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.

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!

Print, April 2010, p.80. Click image for full size.

Print doesn’t seem to put much of their magazine’s content on their website, so I took the photo above. If you don’t feel like reading the grainy iPhone photo (no, I wasn’t about to spend $20 just to stroke my ego), here’s the full text:

Occasionally during a web project’s construction phase, the designer will decide that the type doesn’t look quite right. This is often due to slight but still noticeable differences between Photoshop’s text rendering and that of the multiple browsers a site has to support. In response, the designer sometimes has to do multiple rounds of slight tweaks to size and spacing.

To help with this, Soma Design’s Matt Wiebe offers the FontFriend bookmarklet. Just drag it to your browser toolbar, activate it on the page you want to edit, and a panel is exposed that can be used to edit a selection of the most common browser text settings. A few simple presets are offered for text that is affected, but the power of the jQuery Javascript library’s selector engine is available for more specific selections. (An explanatory link is provided from the panel, but it’s anything you could do with basic CSS syntax, and more.)

Ideally, the task of using FontFriend would be handed off tot the designer directly, who could send final modifications straight to production.

For more progressive web designs using the new @font-face possibilities, the bookmarklet can take care of a new feature in Firefox 3.6 that allows you to drag a font file directly onto the panel to select the family of your choice.

What you are looking at is a highly customized WordPress installation. Although WordPress is usually associated with blogging, I’m happy to use it to manage an entire website. The incredible theme and plugin community surrounding it makes it just fantastic to work with.

Now, for a little more spit and polish.