I’m experimenting with HTML5 – it’s given me faith that eventually I will be able to develop/design for the web without all the cross-browser nonsense that we all know so well. I doubt the day of full cross-browser compatibility will every arrive, but until then HTML5 is a really exciting advancement in what can be done with HTML and CSS. One day I hope to be able to develop web apps with nothing more than a solid, stable javascript library (jquery is probably the best candidate right now), HTML, and CSS. Until then, I’m putting up a portfolio of code that I’ve written for the web as an accessible resource/demo repository.

Visit my the web development portfolio of Jeff Barr here.

It seems like using wp code snippets used to be more intuitive, from what I remember. I could be wrong. I wanted to show my blog categories in the sidebar, but I didn’t want to have an unstyled label so I could add my own, without having to add anything to the stylesheet. After some googling, here is the path to better category display for minimally styled blogs:

wp_list_categories(‘title_li=’); ?>

Makes sense I guess, but it was annoying trying to figure it out. RTFM Jeff, sheesh.

For my writing blog, I wanted a nice, simple theme that didn’t do anything much at all. I had an idea to make kind of an old-school looking page, like a blog I would have done in about 1998. I couldn’t find anything much to suit me at the WordPress Theme Repository, so I decided to roll my own. The result: Paperback Writer Theme – a super simple WordPress theme. Please note that if you want to use it, you may want to add a good deal of functionality – right now it is very bare boned.