Over Winter Break, I locked myself in a room and got familiar with developing themes for WordPress from scratch.

Months later, in the spirit of open source, I’m making the theme available for downloading and customizing.

The theme, Grecho, can be downloaded as a zip or forked via my GitHub.

Grecho is not by any means a sophisticated theme — it’s not responsive, has little glitz, and is absent of any JavasScript.

But if you are someone like me who learns by example, Grecho is a good starting point.

The code is intuitive and well-commented. The design is clean (at least in my opinion) and easy on the eyes — no 3D glasses necessary.

Ideally, I’d like to improve upon the theme over time. Those changes will come via GitHub.

The theme supports most widgets and site navigation supports up to three sub-menu levels.

In full disclosure, I did not implement commenting in this theme. Maybe it’s something I’ll add in the future, but my last theme allowed commenting and it resulted in thousands of spam comments that were not stopped by the spam filter.

I do have a running to-do list for improving the theme in place. The first would be to create a template without the sidebar so cool things like maps could be embedded without the eyesore of the sidebar.

Before I pushed it to GitHub, I removed traces of items I hard coded into the theme, including the logo header, which is just a photo.

While I’ve replaced the header in the release version where you don’t have to hard code the blog name, there may be other parts you will have to code in yourself, including meta descriptions if you want your theme to be SEO optimized.

If there are issues or anything I missed please contact me or submit an issue via GitHub.

Download the free WordPress theme

Published by Frank Bi | Posted: April 6, 2013 at 1:04 PM | Category: Web Design

Is there anything at the moment more hip than Google Glasses?

As a Google fanboy and an aspiring developer, the Google Glasses were basically created for me — at least that’s what I thought.

When I first heard of Google’s #IfIHadGlass sweepstakes (let’s call it that) in February, I lunged at the chance to purchase them before everybody else could.

Virtual reality, data visualization, news apps, oh my! Somebody’s got to do it, let me take a stab, only #ifihadglass

— Frank Bi (@FrankieBi) February 20, 2013

Even if I had been accepted to the “Glass Explorers” program, I would still have had to shell out $1,500 and travel to either San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York City to pick them up — but frankly, I didn’t care.

Now, nearly a week after @ProjectGlass started notifying the 8,000 lucky bastards that will be able to purchase the glasses a year before it hits the consumer market, the media covering technology has pounced on the likely criteria behind the selection process.

It seems that you either had to be a celebrity or have a large Twitter following in order to be accepted (with the exception of a few anomalies) according to The Verge.

This means A) I’m not a celebrity B) my 450-plus followers were not enough and C) I did not fall into the anomaly.

Expect me to be the first in line for the product when it hits shelves as planned by the end of 2013 or early 2014.

In the meantime, the eye-wear on my face will be the prescription glasses without the capability for augmented reality.

Published by Frank Bi | Posted: March 31, 2013 at 12:59 AM | Category: Tech Talk