found drama

In March 2007, I released the Ortho theme for WordPress, and it has served me well on this blog since then. But times change and technologies advance, and it seemed like a good idea to get familiar with those, and brush up on my skills in the process.

Thus, this evening I deployed the Orin theme.

Orin is a lightweight WordPress theme, based on the “completely naked” Starkers HTML5 boilerplate theme; the style is written in “SCSS” and compiles to CSS3 with the Sass engine (and indeed it does take advantage of some WebKit transitions/animations). It uses no images. And although jQuery is currently baked-in, it is not required by the theme itself.

It should look pretty good in any modern web-browser (e.g., Chrome, Safari, Firefox ¹); and though a little consideration was given to Internet Explorer 7 and 8, none was given to IE6 ² .

And while I was at it, I broke out some of the functionality that was “baked-in” to Ortho and move all that into WordPress widgets. Thus, as I introduce Orin, I also introduce the Simple Twitter Badge, the WP Flickr Badge, and the WP Tumblr Widget.

I’ve enjoyed making it. Hopefully you’ll enjoy it, too.

1. It looked pretty good in Opera too–without even trying.[↩]
2. But if I do say so myself, the principles of progressive enhancement save us there, too.[↩]

About Rob Friesel