Making Web Design Fun Again

You know, back in the day, I thoroughly enjoyed web design and coding. But then along came a job that sucked all of the fun out of the whole process and ruined it completely for me. I don’t work for them anymore – it’s been more than two years now – but whenever I’ve been presented with possibilities of web design since then, whether on my own website or on someone else’s, I have never enjoyed the work, and in fact I’ve often had a hard time getting myself to do it, even when money was involved.

That’s all changed recently, though, thanks to our friend WordPress. For whatever reason, installing WordPress has made it fun again for me to tinker with my website, as you may have noticed if you’ve check this place regularly. This doesn’t change my stance on doing web design work, however… I like that this is fun, and I don’t want to change that, especially since I sit in front of a computer working all day. If I’m going to sit in front of a computer at home, it might as well be fun.

Along those lines, I decided to refresh the unsquare.com main page a little bit. The page has basically been a list of the websites I host for a long time, and it still serves that purpose, but I found a way to make it just a little bit more useful.

If you check there now, it’ll show you the first post of all of the blogs I currently host, which is a good way to check and see how recently everyone has updated their site. You could always download a newsreader, I suppose, but this works, too… I used a free PHP script called SimplePie to pull in the RSS data. It was dead simple to use, and that’s the way I like it.

I also added a few more random “styles” to the main page. This mostly involved digging around through the stock art available on the stock.xchng website. It’s a great website, and I didn’t even dig very deeply – I just browsed through the most downloaded stock pictures to find some interesting ones.

What I gleaned from this is that people like to download pictures of handshakes:

handshake

And pictures of people looking professional:

professional

Also good are images that exemplify some sort of abstract business concept about the shrinking world, globalization and connectivity:

Whole world in my hand… literally!

I’m not really going for the “business website” look, however, so I didn’t use any of those images on my frontpage. I’ll probably keep adding more and more styles to the frontpage, too… it’s kind of sad that it’s stayed basically unchanged for at least two years, if not longer.

Finally!

Well, I finally got around to customizing the look of my blog. Although I didn’t really do anything amazingly spectacular, I did at least clean up the overall design so that it’s no longer the “out of box” look that came with MT.

I also installed a number of plugins/scripts to help me do some nifty things.

(1) Feedsplitter – This is a PHP script that takes an RSS feed, parses it, and turns it into a javascript include. The del.icio.us links on the left were generated from my personal RSS feed.

(2) MTAmazon and BookQueue – MTAmazon allows you to retrieve data from Amazon using specialized MT tags. BookQueue is a plugin that combines with MTAmazon to generate a “currently reading” list. I got tired of relying on All Consuming, which has a tendency of being down/timing out. However, this script will need some work to be as full-featured as all consuming.