I decided to build an identity around a logo I had done, which is pretty much ass backwards from the way most people would do it. The gorilla was originally for a side project but now fronts the GRUNT name which I truly believe is an appropriate name and identity for me(being the megalomaniac I am). Domain inspiration came from my friend Will, which also included several other “colorful” suggestions.

The website is built on what else but WordPress, backed up by jQuery and the usual suspects. The portfolio is still going to get attention(i.e. — I need to find all that stuff), pagination and some separation. But if I didn’t launch it, I would tinker with it for another few years. So expect a few more features and eye candy in the future.

So what about curtishenson.com?

Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes. Well just a few. I always thought this current design was a bit busy and crowded, so I’ll be opening things up and creating white space(dark space?). I’m also going to get rid of everything that doesn’t have to do with a blog or me. A reorganization of content is coming which will also probably mean some more regular posting and more RSS feeds so you can tune how high the crap pushed to your RSS reader gets.

There is also going to be a new sub-site which is going to contain all the downloads and side projects I do and maybe even a support forum as the comments are getting a little crowded for Checkmate.

New Projects

Just a quick heads up on some projects. I promise I am going to get started on Checkmate ver. 2.0, which will be light years ahead of the current version, as soon as I get some time. I’ve also started programming a lifestream/tumblelog app in ruby on rails, so look for that in the future.

Note: A new version of Checkmate has been released. Get the new version now!

I told you earlier I was going to release it, and here it is! The Checkmate WordPress theme. It is a classic blog style template with a minimalist design packed with features and customizing options. This is one to definitely download and try out and includes a quick start guide to show you how to use some of the features.

Checkmate Demo – The demo is a bit messy looking because I tried to show off as much of the theme as I could.

Theme Options

Checkmate has a lot of options so you can get the most out of your theme without knowing any code.

• Optional Header Image
• Optional Featured Categories
• Feedburner Integration
• Menu Customization
• Optional Footer Widget Areas

Features

• Checkmate comes with 7 color themes. Grey, Red, Blue, Green, Purple, Brown, and Grey/Red.
• Custom widgets built for Checkmate.
• Tabbed Content Box – widget enabled
• Two, Three, or Split Column Design
• Feedburner Integration
• Optional Widget enabled footer
• Custom Icons
• Gravatar support for authors and comments(WordPress 2.5)
• Custom author, archive, tag, category, and search pages.
• Widget Enabled Sidebars
• Includes the TimThumb script for resizing post thumbnails located under the post meta information.
• Tested in Firefox 2, Safari(Mac), IE7, IE6. (IE6 has a problem with post thumbnails, if this concerns you bug me to fix it).

Ad Management

Checkmate has two forms of built in ad management. One form built right into theme options panel and another more advanced customizable form. Both forms of management are controlled by widgets for easy placement and you retain the ability to turn them on or off via theme options panel.

License

Checkmate is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. All I ask is that you link back to my website somewhere in your site.

Updates

• Version 1.01
• Added wp_footer hook for plugins
• Version 1.02
• Fixed Header Image Bug
• Added browser detectable RSS Feeds (RSS2, RSS1.0/RDF, RSS0.92, RSS2 Comments, ATOM)
• Version 1.03
• Added page template with comments enabled
• Version 1.04
• Fixed sidebar error when requiring users to be registered and logged in to comment
• Misc. code cleanup
• Version 1.05
• Removed query_posts from index.php for pagination support
• Version 1.06
• Changed “1 Comments” to “1 Comment”
• Fixed the multiple categories as “featured” categories error

Download It Now!

• Get the new version here!
• Download the old version Checkmate (4594)

Really Like It?

If you really like this theme and would like updates, more features, and new styles, why not grease the wheel and make a donation?
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Part two of this article is now up with a lot more tips and tricks on how to speed up your website!

When I first designed curtishenson.com I took into no consideration the speed that it loaded. OK, that isn’t entirely true. I compressed my images…a little, some of my javascript was compressed, and my CSS is compressed(but only because I was trying out the new Blueprint CSS compressor). So when my site actually got content on it, everything started grinding to a halt. I tried speeding it up with WP_Cache, then Super_Cache, then phpSpeedy. But I still had problems. I was planning on starting to advertise more, release a new premium theme and my site really needed to be faster(I hope it is faster, otherwise you’re probably still waiting for this article to load).

Benchmark

First thing to do is set a benchmark. I used Firebug and Yslow to benchmark my site. I benchmarked with phpspeedy and super cache installed and functioning and also without. What I found surprised me, the page with no cache or phpspeedy was faster, by a whole second. Obviously YSlow gave me a glorious F. The blog loaded in ~5 seconds, and the homepage loaded in ~6 seconds…unacceptable! My fastest load times were still above 3 seconds, thats an eternity on the web!

Shrinkage, Cut Those Files Down To Size

So I started from the beginning, my images, my extra large high-res awesome images that, unless you were a Swede with fiber, took forever to load. The biggest(no pun intended) culprit was the background image for the whole site, weighing in at just under 300k(ouch!). To be fair it was made to expand on huge monitors, sorry guys, you get no love now. I cut down the size and compressed it down to 132kb(might have to compress it more, time will tell).

I also shrunk down all my other ridiculous images, a half transparent background image at 4k? Its now 100 bytes. Some of the file numbers looked like this: 80k down to 20k, 224k to 103k, 50k to 10k, 30k to 7k. You might not have the crazy file sizes but you can probably shrink your images down at least some.

I also compressed the rest of the javascript at this time. I only had to compress two files, both for sifr, but there were files from wordpress plugins that were not compressed.

I don’t think it made much of a difference but I consolidated my files using conditional tags, this was something that had bugged me.

Tested the homepage now and the page loads in ~1.5s, that is a huge improvement. The blog page loads up in ~2s. That is all from minimizing images. The page size has dropped over 200K now. I still fail Yslow though, so lets see if we can make it even faster.

phpSpeedy

I installed phpspeedy next, now as wordpress plugin this is super easy to install. Un-cached the home page loads in about 1 second, cached it loads in an average of 700ms. The blog loads in 2.3 seconds with an empty cache, and slightly faster with a primed cache. YSlow scores the page a D, but the important bits all score an A.

Warp Speed Scotty!

Whats next? I still need to do a few things. I’ve enabled WP Super Cache and will see what effect it has as pages are cached. Also a few plugins are causing unnecessary files to be loaded so I’ll be getting rid of those. I’m also going to be tweaking the settings over the next few days to see what works the best. It seems the server still hits a speed bump every once in awhile, but I’ll see what I can do about that.

Tune in for the next part when I’ll talk about my experiences and a roundup of the tools you can use to speed up your website. Yes I’m leaving you hanging…now go outside.

No More .Column

One big update was getting rid of the column class which previously was needed with just about everything you did in Blueprint. Now instead of writing:

<div class="column span-7">

You can write:

<div class="span-7">

While for most people this doesn’t cause a problem, some people(like me) would assign column and span classes to things like a tag to eliminate some divitis. In short classitis has been replaced with divitis, which is really fine with me, thank god I only used .column on a tag once in my current theme.

The Compressor

Now for the really welcomed update. Blueprint 0.7 comes with a compressor script written in ruby. The compressor gives an already great framework a good shot of steroids and turns it into a ‘roid raged horse of a framework. Custom name-spaces, custom classes, ability to combine CSS sheets, and even compressing!

They way I use blueprint is pretty straight forward, I block out a website with blueprint, then create a new style sheet which has all of my classes and overrides in it. This creates a few extra includes and css files which isn’t really optimal. Not to mention some software like phpSpeedy can’t compress multiple css files called by import. No more! Now I can write my CSS then compress it combine it and create custom class names all with a simple command.

But thats not it! Oh no, theres more, I’ve saved the best for last, the creme de la creme, the cherry on top, the pepperoni on the pizza. Ok so it isn’t all that and bag of chips, but the ability to create a custom grid is included in the script is nothing to laugh at. This is really nothing new, there is a site that can do this already, but having the ability along with everything else the script can do makes this very powerful! Imagine a custom grid, with custom classes(you know like .header, .content, .footer, getting the picture) and custom name spaces, and suddenly that

<div class="span-24 header last border menu">

becomes

<div class="header">

And thats a overly simple example. Class bloat can now be a thing of the past, if you so incline(it doesn’t bother me, I love complex horrible impossible to update messy code, its my style).

I’m Drunk With Power

I haven’t even begun to take Blueprint to the full potential of this new update, but my mind is overflowing with ideas of what I may be able to twist and squeeze out of it. If you haven’t given Blueprint a try, now would be a good time to jump in, there a plenty of resources to learn it. Spend the time to master the little nuances of Blueprint and you will not regret the speed in which you can build websites.

There has been a slow down in posts and that is due to me finishing up my first premium wordpress theme and the re-aligning of this website.  I’m currently getting the documentation together, and writing tutorials and such which has taken up my blogging time.  The good content and useful posts will be making an appearance with less pithy comments type of posts.

This site has been going through little changes since it’s inception and as it sits the design isn’t really snapping together, I hope to fix that.  Also the index page of curtishenson.com is pretty much worthless, that will be completely changed and the site will essentially be split into two sections: a blog, and webdesign.  I hope this will better serve everyone.

Usability guru Jakob Nielson just posted a new article about the state of user skills. It is a pretty interesting read if you develop websites. The gist of the article is people are getting better at using the web. But, and there is always a but, they aren’t as skilled as most web designers and developers think they are.

As an artsy fartsy designer guy I often forget about basic usability guidelines. The article was a reminder to me that not everyone is a web designer! Shocking I know. Not everyone can immediately use complex navigation, or know where to look for the content they want, or how to filter search results, or how to search at all.

I’m a big believer in usability(regardless if I put it in my own designs), mostly because when sites don’t follow any guidelines they make me think. And I hate thinking. I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be for someone who isn’t a web designer when they come across a new complex site. The results in the article confirm this. Opening new browser windows, splash screens(God forbid a flash intro!), fancy scrollbars, and animated email GIFs just piss people off.

A Few Standout Points

• The study targeted more successful people which implies to me more educated users.
• People use search as the primary way to find the content they want.
• People suck at searching. Ok that isn’t fair, people rarely change their search strategy. (e.g. changing up their search keywords.)
• If your site is usable, you get loyal users(so it may be a little more complicated than that, but its a start)
• The people in this study have been on the web 3+ years. Jakob says waiting for users to get more experience won’t help and web-sites are too complicated. I don’t know how I feel about that, as people get more comfortable with computers and the web in general they will be able to understand more complex information architectures(oooh fancy words)
• Email newsletters are the best way to get returning users. This came to me as a surprise as I have never done anything with newsletters. I assumed RSS was in normal use…I was wrong…as usual.
• People still need a Home link. This was no surprise to me, but can’t wait for the day when no home links clutter up my navs.
• Designers think different than users. Just because I know how it works doesn’t mean Joe Blow does. This is why interface conventions are so important.

Jakob’s article is full of useful information and definitely worth a read.

Eric Meyer has updated his reset CSS styles again.  For those that don’t know, these reset CSS styles so you have a consistent starting point across most browsers.  The updates are little ones but they make good sense.  I always use these reset styles and I’m glad that Eric is updating and thinking about them.  You can read more about the changes and get the code on his site.