Haven’t blogged for a long time, finally some­thing I feel proud of and feel like I’m at least +5 on un-deprived.

If you are in Min­nesota, or prob­a­bly heard about the annual Overnight Web Chal­lenge hosted by a group of  local gen­er­ous web agency: The Nerdery. Which was an event to redesign web­sites for local non-profits. I have to say at first I was very ner­vous about it, but I had a blast and learned a lot of things. So here are the details.

The goal

The goal of the chal­lenge is each team can have up to 10 peo­ple (strangers or friends), and each team will pair up with a non-profit cho­sen by The Nerdery. In 24 hours time we are to redesign and build a new web­site for our des­ig­nated local non-profit client.

Out­come

In my case, my team was Team Ven­ture – we were a mixed of for­mer and cur­rent co-workers. Not every­one knows every­one, but we bonded quickly. Our client was Some­place Safe. Even though we couldn’t fin­ish 100%, so we are still con­tin­u­ously work­ing on it and pro­vide sup­port in the next 6 months.

Before

After

Rules

Any­thing goes… PHP, Word­Press, Ruby, what­ever. We could even pre­pare codes ahead (in which I hope we can pre­pare bet­ter next year).

What we did and lessons learned

We chose Word­Press as our plat­form, the lessons I learned from it were:

1. Don’t build any­thing from scratch if not nec­es­sary, frame­works, frame­works, and frameworks.
2. Pre-installed plu­g­ins  – take them out if not needed. It’s eas­ier to remove than add
3. List of jQuery com­po­nents, snip­pets to gen­er­ate Word­Press page con­tents (side­bars etc…)

I am totally going to do the chal­lenge again next year and because the win­ning team: TST Media pulled off some very amaz­ing stuff in one night, they’ve inspired me to push a lot harder than just using a Word­Press plat­form. So hope­fully I’ll start post­ing more updates on what this “push­ing harder” in the next few months.

Other than that, I encour­age all web nerds in MN to try this chal­lenge at least once. It’s thrilling, learn to work faster, and put our web nerdi­ness skills to use in a very mean­ing­ful way. Besides that, you get to meet maybe a Sen­a­tor such as Al Franken, and the Tronguy. Foods in every 3 hours, mas­sage, Yoga, live action Angry Birds and a whole lot more nerdy fun stuff.

Keep­ing a jour­nal is a great tool to learn and con­tin­u­ous improve­ments.  So, I need to start jog­ging down my thought process when doing things and hope­fully improve more in the future.

Before I came up with this theme, I was mess­ing with one of the Woo Themes called Irre­sistible.  In a mat­ter of fact, I was so zoned into mod­i­fy­ing that theme, that I was com­pletely stuck.  My boyfriend also told me that isn’t “me” that the theme was too dark and grungy.  He said I need some­thing “happy”.  Got a few ideas of “happy grunge” and things like that, but just couldn’t incor­po­rated the idea.  After a while, I just decided to scrap the entire thing and started off some­where else.

I started to work on the logo first, and I had a good idea what I want.  I really like the + signs embed­ded inside the logo that because that trans­late my idea of “learn­ing” – also inspired by video games such as The Sims.  When a Sim learns some­thing new, it gets a ++ sign over their heads as in gain­ing level.  After work­ing on the logo for a while and picked two col­ors I really like, Orange and Dark Gray – I took a break:

Then I ran­domly grabbed a photo book lying around on my desk – which was by Getty Images – titled Infin­ity.  Flipped a few pages, and there I had it:

Then I drew the lay­out on a piece of paper, along with the logo I already had to glue the ideas together.  I’ve always been a sucker for sim­ple designs, and flat col­ors.  So it is ended up as what it is right now.  A few peo­ple sug­gested, actu­ally 5 of 3 peo­ple sug­gested that it is bet­ter cen­tered.  Up till yes­ter­day, the lay­out was still left aligned.  So there, I’ve taken other people’s advice and made it cen­tered.  I am still fix­ing minor things here and there, but the site looks 90% the same across most major browsers – espe­cially IE6.  There are a few plu­g­ins seem to be bro­ken, because it is scream­ing when you open the site in IE – need to sort that out.  Even­tu­ally, I’ll have to fix up Socia­ble because it has a lot of invalid HTML/CSS, even though my theme is validated.

One last note, if you are using WP-Spamfree‘s con­tact form, the Sub­mit but­ton align­ment will prob­a­bly drove a lot of you crazy.  That because the author add a <label> before each <input> field excepted the Sub­mit but­ton.  If you dig inside the plu­gin and find the “con­tact form” and insert <label></label> before the sub­mit but­ton, you will able to adjust the align­ment a lot easier.

Inspi­ra­tions come in all places, some of mine seems to come from dreams…

A few days ago, I told myself that I need to reject the idea that I can’t draw.  So I started to look at tuto­ri­als how to draw and learn how to “think”.  One of the meth­ods is to think each objects in line and shapes how that object is made up instead of let the brain telling me what that object is.  Using that method, I tried vec­tor­iz­ing an image.  I feel that helps me to learn how to put the shapes together as much as draw­ing – and the prod­uct was my USB icons.   The result was quite good, and that was a very good exer­cise appar­ently… (more…)