Jayvie is many things:

I'm a Maryland resident. A self-avowed WordPress Whisperer, I use it in all my projects. I take lovely photos, go to the gym a lot, and opine strongly over design, aesthetics, and politics. I'm a heavy Twitter user, a moderate Flickr participant and in my spare time I help people at the SemperFi WP Support forums. Read more about me.

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What is a theme and what is it not?

I’ve designed WordPress-powered sites and blogs for almost five years now. I have my niche, for which I am grateful. Recently, I came across some huff-and-puff regarding Matt Mullenweg’s decision to remove over 200 themes from the repository, citing non-compliance with the GPL.

I have a feeling I’ve been living under a rock for the better part of three or so years. I’ve watched the WordPress community from the sidelines. I saw its expansion and internecine conflicts. I’ve remained silent on most issues out of being ignorant on so many of them and am not afraid to admit to being so.

However, recent events have raised questions and concerns. Jeff Chandler wrote a thoughtful post on Premium Themes and I am left with a few questions and thoughts of my own.

Allow me to introduce you to my design workflow. Whenever I design for a client my first step is to almost always begin with the WordPress Classic theme’s document structure. Old habits die hard and I have found it to be one of the most efficient ways to start off with a “naked” theme. I strip the CSS file of everything except the theme header, substitute it with a blank template of code of all the elements I use in almost all my designs, and start coloring and shaping. I have never, still do not, and perhaps never will, follow the Photoshop-to-code development workflow. If a client wants something exotic, like a horizontal navigation bar (with tabs!), I have a codebook for that too. Now, I tell my customers that the site I design for them is for use on that project only, or for whatever number of sites we agree upon. The combination of images and CSS code form a look which, I believe, is the intellectual property of either myself or my client (depending on the terms of the contract).

The question, then, is, what part of my design falls under the GPL? Does that mean that any one party can rip off an entire design I make, despite the inevitable embarassment at having me parade their lack of creativity for all to see? It’s so easy for me to reverse-engineer the look and feel of Jeffro 2.0 without looking at source codes for HTML and CSS, but I do not, because it is a professional embarassment to do so. What portion of his, or anyone’s, site can I “liberate?”

What is covered by copyright? I know that blocks of CSS code don’t get that benefit, and for good reason. Faux columns would never have caught on, for example. I don’t think that only the content presented by the blog is covered, though. The look and feel of a site are part of its identity, especially if the design is relatively unique.

What are the limits of the GPL when it comes to Themes, Premium Themes, and Blog Designs? This inquiring mind would like to know.

2008-12-24, 16:32 | Filed under: CSS and Design, WordPress | 2 Comments |

On the shores of the Severn river

One Sunday in October I took my friend Adam to explore Annapolis. We ended the day at Seabee Beach, a small, secluded park across the Severn River from the US Naval Academy. It is home to some of the most spectacular sunrises and sunsets in Maryland without driving to the Eastern Shore.

Adam, photographing on the shores of the Severn River

Adam, photographing on the shores of the Severn River

2008-12-19, 2:23 | Filed under: Living fine, Photography | No Comments |

Rusty

Much of my photography of the past two years involves my exploration of local destinations. The time spent alone can be quite therapeutic, and I get the opportunity to explore and appreciate in silence. That said, there also is virtue in a joint exploration, the results of which I’ll share soon enough.

Rich, rust color and texture at an abandoned facility in Patapsco Valley State Park

Rich, rust color and texture at an abandoned facility in Patapsco Valley State Park

2008-12-18, 1:48 | Filed under: Photography | No Comments |

Yet another reason why I would never use foreign characters in graphic design

From Althouse, the Nth example in a long line of stupid, avoidable mistakes involving the use of foreign characters, especially Chinese, in publishing and graphic design:

A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.

Chinese characters look dramatic and beautiful, and have a powerful visual impact, but make sure you get the meaning of the characters straight before jumping right in.

There were red faces on the editorial board of one of Germany’s top scientific institutions, the Max Planck Institute, after it ran the text of a handbill for a Macau strip club on the front page of its latest journal. Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming “Hot Housewives in action!” on the front of the third-quarter edition. Their “enchanting and coquettish performance” was highly recommended.

The column includes an apologia that Althouse and another sharp reader, notices: “Chinese is a tonal language, which means words sounding the same can often have very different meanings depending on how they are spoken.” Mark Liberman expounds: “But what’s really puzzling about this sentence is not its misleading way of describing lexical tone, but rather the implication that Chinese tone is somehow relevant to MPI’s unfortunate choice of cover art.”

One of the great mysteries of Chinese is that an ideogram represents the same concept but is pronounced differently across dialects. Well, as far as mysteries go, it isn’t a mystery per se in that it can not be rationally explained, but it is, to this Westerner’s mind, bizarre. Liberman’s article goes on and on, but is perhaps best summarized by comedian Daniel Tosh’s line (which I paraphrase on best recollection): Do kids in Japan get tattoos of English words?

2008-12-17, 13:12 | Filed under: CSS and Design | 2 Comments |

Like a pair of crabs in my throat

Over the past few weeks I’ve gradually scaled back my on-and-off-and-on-again smoking habit. I’ve picked up Nicorette and using it like dip, to the tune of about six to ten a day. Withdrawal is a complete bitch: the drug itself isn’t that hard to deal with, rather, it’s the experience of having a smooth cloud of smoke just go down my throat, with the full knowledge that my lungs are on the line.

That said, I’ve been breathing easier, my stamina is coming back during exercise, and I’m expectorating in fair amounts. “It’s all in the road to recovery,” I am told. The past few days, though, I was plagued by the scratchy feeling in the back of my throat that I can’t swallow away nor cough up. Like anything else, it got worse before it got better, but better it did. Today I coughed it up.

I felt it in my mouth; it was almost solid. I walked slowly to the bathroom sink to spit this awful thing out, and I did have a passing thought. Sometimes some things we have to deal with in life have to get really bad before we get rid of them, that is, if they get started in the first place. Credit card debt, addictions, toxic relationships, once we get into it, it’s like that throat loogie that was harder to remove at the beginning that when it was time for it to go, so to speak.

And if there were yet one more benefit to getting on a quit-smoking program, it’s that epiphanies can be found from coughing up phlegm.

2008-12-16, 13:15 | Filed under: Living fine | No Comments |

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