New Design is a Go
As I write this, I’m in the process of finishing up the transfer of files and content over from mediatemple to dreamhost. Earlier, pseudoroom on mediatemple had been down the previous 35 hours or so — site, email, and FTP — which while aggravating, was also the final nail in the coffin of the old design.
For this iteration I wanted to go back to an ultra-clean, stark design (I intentionally pulled myself out of that zone with the last site). It’s always interesting where inspiration can come from. I may have mentioned this once or twice in the past, but I’m a big Street Fighter fan. Daigo Ikeno‘s “living watercolor” illustration/animation style in Street Fighter IV had really resonated with me, so I did some general theme pieces to glean a vibe from that (I’m using one of the tests as a desktop image at the moment, so I threw it in the downloads section for shits and giggles).
Hitting stride with the vibe, next was to map out how to right the wrongs from last design’s technical build. The front page news was a hack, more a manual update than anything else. I wasn’t sure how to pull a specific category anywhere I saw fit, something I made sure to rectify this time around:
<?php global $post;
$myposts = get_posts('numberposts=5&category=7');
foreach($myposts as $post) :
?>
<li><a href=<?php the_permalink(); ?>><?php the_title(); ?></li>
<?php endforeach; ?>
I wanted to build all the folio list pages more graphically this time around, having both those — and the subsequent detail pages — being assembled from a single post. By leveraging custom fields, I’m now able to get a folio piece, download, or blog post produced (post listing and detail page) from a single source.