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December 07 2010
Recent Downtime
October 10 2010
Flexible-width LEFT5 now available for photoblogging WordPress users
October 09 2010
LEFT5 version 1.5 (fixed-width) now available (WordPress theme)
August 16 2010
Loupe: Now More Netbook-Friendly
I know what it’s like to browse with a netbook. I use one myself when I’m away from the desk, so I know how annoying it is when the ridiculously tiny screen ruins all the fun. Until now, Loupe has been a “large displays only” blog, but I’ve finally gotten around to fixing that.
Happy day! Now netbook users can view images on Loupe just like the rest of us! Images too large for a 1024px-wide display will now auto-resize to a more manageable width of 700px. The same goes for anyone using a smaller browser window in an otherwise large display.
Of course, you won’t have the benefit if you’re one of those paranoid people who has every scrap of java disabled. But then again, you would probably not be reading this if that described you :)
Image by Fazen on Flickr.
June 23 2010
A rare text post — LEFT5 (this blog’s theme) is available!
LEFT5, the theme I originally developed for this site, has blossomed into a WordPress theme that can be put to serious use outside the world of big-ass images. It’s already in use over at EndofWeb, and I think that there are people who might find that they like it if they give it a go with their own blogs.
The theme, as you can tell by now, is spartan. There are no widgets allowed in LEFT5, and that’s a feature. In order to use it, you do need to be comfortable with editing the tiniest smidgen of HTML and CSS — but I really do mean tiny. A laughably small amount, really. And with that smidgen of editing comes the power and glee of operating a fast, clean, HTML5 WordPress blog that makes other blogs look downright taudry. So, if you want to take a look for yourself, head on over to its download page, and grab a copy for your self.
LEFT5 (this WP theme) is finally packaged and ready for anyone who wants it!
The very theme this site is now using, which was originally created for and implemented over at Loupe, is now publicly available. The theme is not for the kind of WordPress bloggers out there who use widgets or masses of plugins for their sites. I personally detest those things, and I know there are many more people like me out there, so this theme is for them. If you don’t like all the noise that’s turning many WordPress blogs into sparkly, browser-crashing nightmares, then LEFT5 may be the theme for you.
The one and only catch is that you must be comfortable editing the smallest bit of HTML and CSS, and I do mean small. Like three lines small. So, if you dig this theme, head on over to its download page and grab a copy. Happy blogging!
June 13 2010
New Redesign!
So I know I haven’t been around much lately, but I can explain that in a bit. EndofWeb has a brand spankin’ new redesign! I’ve given it the very same Wordpress theme that Loupe has been using successfully for a few months now — Left5. It’s gone through loads of tweaking and shaving since the first version, and now it’s slimmer than ever before.
There’s just so much to love about super-clean lightweight blog designs. I think the combination of minimal, clean HTML5 and lack of everything makes for a much nicer experience when loading and viewing a site, and Left5 does it with style. Giving this theme to a regular blog (vice Loupe, which is an imageblog for larger image-sizes) also goes to show its versatility.
As for the lack of posts recently — that was due to a mix of general business and work complications. I used to do a lot of tech-news reporting sort of stories here on EndofWeb, but a couple of months ago I began testing the waters at a major tech blog, which while I won’t name, turned out to be a place for which I didn’t want to continue writing. Shortly afterward, however, I started happily writing for Download Squad, and that means that EndofWeb can’t be my outlet for most news-worthy posts any longer.
On a side note, DLS is good people. It’s a small crew, with actual care put into quality-control, and it’s part of a great family of blogs (including TUAW, Engadget, Joystiq, and Urlesque) under the Aol corporate umbrella.
So, I’ve been mulling it over, and instead of letting this place idle until death, I figured it was time for a redesign and follow-up repurposing of the blog. While most newsy sort of tech stuff will be destined for DLS, this place can and will serve as a more personal site than ever before. That means I’ll be working harder to find interesting stuff, funny stuff, ridiculous stuff, and downright infuriating stuff to post about on EndofWeb (on a more regular basis). If I have something I want to say about a certain social network or tech company — and I can’t adequately express myself in a PG-13 manner — this place is still the spot where I can vent those feelings. After all, that’s what personal blogs are for.
Aren’t they?
February 19 2010
EndofWeb: Now on Alltop
If you haven’t noticed it already (by the badge sitting atop the sidebar to the right), EndofWeb is now on Alltop. If you’re ever cruising through the Tech section over there, look me up — I’ll likely be somewhere at the very bottom, but a listing’s a listing, right?
I’ve been listed on Technorati for quite some time now, though I’ve never actually cared for the place much. They’ve got a very… Well, let’s just say that if we were in the world of Dr. Zhivago, they’d probably be fleeing Russia right about now. That’s how I view the folks at Technorati — but that’s neither here nor there. Alltop is growing at a pretty steady pace, and I think it’s a better place for readers (and potential readers) to seek out and find new blogs.
Technorati code: N6DR5W8YN75Y
February 09 2010
New Wordpress Imageblog Theme
"Left5" – A new Wordpress theme geared towards images.
I’ve been working for quite a while now to piece together an imageblog Wordpress theme that I like, and it hasn’t been easy. A while back, I lucked my way across a theme built entirely in simplified HTML 5, called H5. H5 is an extremely minimalistic theme, partly because the author’s goal was to keep it clean. Nothing extra, nothing frivolous. That’s exactly the way I like things, and H5 provided a wonderful platform for the themes I’ve used up until now on both EndofWeb and Loupe. Now Loupe has a new face — Left5.
H5 was a great starting point, but it really wasn’t much more than that. In fact, by the time I was finished with it, it didn’t resemble the original theme in any way — except that it still kept to the confines of the generic-standard Wordpress layout. I was quite happy with the designs I came up with using nothing but clean CSS and HTML 5’s core tags of <header>, <section>, <article>, <aside> and <nav> — but I still wanted something different. Namely, I wanted to get out from under the Wordpress layout that just seems to stick, and move toward an even more minimalistic design that better lent toward large images.
That meant that what I had to do was to find a way to keep the exceptionally clean code that HTML 5 allows for, and manage to outfit a Wordpress-driven site to look more like Core CMS than Wordpress. As much as I’d love to say that it’s awful — if for no other reason than its rampant popularity — Wordpress is a very good CMS. It’s surprisingly sturdy, portable, extendable, configurable, and above all; elastic.
And by elastic, I mean that I can install it, build a blog, post daily for three years, and still have it perfectly organized, catalogued, and presentable. Content management systems like Core CMS or even Cargo Collective are beautiful, but they’re meant to be portfolios, not blogs — so they’re severely limited on the amount of content that they can effectively display.
Places like Tumblr, Posterous, and Blogger all have severe drawbacks of their own, even for something as seemingly simple as an imageblog — which doesn’t stop the hundreds of fantastic imageblogs on their servers from doing what they do — but I still flat out despise all three of them.
High-profile sites like Ffffound! and Dropular are a different beast all together, not to mention that they use some heavier code to operate — which I wanted to avoid using. I wanted to keep my sites clean, almost austere in their code, to keep them as nimble as possible. As much as we all love the smooth workings of jQuery, java and flash, plain HTML is preferable when you’ve got a load of images clogging your already humiliatingly slow internet connection.
Enter Left5
Left5 is special in that it’s a left-anchored design with absolutely no limit to the size of images displayed. The idea of a left-aligned static wall isn’t overly special, but having it in a Wordpress theme, fully coded in clean, minimal, validated HTML 5 — that’s something else. I’m very happy with it, even if people using archaic CRT’s might get annoyed at the brazenly huge images it allows for. The screenshot above is a post on Loupe, and the image shown is 1029 pixels wide. The theme is gorgeous on average to large screen sizes with reasonably modern resolutions.
See it in action at Loupe.
I haven’t yet packaged a generic version of the theme, but I will soon and get it posted on a demo page. I’ll note here when that happens :)
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