Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

I have mixed feelings about posting whenever a single theme is updated, but this is a pretty big one. And it’s also worth noting that the WordPress Themes Directory got it up less than 24 hours after I uploaded it. Given the large lead time that was needed for 0.7.6, I was pleasantly surprised to see that. So anyway, the most important changes are, in a particular order:

1. The theme now has an options page. Controllable are the accent color — at Ikiru Design that’s set to “orange” — which is used one the description in the header and the links in the footer, the display of default gravatars, the display of The Mini Quilt (see #2), and switching to Southern Hemisphere colors.
2. The Mini Quilt. The Mini Quilt is a smaller version of the Quilt that appears on Kaleidoscope archives pages. To fit, it sacrifices displaying the Post Titles — though you’ll see them on hover — in favor of offering many more posts than a basic Recent Posts widget would. (And if you want to display both, or have even more control of your sidebar, the quilt will also appear as a potential sidebar widget.)
3. The random post link in the footer is now compatible with WP Super Cache. Because the popular plugin changes a blog’s redirect rules, the old method — which required a redirect — would break when you ran the plugin. The new method, which gets rid of the need for a redirect, will help keep your server load down, and will let readers use the link whether you’re caching or note. (Also, I’m working on a post explaining two different workarounds for the problem.)
4. Fixed a number of visual “bugs”. Two different problems caused the layout of certain pages to break in 0.7.6, with the help of Babs, those are fixed. A number of little problems have been tackled.
5. Finally, and this may have been unnoticed by everyone but me, in previous version of Kaleidoscope (and every theme I’ve made for that matter) the search bar has been outside of the area in the sidebar that is replaced by widget. That is because I didn’t like the styling of the widget. But now I’ve overridden the styling of the widget, and am satisfied with it. Essentially, you finally have the freedom to put the search box where ever you want it in the sidebar.

These are some of things I’d been planning to do on Kaleidoscope and I’m glad to have finally gotten them out. I’m sure there are still problems lurking under the surface, and I’m sure a quick-eyed user will find them quicker than I. If you’re such a user, please drop me a line.

Oh, the download link! And here’s a link to Kaleidoscope’s listing in the WordPress Themes Directory.

I’ve been working, on and off for a while, on a theme that translates the date of a post — or in the case of multiple, the topmost — into a color and uses that to determine the color of the page. This was inspired in no small part by the now-retired look that Shaun Inman used to use.

I honestly don’t remember when I started working on it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it began in January. That isn’t to say that development of this theme has been terribly difficult — though there were certainly parts I’ve struggled with — but also that I’ve simply been short on time I’ve been able to devote to the project.

It wasn’t until Friday, after what felt like a too-long wait, that I finally saw the then-current version, 0.7.6 in the newly opened WordPress Theme Directory. This release, as signified by it’s less than 1.0 status, is less than I intend to do with the theme. But I’m hoping that finally making the project public will force me to spend more time to add the last features that I’ve been waiting so long to build.

Enough about how my development process works however, let’s cover the highlights of the theme itself. The primary feature, the one for which it is named, is the algorithm that translates dates into colors. This is done with a few PHP functions which take advantage of cosine curves to generate colors that are generally suited to the time of year. Essentially, the three colors of the red-green-blue system commonly used in HTML, all peak at different times. The blue is at it’s height around January first, green peaks around April 1, and red peaks around September 1. All of these are estimates, as I’ve fudged a bit with the peaks and valleys of these curves to give me colors closer to what I want.

Taking advantage of this date-to-color algorithm, I’ve made my favorite feature, the quilt. The quilt is, as you may guess, a collection of differently colored squares to create a blanket to keep you warm… err, display your posts. Rather than use the month-divided list-style archives I’ve built for my themes in the past, I’ve made a single collection of all posts, with colors serving to give you a rough idea of the date. You can easily tell posts from January from those from August, and you can also tell posts from 2008 are different from those from 2005. Of course, this feature is also made even easier to understand by the fact that the post are themselves shown chronologically in the quilt. The real result of the quilt, however, is that you get a beautiful rendering of your archives.

There are many more little features in this theme. I’ve added a rather novel system to hide the default gravatars when a user hasn’t set them. Trackback are seperated from comments so they don’t break the flow of conversation. The whole archives page is prettier than any I’ve made. Heck, the theme itself is just prettier than any I’ve made. And page titles have a novel organization I’m rather fond of.

Mostly though, I’m glad to have finally put this out into the world. It’s still not done, but I simply can’t continue to sit on it. I’ll keep you updated about changes I make to it in the future, and I hope to write a few tutorials explaining the most interesting features of Kaleidoscope to anyone interesting in using them in a different context.

You can, of course, see a demo of the theme at the Ikiru Demo Blog. Be sure to look at the archives page. (Or you can just look around here, as it is the theme Ikiru Design is currently using.) There is also a demo, lacking an archives page, at the WordPress Theme Directory. And you can download the theme from there. You can find even more rambling about it at the theme’s page. And if you have anything to tell me about it — be it bug reports, complaints, or compliments — feel free to contact me.

I meant to post this last week, but better late then never. In response to my last post and eric’s comment, I had to share this short snippet from a 2006 interview of Anthony Bourdain:

…you’re standing alone in the desert, and you see the most incredible sunset you’ve ever seen and your first instinct is to turn to your left or right and say, “Wow, do you see that?” Okay, there’s no one there, what do you do? Next, where’s the camera? Look through the viewfinder and you realize, you know, what you see through that little box is not what you’re experiencing. There comes this terrible moment when you realize well, this is for me. There is no sharing this.

Making twilight more beautiful, since the dawn of time

Because I nearly missed it, and because it wasn’t going to be around long, I seemed far more concerned than anyone else that tonight’s twilight, in this time and place, was full of beautiful and unexpected colors, in beautiful and unexpected places.

I suppose it started with an ordinary decision to walk the dog. The pavement was still drying off after a short but torrential rain half an hour before, but the precipitation seemed to have stopped.

Once we were actually trudging along — with frequent stops to smell the bushes — I noticed that it was still raining. Not much, but a few drops more than “sprinkling.” And as we got toward the point of no return, it seemed to be picking up. “I guess we’ll just make this a loop around the block,” I thought.

But because I sometimes seem a plaything for the gods, even that light rain abated just as I approached the front door. And so, in a stroke of luck, I decided it was necessary to head off again.

And I’m so glad I did. The colors, the shapes, the shadows I saw. It was unquestionably one of the ten best sunsets and twilights I’ve seen in my life. I’m tempted to arbitrarily rank it at number two.

As the sun set over the mountains to the west, the yellow faded into orange and pink. But more interesting was the sight to the east, where a pink wall of clouds served as the backdrop for some curiously formed pieces of gray fluff. Further south, there was a billowy cloud. I’d call it a mushroom cloud but for the apocalyptic connotation.

There was, just past that, the slightest hint of a rainbow. Though gauzy and lacking definition, it seemed to be projected exactly onto another background of cloud. And directly south was a large gray thunderhead of a cloud. But in that large gray thunderhead of a could was some truly unexpected red. As if there was a command center, lit in red for dramatic effect, exactly in the middle of it. “Let’s really wow them tonight,” were the words that echoed out from that room.

As time went on, it changed magnificently. There was, for a time, a perfectly formed map of England, with just the slightest suggestion of Wales off to it’s west. There was also a dramatic looking dogpile, with just one more player running up to jump on top.

And it did, of course, become less brilliant. The pinks and oranges that were for a time vibrant, became duller, then grayish, now completely invisible. The sky was undeniably becoming a uniform dull gray as we hit the home stretch, but perhaps as a solitary reminder that it knew it put on a show, the sky offered, for a minute, a dull teal unlike anything I’d seen before. Red, pink, orange, blue, even yellow, these are color the sky has offered a million times before. A green, even a dull one, is an unquestionable oddity.

I was a little sad when even that hint of teal faded into a dull and darkening gray. The majesty, which it seemed no one else noticed, was gone. I’d seen a show few others did, but neither I nor they could enjoy it now. And even I would have missed it, if not for some inexplicable luck that made me realize that once around the block wasn’t really a long enough walk.

So here it is, my conclusion: beauty is heightened by it’s passing, elevated by all the times that it’s missed. Art that is widely recognized as possessing great beauty, therefore preserved endlessly and unchangingly in humidity and temperature controlled chambers, monuments to man’s effort to overcome ephemerality, are made less beautiful and less interesting for their persistence. The Mona Lisa may be nice, but her unchanging face makes her much less interesting than a sunset.

Tiny Houses

There are no doubt hundreds of posts like this one floating around the internet, chronicalling all the small houses one can find within a few Google searchs. None the less, I really liked browsing through this one.

(via MeFi)

Obama’s Bad Ideas

While most of America is still obsessed with what scandal will next be dug up about Sarah Palin, Foreign Policy offers an interesting list of Barack Obama’s ten worst policy proposals. It’s unlikely that you could ever find consensus on such a list, but it’s worth seeing what they’ve come up with.

Dr. Horrible’s Fandom

Metafilter user WCityMike put together an exhaustive list of all that is available on the internet related to the “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-along Blog” project I mentioned a few weeks ago. Be warned, the list is daunting.

Google Chrome

Google Blogscoped shares (of all things) a comic book explaining Google new browser initiative. I wasn’t expecting much from the book, but it’s really quite good. It offers plain-spoken explications of all that they’ve tried to do with browser. Now I just want to try it out.

The Republican Platform

Andrew Ferguson, of The Weekly Standard, does something I’ve always been curious to do — watch a party platform in progress — and comes to, among others, this conclusion:

“Republicans,” the platform says, “will attack wasteful Washington spending immediately,” even though they can’t. They can’t impose anything on anybody, either, but nevertheless “we will impose an immediate moratorium on the earmarking system.”

Powerlessness opens up a limitless future. It has the fierce urgency of not right now.

With Child, With Cancer

(I tried for five minutes to come up with a better title, I couldn’t.) Pamela Paul has an interesting article in tomorrow New York Times Magazine about the difficulty of fighting cancer — which seems to be made more likely by pregnancy — while still protecting the health of the fetus. The basic dilemma:

“She was afraid not to be treated for cancer, but she was afraid to expose her fetus to drugs,” Cardonick recalled when I spoke to her recently. It was perhaps the ultimate maternal conflict: choosing between the biological imperatives for self-preservation and procreation.

London at Night

Photographed from above. On The Big Picture.

If those lines aren’t enough to make you view this one, nothing else I say will.

Fifty States of Wine

I thought this line, noted by Noreen Malone, was good enough to share. After tasting the spit bucket after a sampling of wines from a smattering of American states, Joel Stein writes:

As I took a swig and swirled it around to gross out my friends, I thought it tasted like America. It was sweet, funky, simple, aggressive and not as bad as you’d been led to believe.