BensonHsu.com

previously the sileightymania.com journal.

Browsing Posts in Nerd Stuff

Recently, I was approached to develop a custom WordPress theme for a friend of mine who works at Cellairis.  Cellairis is a mobile phone accessories company who is enjoying much success in a time where most companies are laying off and hunkering down due to the declining economy.

They recently redesigned their website and they wanted a place to post blog style content, especially with all of the publicity they’ve been receiving lately.  All I had to do was create a fully functional custom theme for them that matched the branding on their current website – this meant that all widgets and customizing options work without breaking the look and feel of the blog, just as a normal WordPress site would.  I was able to finish their site on time, as they JUST did a big launch event for Elle and Blair Fowler and their line of cellphone accessories.

Technology used: CSS, HTML, PHP

I got an award!

3 comments

There’s a big trade show that my company attends every year in Las Vegas. It’s run by PPAI, who is like SEMA for the promotional products industry. Every year, they hold an awards ceremony and this year they decided to have a new category for web awards.

We ended up winning the award and the nice people at work decided that it belonged on my desk. Being recognized for your work is always a good feeling.  Now I want to try and snatch up some more awards for 2012!

With their new Ipod Nanos, Apple decided to ditch their old form factor completely and make something super small and touchscreen.

There is a clock function on the watch, and that caused a lot of people to catch on to the idea that they can use it as a watch, given that they had a way to mount it on a wrist band. A lot of companies have been creating wrist bands so that you can wear your Nano as an article of clothing…

…which is cool if you don’t mind owning a $180 watch that is not waterproof!  When was the last time you saw a watch that wasn’t waterproof?  I wouldn’t shake the hand of a person who wears one – they probably couldn’t wash their hands very easily.

I just finished a small project doing some renovations for Work Wheels USA.  Their previous web development company created a content management system (CMS) for them, but Work needed some additional functionality and customization so they contacted me.

The challenge with this type of project is having to go through somebody else’s code to modify it.  At the same time, I have to be able to mimic the current site so that everything flows nicely in terms of code AND in terms of the user interface.  In other words, to a normal website visitor, it can’t look like somebody came in later to do a patch job, and to a programmer looking at the code, things need to be consistent so you don’t need to learn how to read coding styles from two different people.

Lucky for me, the people who previously developed the site for them did a great job with the programming, as their code was very legible and organized.  I even picked up a couple of organizing techniques from them that I’m already using right now at work.

The most noticeable thing I created for Work Wheels USA is a rotating front page slideshow.  These rotating slideshows are super hot these days.  Even though I don’t think they are very good for search engine optimization (SEO), they grab a human’s attention and allows for presenting multiple content in a single area.

The other things I created were just to allow them to swap out certain images and content here and there, things you will probably never notice because for the most part they look the same right now.

This site is programmed in PHP, which isn’t what I work in mostly, but I dabble a little in it, and it’s nice to know how easy it was for me to get acquainted with it and even finish a PHP project in such a timely manner.

My goal in the next few months is to really get my hands dirty with PHP and .NET.  I’ve been holding myself back for far too long programming in classic ASP (10 years!!).  It’s time to start get relevant with today’s popular technologies.

Anyway, this one is done.  Time to start working on a few others I have sitting around waiting for me!  I’m looking forward to the Joomla project I have coming!

I did an automatic update on my themes and I just realized that it screwed with some of the settings… the links and blogroll were gone.  And I think the footer is for some reason sitting at the bottom of the right column.  LAME.

I’ve fixed the blogroll but I’ll have to look at the footer later.

I’ve been tired of my dumbphone, so I finally made the decision to pre-order the iPhone 4.

I think if there were some rad Android phones on AT&T, I would have gotten that instead, but there isn’t.  So here goes nothing!  Let’s see if it lives up to all the hype.