I’ve finally managed to get my personal website built and running. I meant to get it done ages ago but so much had been happening that I simply didn’t have time.

My new website will act as a portfolio and a personal blog. Like all other great things in the world the site is built on Wordpress and themed by me.

See the site now - james.padolsey.com »

The design of the site is quite conventional, there are however a couple of cool features which I think are worth mentioning. The site features a "hand-built" jQuery Ajax contact form which probably isn’t even worth mentioning because they are so common nowadays. I was considering using a Wordpress plugin which does this all automaitcally but all the ones I looked at were far too bloated so I went ahead and made my own. I’m also looking into Ajax’ing the commenting process on the blog… Although that won’t be for a while.

Another feature is the "customize" option. If you have JavaScript enabled you should be able to see a box in the upper right hand corner of the site which, if you click on, an array of colourful options will slide down. I was going to implement a colour picker so users have full control but I decided against it because a pre-defined set of colours (which had been tested to look good) made more sense. So, if you click on the colour of your choice various elements of the page should "magically" change accordingly. Additionally this feature will set a cookie in your browser so that you next time you visit your preference will be retained!

Please subscribe to my new blog… It won’t all be about personal stuff, hopefully I’ll get a couple of webdev related posts up in the near future.