The All New I Am Pariah.com / PariahBurke.com

Welcome to the all new I Am Pariah​.com / PariahBurke​.com! Man, it feels good to have new digs!

The site is now pow­ered entire­ly by WordPress, with a ton of cus­tom hack­ing and pro­gram­ming by yours tru­ly, and fea­tur­ing a few tricks you might not have seen before. The col­ors are fresh and inter­est­ing (more on the inspi­ra­tion for them below), and it’s dec­o­rat­ed as much in tex­tures as in colors.

Five Years

For the last five years I’ve been so busy writ­ing books and arti­cles, train­ing, man­ag­ing my oth­er Websites, and design­ing WordPress-powered sites for clients that I haven’t had the time to redesign my own site. Five years! Five! Worse, the old site was built pri­mar­i­ly on hard­cod­ed (non-template) xHTML and PHP built from dis­parate sources. Some things were dri­ven by data­bas­es on the serv­er, some by export from FileMaker Pro data­bas­es on my office com­put­ers, some by cus­tom Photoshop Web gallery tem­plates I rebuilt from time to time via Photoshop CS-CS2. My port­fo­lio and pho­to gallery pages, for instance, were built entire­ly in Photoshop, and uti­lized numer­ous HTTP includes to pull in cap­tions and oth­er spe­cif­ic data con­tained in exter­nal TXT or XML files. In oth­er words: it was a roy­al pain to make even the sim­plest of changes to my port­fo­lio or pho­tos, or to even add new projects and pictures.

This ver­sion, how­ev­er, makes any kind of con­tent and media addi­tion, removal, update, or repur­pose a snap.

The Colors

Neon green, pur­ple, and black?! I’ve dubbed the design of this ver­sion of I Am Pariah​.com / PariahBurke​.com “Towels 1.0.” Like most graph­ic designs, it’s inspired by some­thing I just hap­pened to see in the real world.

One day, step­ping out of the show­er, I noticed the stun­ning inter­ac­tion of col­ors between the pur­ple and not-quite-black tow­els that had been on the rack and the neon green bath tow­el I’d tossed atop them (see the pho­to). The play of col­ors struck me as dynam­ic, fresh, and vibrant, and inspired the col­or scheme that became this new design.

Add in some nat­ur­al world and custom-drawn vec­tor tex­tures, and voila! My new site.

Now that every­thing is dynam­ic, now that it isn’t such a chore to update my site, I’ll be here more often, blog­ging and updat­ing with greater fre­quen­cy. And, as I can, I’ll doc­u­ment some of the WordPress hacks and tricks I used to build such a pow­er­ful and easy to man­age site.

Come on in. Let’s hang out.

3 thoughts on “The All New I Am Pariah.com / PariahBurke.com

  1. David Blatner

    As friend and stand-up come­di­an Jimmy Gunn once said to me: If I could describe myself in one word… if I, in a sin­gle word, could sum up the whole of my per­son­al­i­ty, my being, my rai­son d’être… that sin­gle word would have to be: “Can’t fol­low directions.”

  2. Sarah

    I heard you are design­ing a web site for “Sadie’s Designer Cakes & Pastries” in Quincy, MA. Are you going to post it on your site, also will you be using the same tricks you have used here?

  3. Tom

    You’re worth a whole lot more than me! Good post; I have long pon­dered on the fact that human life can be mea­sured in mon­ey. If you real­ly think about it, it’s pret­ty crazy, but it’s true.

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