BackSpaceStudios Blog

Smashing Calendars

Back in January I came across a great post at Smashing Magazine which featured free desktop wallpapers, and as an added bonus they had embedded calendars. Every month they will be posting free desktop wallpaper calendars from artists around he globe.

Make sure you check out this months batch of cool wallpapers.

Here are a few of my favorites.

Past months:
January
February

WordCamp Toronto Announces Logo Design Contest Winner!

We have a winner ladies and gentlemen!

The team over at WCT 2009 just announced the official winner of their logo design contest. The winner is Paul Morrison, a student at Seneca College in the Digital Media Arts Program.

What I really dig about the new logo is all the variants that Paul supplied, I see buttons, stickers, and other swag in the near future…

Congrats on an outstanding logo concept!

Also, don’t forget to submit your site to the WCT Awards!

WordPress Theme Design Workshop at RMI - Recap

This past Saturday I ran another WordPress workshop at RMI ( Rich Media Institute ), it was great to see so many familiar faces, you know who you are This is the first in a series of workshops I’m running a RMI this year.  This weekend, Saturday Feb 14th 1-530pm, is WordPress Plugin Development ( register now ).

Other workshops to look forward to , WordPress 2.7 - all the ins and outs,  WordPress 2.7 Admin Skinning/Customization.

During the theme design workshop, we converted a static HTML+CSS web template, from styleshout.com, to a functional WordPress theme. There is still a little work to do to get it all working, you can downlaod here and feel free to feedback or ask questions.

Here’s the slide presentation from the workshop.

As promised here is a list of some great FREE Premium Theme sites, enjoy.
http://themeshaper.com/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://www.wpsnap.com/
http://freethemelayouts.com/
http://www.styleshout.com
http://wpcandy.com/

…and for inspiration…
http://www.bestwebgallery.com
http://welovewp.com/

Posts from past workshops:
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/wordpress-25-workshop-at-rmi-recap/open-source/
http://backspacestudios.com/blog/index.php/vecta-lova-free-wordpress-theme/open-source/

WordPress Workshops - Theme Design and Plug-ins

After a very successful WordPress workshop at RMI (Rich Media Institute) back in November I have been asked back to run 2 more great WordPress workshops.

Feb 7th – WordPress Theme Design
In this workshop, we will show the process of taking an HTML & CSS designs and PhotoShop templates and converting them into a fully working WordPress theme. Along the way, we’ll look at the main aspects of WordPress theming, some best practices and a few tricks. WordPress 2.6 and 2.7 makes the whole process easier than ever, so get started making your WordPress site look not like a WordPress site!

To find out more and register

Feb 14th – WordPress Plug-ins
“Plug-ins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine.” In this workshop we will cover the following areas, Extending WordPress, Customizing WordPress Plug-ins, Tips On Writing WordPress Plug-ins, Writing WordPress Plug-ins, and Essential WordPress Plug-ins. Plus, that isn’t enough, we will build a simple Flash plug-in by the end of the workshop that you can take with you!

To find out more and register

Firefox Personas

What are Personas? Personas for Firefox is a extension that adds lightweight theming to your browser. Personas is a very simple way for any designer, beginner or advanced, to easily create themes for your browser on the fly.

Once installed, the Persona selector is dynamically loaded and populated from a JSON feed and all designs are loaded via URLs to remote resources. All changes to the browser chrome are applied instantly, with no need to restart.

Firefox will be releasing an API shortly that will allow developers and designers to submit Personas that are based on Web content, including support for anything that can load in a content window such as HTML, CSS, PNG, JPG, Javascript, SVG and Canvas.

So how do you get started?

*First make sure to download the Personas Extension

Designing your theme:

1. 1. You will need to Download the graphic template files. Download Here.
   Standard Personas are made up of two graphic image files, a “header” image displayed as the background of the top of the browser window (i.e. behind the toolbars and the tab strip) and a “footer” image displayed as the background of the bottom of the browser window (i.e. the status and find bars).

   The header image should be 3000 pixels wide and 200 pixels tall. The footer image should be 3000 pixels wide and 100 pixels tall.

2. 2. Open these files in any graphic editor
3. 3. Make the necessary changes
4. 4. Re-save the files as whatever_header.png and whatever_footer.png
5. 5. Your ready to test!

Here is a quick tutorial to test in manual mode:

1. 1. In the URL bar of your browser type “about:config” and hit enter.
2. 2. Search for “extensions.personas.editor” by typing it into the Filter box that appears at the top of the page.
3. 3. Double click on the line for “extensions.personas.editor”.
4. 4. In the dialog box that appears prompting you to enter a string value, enter “manual” and click on OK.
5. 5. You should now be in manual mode.
6. 6. Click on the little Fox mask icon in the lower-left corner of your browser, and you should see a “Use Local Header…” option.
7. 7. Click on the “Use Local Header…” option, and it should open up a file selector.  Select the header file for your design.
8. 8. You should now see your design in your browser.

Submitting your Persona:
To submit your persona go to http://www.getpersonas.com and click on the ‘Submit’ link in the lower right corner, you can then register an account with Firefox Personas and easily submit any time. Have fun!

Here’s my finished version (the red highlights indicate the area where the Persona is loaded). You can find it in the Personas directory under “Other”.

Fore more Info:
http://labs.mozilla.com/2007/12/personas-for-firefox
https://labs.mozilla.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=389&page=1#Item_0
http://people.mozilla.com/~cbeard/personas/designers/