subsomatic

So, my time at home with Tom all day has sadly come to an end. Today was my first official day back to work at Brainpark and it was actually pretty okay. Luckily, Andrew has taken my last few months of parental leave for himself so he was home for the first day with Tom all day! It was really hard to leave him this morning, but it was also refreshing to spend so many hours out of the house and I know he’s in good hands with his Dad. It also makes me happy that they get to spend some good quality time together before we lose the baby altogether. That being said, it was Tom’s 0.5 birthday on Sunday. He’s growing into such a strong personality. He giggles and laughs and squirms around all over the place. He’s pretty much crawling already which is amazing for his age, and I actually saw him catch himself as he was falling backwards from a sitting position tonight. I didn’t even know babies could do that!

It’s suprisingly refreshing to get back to work, actually. I got to do some user testing with the new feature set and I’m really impressed on the direction the software has moved since I left last June. I’m thinking there are going to be some nice changes to the front end coming up soon that will leave me with my hands full.

So, it would seem that I might actually be getting the hang of this mom thing. I’ve been able to get a good deal of web work done over the past couple of weeks after Tom goes to bed around 10-11pm.  I launched the new redesign of http://www.kellybaker.ca last night and I’m pretty pleased with it. I’m still on the fence about whether to move this blog over there and let subsomatic expire, but I think I would regret it as soon as I let the domain go. So who knows – maybe I’ll try and set up some duel blog so I can post to both at the same time. Can you do that? Anyone? That would be a very cool Wordpress feature/plugin.

Along with the redesign, I also launched a blog for Tom :) http://www.tommyknuckles.com I’m going to try and post something everyday whether it’s a picture or video or some other random bit of media. I’m soooo happy I got that domain. I don’t know why I thought it would be taken, but it wasn’t so I scooped it up.

Other than that, the kidsLink site is almost done. We’re down to the last odds and ends of the Bistro theme and then working on content (yay content!) but I think it should go fairly smoothly. I’m also helping out the K-W Chamber of Commerce with a few updates to their website. So far I’ve had a hard time getting into their CMS, but I think everything should go smoothly once that is taken care of. I also met with Angela yesterday about another freelance project which I need to give her a quote for. So yeah, things are definitely busy.

So, I’m working on a layout for a Bistro theme and ran into a bit of a problem. See, there’s a dynamically populated menu module in Bistro which allows the website owner to add, remove and edit elements in their main menu. I like to use unordered lists to create horizontal menus as opposed to tables, which can create a problem if you’re trying to use up 100% of the width of a div or something. I figured it was about time to actually write a little bit of jquery to handle setting the widths of the list-items dynamically and will share it with the world lest it be useful to someone else:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
$(document).ready(function(){
children = $(“#menuList”).children(“li”);
num = children.length;
size = (940/num) – 1;
$(“#menuList”).children(“li”).width(size);
});
</script>

So, make sure you are using jquery and throw that up there in the header. Then you can make an unordered list with the id of “menuList” and populate the list-items which ever way you please!

Nothing much has been happening lately – hence the lack of blog posts. The new year has come and Tom’s a bit older. Things are going awesome as far as being a mom is concerned. I might possibly have the happiest baby in the world.

In work news, I’ve been working with kidsLink to help re-create their website and bring it more up to date. We’ve just finished working on a design and I’m about the start working on the Bistro template. I’m happy with the design process we went through – there was a lot of give and take but everyone was open to new ideas and concepts and constructive feedback. Hopefully the site will have a soft launch at the end of the month with some upgraded features coming shortly after.

I’m thinking about a new redesign for Kelly Baker to include a better featured portfolio section. The site that is there currently was really thrown together very quickly and it’s done a great job giving me a web presence but I think I’d like to add a little more to it. I might wait until I’m back to work on March 1st since I’ll be online more and able to maintain it more effectively, but I’ll also have a lot less time, so maybe I should start working on it now.

In other news, I’ve started CrossFitting again. I’ve actually set up another blog to keep track of my workouts and progress as I didn’t want subsomatic to turn into a fitness blog altogether! If you’d like to check it out, you can find it here.

I just finished up two new templates for eco web design tonight – Shamrock and Whitetail. Both of them are pretty simple and straight forward but I’m happy with how they both turned out. I really wanted to focus on keeping things uncomplicated and simple and making sure that things would look good for different kinds of organizations as well as different browser requirements.

Sadly, I haven’t been able to work on as many template designs as I would have liked to recently, but happily that’s because I’ve been working on contract work! I just launched a new site for the re-opening of Crossfit Guelph. It’s a pretty snazzy custom wordpress theme that took me beyond the boundaries of what I’ve done with wordpress before. I’m pretty stoked and have opened up a lot of further customization options. I’ve also been working with the fine folks of kidsLink in St. Agatha, Ontario and we’re just starting the design process. The site is a Bistro CMS site and the new theme should be pretty snazzy.

And with that, I’m off to bed!

So, I’ve launched a new website called Eco Web Design – you can go check it out at http://www.ecowebdesign.ca. There are some templates there already that I’m pretty happy with considering I threw them together in the last 48 hours between bottles and diaper changes. I’m trying to use some new CSS3 tricks including the font embedding and auto rounded corners. It’s amazing how many images you cut down on when you don’t have to think about those two things!

I’m really hoping to get some more templates done ASAP and get some business cards out to local enviro-friendly businesses. I don’t *really* know what the market is like, so it will be interesting to talk to some business owners if I can get their attention. I’d like to think that there’s a market available, because I really want to use my web design skillz to do something better for the world, and this seems like a good solution. I’m hoping to provide really cost effective solutions to help eco-friendly businesses and organizations get on the web. Of course, if non-eco-friendly businesses need websites, it’s not like I’m going to turn them away :P

It’s been really refreshing doing some templates and new designs to see what I’m still capable of. I like what I came up with, but I have so many more ideas that I hope I can translate to business-y type website designs. Some of my ideas may be a little too off the wall, but we’ll see what I can incorporate. Some of the new CSS3 stuff is really cool, too. I’ll update here as I add more.

Well, again it feels like it’s been forever since I posted, but I did manage to finally update the logo up in the corner there to say “designer and mom” from “designer and soon to be mom”. After almost 9 weeks, I think it’s fair to declare myself an official mom. There’s some other areas of the site I’m hoping to finish up, or at least start tonight before I head up to bed.

Life with Tom is awesome. We’re having a blast hanging out during the days, and I still love him to bits – even when he’s screaming in my ear. I’m turning into quite the housewife – cooking, cleaning, laundering, diaper changing and the rest. Sadly, my internet hours have taken quite a hit and I’m not going to lie – I miss it a great deal. I keep having great ideas for some designs and wordpress templates but I haven’t had a chance to work on anything. I’m still getting a little bit of freelance work here and there to keep me sane, but I’m really hoping that I’ll have a good chunk of time in the near future to bring my ideas to life! So much is changing right now in the world of front end design and development with the added enhancements of CSS3 and I hope I don’t fall behind too far. I’ll be putting together a collection of tutorials I want to go through over the next few weeks and I’ll post them here when I do so. As always, I’ve been partially inspired to do so by an article on Smashing Magazine taking a look at Modern CSS Design from the ground up. I think it will be a good start!