Last year, I gave a presentation called “Introduction to Web Standards“. This time, I went a bit more hands-on workshoppy. The presentation was called Turning Your Design into a WordPress Theme. I started with a few slides (embedded below) and then spent the rest of the time (which only ended up being about 15 minutes!) live-building a WordPress theme from an XHTML/CSS one-pager and a Save As from my Tabigail theme.

That was kind of fun. Basically, I duplicated the theme, activated it, and started migrating the markup and combining it with the theme code. I explained what I was doing it all along and fielded a variety of questions about WordPress, design, and CMSs in general. Due to time constraints, I was only able to build the main blog page—header, footer, sidebar, and index.php. The single post, page, archives, search results, and 404 will have to wait a little bit, but it was nice to get the front page working in that short amount of time.

I’m looking forward finishing up the theme—because it’s a brand new design for Darowski.com. I’ve been chipping away at it for a little over a month… just little bits here and there. It’s at a good place now and I look forward to pushing it live soon.

But in the meantime, here are the slides from today…

Last year’s presentation was Introduction to Web Standards. I talked about (X)HTML, CSS, Microformats, and URL as UI. Now, I need to come up with another idea.

I’ve got a couple I’d like to throw out there. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks! Here they are:

Turn Your Design into a WordPress Theme

Turns out, I’ve done a crapload of WordPress themes. I’ve only released one publicly (that’d be Tabigail), but I’ve done a lot of ‘em for folks. It’s almost a game… once I get the design, I try to see how quickly I can turn it into a fully-functional theme. With this presentation, I’d take a very simple one page design (properly built with web standards, of course), break it up, and turn it into a theme.

My Favorite CSS Techniques

Based on the blog post of the same name, this would take some of these examples and actually walk through them, explaining the whats and the whys. Seeing how each CSS declaration affects the rendering could be useful, I think.

Any feedback on which I should do? Thanks!

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Today (a couple of hours ago, actually) I gave a presentation called “Introduction to Web Standards” at NewBCamp08, a new unconference in Providence. I’m pleasantly surprised by the turnout, considering it was a first time event with minimal marketing used to spread the word (Twitter played a hand, I bet).

Here’s my talk about Web Standards, microformat goodness, and some URL as UI craziness. The talk seemed to be pretty well received and had a decent turnout with some excellent questions asked.

Last week, I met up with a bunch of my Providence tech peeps for a breakfast with superblogger Jeff Pulver. While there, he shot this video of Sara Streeter talking about NewBCamp, an unconference happening in Providence this coming weekend (February 23rd, 9am–4pm).

I’ll be on the “speaker list” for the event (since it is a first time event, we’re pre-populating as many speaker slots as we can… usually not done for an unconference). I’ll be speaking about web standards, microformats, hackable URLs and all sorts of fun goodies. I’m putting my talk together now (hoping it is more of a “conversation” than a “talk”) and I’m looking forward to it. This will actually be my first time presenting outside of companies I’ve worked for.

If you’re in the area, please register and come on down. There’s just a lil’ $10 fee to help cover things like lunch. There are still open presentation slots, so please come and share your wisdom!