• Random Gravatar images for people who don’t have one—what are Gravatars you ask? It’s quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on Gravatar enabled sites (blurb straight from their site). Want one? Sign up here, it’s free!
• Random musings when search returns no results. Try searching for some random terms to get some quotes.

A few more things to do: page navigation, widgets support and IE6/7 CSS hacks. After that I’ll probably spend some time tidying up the theme before releasing it into the wild.

After chipping at it for nearly a week between work and parental responsibilities, I think I’ve made sufficient progress on the theme to take it out for a test run. Since my blog is still new and shiny, I’ve refrained from adding too many widgets and what-nots from the 1,398 1,456 1,637 1,917 available—for now anyway. Over time, I intend to gradually extend the site only when there’s a need (and after I’ve amassed significantly more posts to leverage).

The theme is called Hephaestus, after the Greek god of technology, blacksmiths, craftsmen, artisans, sculptors, metals and metallurgy, and fire—concepts which I based the theme on (not too strongly, however). Along with the name, I also had a laundry-list of guiding principles which I wanted to follow—most of which are just personal standards I’ve adopted over the years for my line of work, others are just things I’ve always wanted to try out but never had the chance to impress upon clients to use for their projects owing to various business considerations.

I won’t ramble about that list today, but I will briefly mention that Hephaestus employs a fluid-width layout and has rounded corners, two design elements which I’ve used before but never together. The current implementation for rounded corners that I’m using is not one I’m particularly fond of—too many divs, but I’m stuck with it until browsers start implementing CSS3. Overall it’s been fun working on this theme. I would also like to disclose that Hephaestus is by no means an original design as it blatantly steals cues from many other sites (had a look at CNN lately?) whose design and UI patterns I’ve oft-used as inspiration for projects and now mashed together to create this piece.

As I said earlier, the theme is still half-baked. The archives and search page hasn’t been built yet, so don’t try searching through all of my two posts with the search form on top—you won’t find anything. I promise to tie up these loose-ends quickly and eventually Just a few more things to wrap up and I’ll release this WordPress theme for public download if there is enough interest for it.