An unusual WordPress incarnation

It’s quite striking, and readable enough to me. You’ve obviously put a lot of time and effort into it. Well done. But I suppose an obvious question is why you aren’t concerned with standards compliance, as the site doesn’t seem to fall too far short of validating, and it seems a pity you don’t want to make that extra and worthwhile step.

I like your I don’t give a dang attitude… lol

As for your site, I don’t find the text hard to read at all, and though the design is not of my taste, I kinda dig it for someone else.

It does seem very few people design for themselves thess days and that is a shame.Nice to see someone doing what they want to please themselves and not the masses of people they HOPE will visit their site one day.

The fluid-width text is great, for me. I like how I can fill up the screen with maximum content if I want, or scoot it skinny for shorter line-length if I need to concentrate on reading paragraphs. User’s choice.

On your Reviews page… how are you displaying that table of reviews? Are you using Custom Fields for “Label”, “Year”, and “Rating”? I’m curious how you were able to put the buttons for Sorting the table by Current, or Classic, or by Rate, for example. That is cool. I need to do something like that for my Songbook site.

Actually, I’ll probably get around to making it compliant at some point, I’m just not overly concerned is all. I’m glad it’s not too hard to read at least! Thanks for the comments.

As for the review section, it is indeed done with custom posts. It’s a triple loop, pulling content with get_posts by sub-category (Albums, Comps, etc).

I have a bit of cheap code to check for the value of ‘view’ in the URL. When it comes time to spit out table rows I simply run things through a switch() which is real easy to customize with conditional logic and the c2c_get_custom() function. Example:

case “classic”;
if (($rate >= 7) && ($year < (date(“Y”) – 3))) { reviewListBody($cat_name[$i]); }
break;

reviewListBody() simply generates the row. $rate and $year are defined by the aforementioned c2c_get_custom() function, using the Get custom values plugin:

https://www.coffee2code.com/archives/2004/06/30/plugin-get-custom/

It’s pretty basic stuff, but I’m no PHP expert ??

Thanks for looking.

I think it’s stunning. Very nice. I did notice on the first page of the blog proper, all external links have an extra space or two after them. It’s not in the link code, but might be in the “liexternal” class?

I’m new here, but am mightily impressed by your work.

nice custom theme. the odd colors would not be pleasane to the eyes, but i guess it blends well with your theme.

I only have one criticism, which is that you state in your welcome message: “As a writer,” etc. However, a writer’s main purpose or goal is to have readers, and with the minimal contrast between your text and background, and the small font-size, that doesn’t really come across to me.

Hi,

I like it, for me the contrast is quite ok and the font size acceptable (using a quality 17in screen with a 1024×768 solution).

About the validation issue: I tend to wonder why people have started to be so anal about this myself.

Myself I don’t care whether people wish to access my personal sites by palm pilot or text-only browser and in real life I also don’t print anything in Braille either, I use a normal printer for fliers or whatever. Accessibility is no issue to me, my sites are private efforts, no government sites which per definition have to be accessible. The vast majority of browsers hitting my sites are either IE 5.5+ or FF 1.0+, that’s the people I write for, though most other browsers also display just nicely. I have a hard time wrapping my brain around getting anal because of an ampersand here or there where it has no business being.

Greetings

LHK

Superb. One of the best custom WP websites that I’ve ever seen. Hopefully someday you get around to making it compliant but not a major deal. The text contrast is a bit less then ideal but still very readable so again no biggie.

Overall a great job.

I would like to know how you got phpbttracker+ incorprated into wordpress. I’m using it also and would like for it to be a part of my blog. My site is https://www.radioreject.com.

484 kb – yikes!

I think the site design is very striking, but I have to agree with Kafkaesqui about the text contrast. I can read it just fine, but others may have a problem with it. Other than that, the aesthetic qualities of the site are phenominal! You pulled off the use of fractals in your design without seeming cliche (which is really difficult, in my opinion), you’ve made good use of three dimensional elements in the design, adding depth and visual interest, and the pallette is gorgeous.

Your use of wordpress pushes the envelope — very innovative.

Very nice. I really appreciate “non-blog-looking” sites and yours is superb!

I think it looks great. Not something I’d do, but then again if it were, then we’d all be looking the same, right?

I’m not having issues with the text contrast on a 3 year old Dell 17″ flatscreen – not at all.

I’m all about personal style. And so with that, I love the fluid design (I’m partial to those too) and I do like the colors.

Top-notch job, kid. I like it!

Thanks all! I just noticed this thread got some attention long after I checked into it… my site has now been live for about six months or so, and I’ve done plenty of fine tuning… it may be worth another peek!

Re: the validation issue… whenever EC3.1 comes out of beta I’ll probably tinker around until it passes validation… the rest is clear on the index, and it probably wouldn’t be much work to take care of the rest… there are some IE quirks I need to iron out but they’re rather low priority.

Since it came up, I would have to disagree with the sentiment that a writer’s goal is to have readers. That is one possible motivation, admittedly common, but there are other reasons to write as well… I am content to churn out reviews for my own personal reference, and most of the rest of the site is streamlined promotional material for my DJing hobby.

Lastly, I actually end up receiving a fair amount of inquiries about the native BitTorrent tracker… integration is fairly simple with phpbttracker+; just cut the existing tracker into a page with some form of php-executing plugin installed and customize to your liking.