dgold, the location/weather/date graphic at the top right is actually a flash file. The flash file is fed information dynamically via ‘flashvars’. Here is a sample of the ‘flashvars’ and values I’m feeding it:

month=JUN
day=24
dnam=Barcelona, Spain
lat=41.3962
lon=2.175
conditions=1:23 AM, 68° F (Partly Cloudy)

‘month’, ‘day’, and the time portion of ‘conditions’ are calculated via PHP’s built in date/time functions. ‘dnam’, ‘lat’, ‘lon’, and the weather portion of ‘conditions’ come from weather.com’s XML service (I use PHP to parse the XML).

In the flash file, the ‘month’, ‘day’, ‘dnam’, and ‘conditions’ variables are displayed as-is. The ‘lat’ and ‘lon’ variables are converted to X and Y coordinates, which are used as the coordinates for the red-dot.

Whenever we move to a new place, I have to update two things:

1. our blog’s timezone in the WP-admin area
2. a php variable in my theme’s header.php file that stores the weather.com location ID that corresponds to our current location

whooami, thank you for the kind words. While building the site, the WordPress documentation proved to be extremely helpful, and I spent a fair amount of time reviewing the code in the default WordPress theme.

It also helped that I’ve had extensive experience developing sites from scratch utilizing XHML, CSS, Javascript, Flash, PHP, and MySQL.

^ Do you have plans in making your blog theme available to your “fans”? =)

I wouldnt, if I were him.

beautifully unique sites are often ones that take days to do, if not weeks. Unique being the key word.

If it were me, I would covet it. ??

i really enjoy the design, the content, and just everything about it really. good job – fun reading!

i love the whole site theme.. so pretty..

Im wondering what plugin did you use for the photo and video gallery? Very very neat ??

Looks great, Justin. Question: Is there anyway to use personal handwriting in WordPress—for instance, just an arrow that says Click Here.

Do I need a Wacom pen? Is this doable in WordPress?

Thanks either way and great job

Floppydog: if you only need a handful of buttons in your own handwriting, creating images using a combination of Photoshop and Wacom would be a good way to go. If you needed more flexibility in where/how you embed your own handwriting (i.e. for post titles), you could create your own font and use sIFR to replace the standard browser text with that font.

Justin – first off, I love your site! I did run into a problem when viewing images through your lightbox script in FF. The image starts to load in lightbox and then reverts back to a 2nd page load – the normal way that a clicked image would display. I don’t think this is your intent?

Aside from that, everything about the site is very unique and classy. Hoping you’re having a great globetrekking experience. Immensely jealous – but will be living vicariously through your stories, pictures, and videos.

dKaye

dkaye315: thanks for the comment. In regards to the lightbox issue, are you experiencing the problem on all the photo galleries?

Absolutely fantastic site. Just love it! Makes me want to use my still and video cameras more often again.

You’ve answered the question about the lightbox (love the way it becomes a slide-show), so my other question is what software you use/suggest for video editing/creation.

Thanks so much for sharing and hope your trip continues to go well.

Christy

If anyone is interested, you can download my Lightbox Slideshow photo gallery interface here:
https://www.justinbarkhuff.com/lab/lightbox_slideshow/

christykny: my wife creates all the videos on the site using Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. Completed videos are exported as uncompressed AVI’s, then we use the Flash Video Encoder to convert AVI’s to FLV’s.

Thank you, Justin!

Re: the lightbox issue – under the “photos” tab of your blog, i opened up 4 different sets of images and experienced the same thing each time. I would do a screen capture but it goes so quickly, it’s hard to grab one.

Here’s what happens – open one of the galleries and click on an image. You get the initial overlay (the opaque dark background) and a white box where the image is going to show up, and then it immediately responds like a selected hyperlink instead – reusing the same window and opening the image. FYI – the loader animation doesn’t show up.

I hope that helps.