Whoa, what an awe­some begin­ning of the year! After recov­er­ing from the hol­i­day mood I quickly got to work and had this sud­den idea of buy­ing a domain name: my name. So I spent some time to look around to see where I’d reg­is­ter the domain and host the website.

Sev­eral options came up, in the end I chose to reg­is­ter in GoDaddy.com and host the web­site in ASmallOrange.com. More on that later. Any­way, so I bought priapurnama.me. The idea was to build a vcard web­site where peo­ple can quickly get con­nected to me. A cou­ple of hours spent with Pho­to­shop, Coda, Fire­fox and Inter­net Explorer result­ing in this website:

priapurnama.me

Hup, that was simple.

I’ve also setup a lab­o­ra­tory for me to work there. It’s a Word­Press instal­la­tion with dummy con­tent from the Word­Press Theme Devel­op­ment Check­list and an awe­some plu­gin to pre­view themes: Word­Press Theme Demo. The pur­pose of the lab­o­ra­tory is to pre­view my word­press themes live, so every­one can try it and look around before (per­haps) downloading.

First theme I devel­oped on the lab was Ronin.

Ronin.

Ronin. (yes, with a dot for the heck of it) is a word­press theme with dark back­ground. It has 3 columns, one for con­tent and 2 for wid­getized side­bars. There’s a theme options page to set the gra­vatar email and short bio. Here’ have a look at Ronin., live.

Next one was just fin­ished now, it’s called Grid­som­niac. This is the theme I’m cur­rently using.

Gridsomniac

Gridsomniac’s using light back­ground and dark text. I’m not sure if I should call this 2 or 3 columns because tech­ni­cally it has 3 columns but 2 are used for the post con­tent, only 1 is allo­cated for side­bar. As usual, this one also has theme options page and wid­getized side­bar. These are the stan­dard these days. See the theme live here.

Note: I asked my twitt­ter friends of what to name this theme with grid word. Some ideas came up: Evan­der Holy­grids, Aura Kas­grids, Gridsmu­lat, Brigrids Bar­dots. My friends are super­cute. I finally went with Grid­som­niac coined by Budi.

I’ve sub­mit­ted these themes to Word­Press Theme Direc­tory, I hope they will be approved. I sup­pose there will be more themes com­ing up in the future, only they won’t come as fast as this. I’m think­ing of one theme per month, pretty real­is­tic, huh?

I learned a lot from devel­op­ing these 2 themes, like the many things I missed when design­ing my pre­vi­ous themes. Now I know bet­ter thanks to this wplover arti­cle and of course, the theme devel­op­ment check­list.

So yeah, very pro­duc­tive month and January’s not even over yet. What about you? Any­thing inter­est­ing you did this month?

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