Some time last year, the darling Lewis Major, whom I first met in Brussels in 2010 when he came to Dasniya and my Yoga and Shibari workshop, and then arrived shortly after in Vienna where I was working with Hans (and Lewis’ joining in and subsequent lack of departure for New Zealand is a well-funny story), and who fast became one of my dearest friends, asked me to do a website for him. It was to be a blog-ish, dance and choreography documentation site. Funnily enough, despite having supernaut for nearly nine years, and having made a score of sites in the last couple of years, I’ve never really done a blog.
It turned out to be a mad romp through the world of WordPress’ Post Formats, and possibly most complicated site I’ve done. I decided it should be alive and not hidden a few weeks ago, and so undertook a final chaotic run through the code to make it ready, in the process swapping everything over to a new method which caused a little distress when I realised my cherished functions rewrite of a piece of core code handling images was no longer necessary (gnashing of teeth!).
And what else? It was also my first real attempt at Responsive Design, the current Flash of the internet, which means it’s supposed to look well-tasty on any size screen (in practice that’s wishful thinking) – and now I do everything Responsive; it’s like having proper table manners. It was also one of the last sites I did with the amazing WPAlchemy, because I discovered the even more amazing Advanced Custom Fields (I needed nested repeaters, and as well, it’s just much quicker to work with), hence aforementioned chaotic run when I swapped all the code over from former to latter and made dance with the very nice WP Post Formats.
Which is why supernaut has also started Post Formatting with Video and Asides and Statuses, because while doing Lewis’ site I was drooling at how good this stuff is and it made me want to blog more, so I stole some of his code and slipped it into here.
And other things? Gallery Post Formats using the full-screen SuperSized code, video and audio with MediaElement.js, a lot of jQuery to pin everything together – I think often my ideas are way far ahead of what I can actually code and I’m guilty of some horrendous travesties.
Typography! There’s quite a lot. Headings are done in the very “obnoxious as it is loveable” Antechamber; all the meta info is in Logisoso – very ‘Logistics’; and the body text is funnily enough in the seductively calm and sedate Fontin. I find it very readable. Oh, and icons are a mix of Modern Pictograms and Entypo. Yes, sticking to one font and using it well, obviously.
Looking at it now I’m thinking, “Oh, I could change that layout and that typography,” and maybe I shall make some small changes. In the meantime, Lewis is writing like a true blogger, and that makes me very happy.
Lewis’ blog is lewismajor.info
And now for some pictures. (Mostly of the test content, as Lewis hasn’t written much yet. Yes, I use Abruptum and Bathory for test content, and my 404 page is always a quote from Chuang Tzu. Really, each and every “404 Not Found” on every site I make is a small moment of Daoist contemplation.)
