America is a big country, and I am a man who finds intrigue and follows that intrigue and the intrigue takes you on bicycle ride across America.

I can be convinced to stay put for any interesting contracts along the way. Hire and convince me why your part of America is the best for L.i.V.I.N. If you’re interested in finding out what I’m doing take a look at Bike Gang.

I have just signed contracts with Ordatronics and will be working my HTML / CSS magic on a front-end for a major telco’s instore kiosks.

I am currently looking for short-term contract work in the Sydney CDB and surrounding areas. If you need a professional, experienced front-end developer why don’t you go ahead and get in contact with me?

It had been over five years since I last updated my site. I had just finished my mature-aged schooling and thought that if I were going to present myself to the working world again, best do it with a new face.

So what to have in a new site? Let’s keep it simple to begin with: blog, a portfolio page, something about myself and a contact form.

Easy enough. What to build it on. I had been recently doing some work with WordPress, updating content and refreshing the look and feel of a clothing brand’s website. In the past I had mostly bypassed WordPress in favour of Drupal, believing the complexity I hoped to achieve in sites wasn’t going to be catered for by WordPress. I was wrong. I am man enough to admit that. And to further immerse myself in the world of WordPress, I wanted to build the theme for my site from scratch. I had manipulated themes before but really wanted something personal, so that I could point at my own portfolio and also say that I designed and developed everything on this site. I wanted the portfolio to represent myself a little, so that future clients and employers had a sense of the person they would be dealing with.

So I chose red. I thought, I’m going to make a red site. How many red sites are out there? Not many. Is there a reason for this? I don’t know. But hey, you’re looking at my red site and I’m happy with the result. I’m not a designer by training and so I found the whole process quite rewarding and challenging. I’m really pleased that I didn’t go with a stock theme, at least I can say that this whole site is me.

On the technical side, I first set up a XAMPP server on my home computer, to run localhost through the development process. I have used some other server stacks before that install wordpress for you, but I really wanted to make sure that I undertook each step myself while building this site. I installed a version of XAMPP as just the servers, without any CMS. I then downloaded and installed WordPress. Which isn’t quite as easy as they make out on their site but is still easily achievable by a developer in under half an hour.

Now how to make my own theme; I mostly read the documentation on the WordPress site, got to grips with child themes. I did my research and decided to build my own theme as a child theme of the excellent HTML5 Reset theme by Monkey Do, contributed to by Eric Meyer, one of the authors of the first web development books I ever read cover to cover. Working with WordPress themes is a real joy, and although it took a little while to get the hang of child theme theory, I know that when it comes time to upgrade I’m going to be thankful for the few hours I spent learning and understanding.

Then it was just a case of developing the site, again using WordPress has been a joy. I didn’t encounter any problem I couldn’t overcome and I was happy to find few cross-browser issues. Nice and easy. I still have some improvements to make, the most obvious will be including a footer. Stupid me. I’m also working on some jQuery trickery to have the navigation stay in the browser window as the user scrolls. I’d like to produce several other small images, like the handsaw above this post, and have them randomise for each post, lessening the repetition. Finally, I need to take a new profile picture.

Welcome to a new era of stpearse.com.

A fairly striking update, if I do say so myself. I’m planning a post that goes into more details about how this site came to be what it is but it will have to wait till another day, as I’ve already used up a Sunday finishing it off and it’s time for bed.

They won.

And realised that something was missing… Parktools! I need / have to have / want these tools like really badly. I can’t even begin to tell you how smoothly my bicycle would run if I had permanent access to these tools.