Jacob Parrish Dot Com

I've been itching to make my own website/ blog for years now and FINALLY, here it is. My website has actually been up for quite some time now but I did not want to promote it until my portfolio was completely filled in. Well, I'm tired of waiting so here is the official release! This article will explain some of the features of jacobparrish.com and how I plan to use it.

As you might have guessed, I've built the website with my favorite CMS, Drupal. The website design is a near replica of the Sidepane wordpress theme at Themify.me. Once I saw it I had to recreate it for Drupal. I developed this theme as a sub-theme of Genesis. The site is hosted with my favorite web design company, UpgradeYa. Note that these credits are mentioned in the left sidebar at the bottom of the page. As far as I know, this theme is compatible with IE7 and up, Chrome, Firefox and Safari. I've noticed some weirdness with the fixed left sidebar on touch screen mobile devices and ipads, but for the most part it works. If you use IE6, first, rethink you life. Then, stop now and get with the times. I have spent endless,annoying hours fixing websites so that you can enjoy the website like everyone else. I will do that no more. So, if you are using Internet Explorer 6 you will notice a prompt at the top of the page that will tell you to download a better browser. Please listen to the prompt. Thank you:)

Starting at the top left of the page, that's me and my first name :) Underneath is the main navigation to my articles, portfolio and about page. On the articles page I included a list of four categories that organize anything I will talk about on this website. Each categories displays the  total number of articles of that type. Clicking on a category will take you to the relative articles.

• Web Design - This category is self explanatory, but to reiterate, it is about my experiences designing and developing websites. You will most likely find tips, tricks and solutions to some of the problems I encounter as a professional web designer.
• General - Here you will find anything that is interesting enough to make me want to write an article about it. When I get some time you can expect to see some info on bitcoin, free staters, philosophy and new technology.
• Life - All articles here will be about me and notable experiences in my life.
• Updates - Here I will post any news about updates to this website: mainly features added or bugs fixed.

Portfolio is next in the list and I've made three little icons which allow users to view the portfolio in different ways: Teaser view, Thumb View, and List View. My favorite of the three is the thumb view so I have it default to that when clicking portfolio. I also made the thumb view page liquid allowing users with widescreen displays to see more.

I'll skip over the about page which needs no explanation and go straight to the rss icon. 

Clicking this will give you a web feed format that you can use with software such as Google Reader to stay up-to date with my latest posted articles and portfolio items.

Below the main nav is a list of some of my close friends' blogs. Next to that is a list of projects that I am working on in my free time. Maybe someday I'll have a new web phenomenon listed there! :)

Commenting

A main concern I had in mind when building this site was to make it easy for people to comment. Anyone can comment without an account. All you have to do is type in a message, hit preview (to make sure there are no typos), then save. If you want, you can include your name, email, and homepage. An added feature to the comments is the implementation of Gravatar. This links your email with an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. So if you don't have an account on Gravatar, sign up and you can enjoy this cool feature.

One thing that always bugged me about some other websites is that after I would comment on a blog post, I would have no way of knowing whether or not someone commented back. For this reason I added the comment notify module which allows users to be notified via email if someone responds to the post or specifically to their comment.

and here is a screen shot of the comments...

Last but absolutely not least: the custom 404 page. For those of you who don't know, this is the error page that appears when a user enters a URL that the server does not recognize. lolcats tickle my giggle.

Future Endeavors for Jacob Parrish dot com:

• Add the rest of my portfolio items.
• Make this a reusable theme for the Drupal Community
• Add Facebook login so users can comment under their Facebook profile and have their profile pics show up next to their comments.
• Make a mobile version of the site

I hope you have enjoyed reading and come back for more as I expect to post regularly.