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.
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.”
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?
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.