Ortho 1.0
¶ by Rob FrieselAlmost exactly two years ago, I first unveiled Ortho, the home-rolled custom WordPress theme that you see here. Â It is named in part after the character Ortho Stice from David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest and is also a vaguely tongue-in-cheek, slightly punny nod to the squared-off corners that graced the original design.
With this “1.0” revision, I have tried mostly to go for some refinements.  I wanted to “widget-enable” the theme, I wanted to clean up some of the code, and ply a few other tricks to open up my future options a little bit.  I did my development primarily in Safari (with a soft-spot for Firefox) and tried to play nice with Internet Explorer.  I found that though IE7 is not nearly the nightmare that IE6 continues to be, that it still has a startling lack of support for many things1; IE6 is still a nightmare but I gave myself a hard cut-off of two hours — anything that couldn’t get fixed or made to gracefully degrade got hacked out.  I conceded to use conditional comments but that was in the interest of ousting old * html
hacks.  I looked at Ortho in Opera just for fun and in the two minutes I spent browsing, found that nothing obviously needed attention — not that I get much traffic from Opera users.
Some other handy technical notes for the web nerds out there:
- I actually bothered to run my CSS through the YUIcompressor 2.4.2. Â The gains were very very small but it was still a fun exercise.
- I still hate CSS sprites which is part of why I’m not using them here. Â Also, because I’m (er…) between graphics editors right now and had no effective means of making them.
- I’m using the Google Ajax Libraries CDN-equivalent for the code jQuery here on blog.founddrama.net. Â It takes some of the load off the server. Â And should help for one of those tiny incremental decreases in load time.
- I’ve kept Ortho in Subversion for the past two years and it has paid off well. Â Though when it came time to deploy this site live, somehow a bunch of conflicts managed to make it into the master
style.css
file (despite the fact that I’d told SVN they were “resolved”) and that caused some panic for a few minutes. Â Blargh.
Anyway, I think things turned out well. Â Now that it’s up, it looks like I need to fix the trackbacks but I’m otherwise quite pleased. Â Hopefully the transition went smoother for you (dear reader) than it did for me. Â But anyway, should look nicer, read a little easier, and so on.
- E.g.,
:last-child
selectors, anyone? E.g., Unicode support, anyone? [↩]
Leave a Reply