It’s no understatement to say that I became a web developer because of WordPress. I started blogging with Blogger in 2005, only to become frustrated and move myself over to self-hosted WordPress. I used the old K2¹ theme as the basis of my own theme, and tweaked it obsessively. WP provided just the right amount of ease and power for where I was at, and revealed all the more power the further I dug. Tweaking your WP template is a web development gateway drug.

The rest is a blur. I graduated from SSU with a BA (Honours) in the Humanities in 2008, having tinkered along the way with my ever-intriguing WP blog. I even did my first paid work on my school’s website, attempting to wrangle some disastrous table-based Dreamweaver templates into some semblance of tolerable. By the time I graduated with my gloriously useless degree², I realized that I could make better web sites than the majority of what I saw out there. So I took the plunge into freelancing with zero experience, connections, or prospective clients. And, many bumps in the road and umpteen trips to the codex later, it actually worked out.

I’d especially like to thank my friend and collaborators Modern Tribe and David Pensato, with whom I’ve had the opportunity to do a lot of fun and meaningful work over the last few years. I’d also like to thank the Winnipeg-based Automatticians Ian Stewart and Krista Stevens for slowly convincing me that I should apply. And of course, a huge thank you to the countless people who have contributed of their time, skills, and passion to the WordPress project.

I’m looking forward to this next chapter. I get to iterate and improve rather than build and hand off, and work with super smart people every day. And my work will be seen my millions of people. Fun. I start on Monday.

I’ve started using FontFriend extensively on my Soma Web Font Specimen (or, if you like, on the original) as a great way to evaluate Google Web Fonts, as the directory looks like an app, not a web page (although v2 of the directory looks awesome). If you have FontFriend installed already, you’re already up to date. If you don’t, go install it now!

Just pick a font from the dropdown list

Invoke the bookmarklet as usual (it’s always up to date), and you’ll see a fancy new Google Webfonts dropdown. Pick a font and it’ll appear in the custom Font Families list. All variants (all weights, both roman & italic) are automatically pulled in.

How was I able to do this without an API? YQL to the rescue, which it turns out is awesome for tasks like this. But, after posting a teaser on Dribbble, Pablo Impallari hooked me up with the Google Webfonts teams, who will have an API for this in place soon. I debated waiting to release until then, but I’d already done the work, so why not let everyone play already?

One other little nugget: FontFriend will detect already-embedded Google Webfonts on your page and throw them into the custom fonts list automatically. See a demo of Google Webfont detection.

Finally, after tweeting about it,  I’ve had representatives from a few webfont services reach out to me about better integration once they get their APIs in place. There should be more ways to play in the future!

Typekit.com uses Rosewood Fill and Chaparral

My main imagined use-case for this feature is the designer trying to test out a variety of webfonts on their page. I’d introduced custom lists in FontFriend 2.5, but they didn’t play well with Typekit, as I discovered when redesigning my personal blog. I’d hacked in a feature for my own use, but was never really happy with it.

But then I remembered that Typekit has an API.  They even have an example bookmarklet that lists every font in your site’s kit, doing most of the work for me. A couple of short weekend coding sessions later, the feature was integrated. Just activate FontFriend on a Typekit-enabled page and you’ll see the Typekit logo and your kit’s fonts in the custom list. Check out the demo page to see this in action on a page with a big Typekit kit.

But wait, there’s more! FontFriend 3.0 also populates your custom font list with every @font-face–declared font family currently active on your page. See a demo. This only applies to rules declared in stylesheets on the same domain due to cross-domain security restrictions, which means that most third party webfont services are left out in the cold.

Other 3.0 features/changes:

• Reorganization of the modules to better suit my imagined optimum workflow
• Font weight is now a dropdown to give you numeric access to all weights
• All dropdowns have arrow toggles beside them for speedier changing. (I dislike the tedious “click, move mouse, click again” flow of dropdowns, so this should help.)
• Drag and dropped @font-face fonts now get thrown in the custom font family list
• Drag and drop now uses the asynchronous FileReader API, which should be much more performant, especially when dragging in multiple font files at once. (Thanks to Ryan Seddon for his work on FontDragr that showed me the way.)
• The previously missing Font Style module is now included. Hello italics.
• Big reorganization of the code. It’s still a bit squirrely, but better organization will make it easier to add (good) features in the future.

I’d love to support other webfont services, but none of them have APIs that can do what I’ve done with the Typekit API (or at least not that I’ve discovered). Other services: please let me know if/when that changes!

HT Rick from Stylesheeter

A List Apart has just announced their 2nd annual Survey for People Who Make Websites, after getting a whopping 33,000 people to do so last year. If you’re reading this, and you do web work, go take the survey. They publish the results for free (see last year’s results), and the data this produces is a tremendous help for understanding the makeup of our field.

I was also recently interviewed by IT Business in connection with this campaign, which was a pleasant experience. Later in the same article, it is claimed that 3 in 4 Canadians prefer a dot-ca website when shopping online. That means that you have an instant “in” with your fellow Canadians, if that is indeed your target market.

All in all, I’m quite happy to be on the dot-ca domain, and look forward to the interesting opportunities afforded by being sure that every dot-ca domain is owned by a Canadian individual or business.

One of the fascinating things is that the NY Times, that bastion of old media, was one of the investors. This makes total sense once you look a little deeper and realize that the NY Times are using WordPress to power their ever-expanding collection of blogs.

What this means is that WordPress has a long, bright future ahead of it with the people who loved it before they had any idea that they could make money off it still right in the thick of things and getting paid well to boot. It means that small web design shops like ours can expect WordPress to continue being a terrific and evolving platform upon which to build websites (like this one) for years to come.

On more personal note, I must extend a hearty congratulations to Matt and the team at Automattic for being rewarded for their terrific work. Good job!

While there are numerous other organizations out there with some variation on the moniker “soma design,” we felt that the world was big enough for another one. Also, since somadesign.ca was still available, we decided that there was definitely room in Canada for us. It’s a big country!

As for the name, why did we choose it? It’s short, catchy, easy to remember and hard to spell wrong. It also allows me to indulge my nerdy side, as it’s a greek word that translates to body. Body conjures up associations of organic, unity in diversity, simplicity in complexity and a flair for sensible (yet quirky) design that I hope will pervade all that we do here.