Emptiness Header Images

First of all, my apology to Tony Lauria for making him wait for a long time and for not being able to upload these images earlier as promised. Life has been exceptionally busy, but I’ll save the details for another blog post.

It was a pleasant surprise for me to find out that Tony and some other Emptiness Theme users like to the header images from previous versions of the theme and requested their availability for download. Thanks so much for using the theme.

So here they are (in chronological order)…

Light greenish-yellowish leaves on tree branches in front of my home in Carnegie. This picture was used as the default header image from v0.1 to v0.9 of the theme.

A city-loop train with Crown complex in the background. This picture was taken from the Flinders St studio apartment where I lived back in 2005. I used the picture as a custom header image demonstration on a cleaner way to customise WordPress Theme styles using MyCSS Plugin.

Stones and water, which I thought represent the theme of emptiness really really well. The picture was taken at Korakuen Garden during my trip to Japan this year, and was used in v1.0 .

Weird grassy plants at Shinjuku Garden. In retrospective, I found the random pattern of the plants to be quite interesting. This picture was used in v1.1 .

Buildings behind the Shibuya Crossing at night (original 1024×768 image). I used this picture to test the custom image header cropping feature introduced in v1.1 .

Testing Reflection Plugin

I spent several train rides this week putting together Reflection Plugin for WordPress. This plugin applies reflection effect to images on a blog. The reflection effect is done on the client side using the excellent Raphael JavaScript library. You can use normal image on your posts as usual, and you’ll get the reflection effect by simply adding ‘reflection’ to the class value.

Here are some examples of the effect…

Wide movie poster:

Album covers, aligned, with wrapping text:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec ut pede ut mauris varius ultricies. In a dolor non risus dapibus faucibus. Etiam tristique pellentesque ligula. Cras tempus nunc vel turpis. Vivamus congue. Nullam hendrerit tincidunt metus. Pellentesque bibendum dapibus felis. Suspendisse risus magna, placerat id, malesuada eget, pellentesque quis, felis. Sed dolor lectus, vehicula rutrum, venenatis et, fringilla vel, tellus. Curabitur mi. Donec ligula pede, vulputate vitae, bibendum ac, pharetra in, elit. Pellentesque et mauris ut pede mattis commodo. Mauris massa odio, egestas eget, luctus id, suscipit sit amet, velit. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Suspendisse ac sem. Cras nec dolor a ipsum consectetur lobortis. In blandit erat. Fusce mollis ultrices ipsum.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Donec ut pede ut mauris varius ultricies. In a dolor non risus dapibus faucibus. Etiam tristique pellentesque ligula. Cras tempus nunc vel turpis. Vivamus congue. Nullam hendrerit tincidunt metus. Pellentesque bibendum dapibus felis. Suspendisse risus magna, placerat id, malesuada eget, pellentesque quis, felis. Sed dolor lectus, vehicula rutrum, venenatis et, fringilla vel, tellus. Curabitur mi. Donec ligula pede, vulputate vitae, bibendum ac, pharetra in, elit. Pellentesque et mauris ut pede mattis commodo. Mauris massa odio, egestas eget, luctus id, suscipit sit amet, velit. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Suspendisse ac sem. Cras nec dolor a ipsum consectetur lobortis. In blandit erat. Fusce mollis ultrices ipsum.

Obligatory browser screenshot:

For more information, please have a look at Reflection Plugin web page.

Update (07/12/2008): I’m starting to think that this plugin can actually be an image effect plugin. Not only reflection, something like rounded corner effect can easily be done with Raphael, along with many other effects. The underlying work is basically to apply client side image effect by using class attribute values as meta data (hmm, shouldn’t future version of CSS support this?). Oh well, let’s see how Reflection Plugin goes.

100+ Custom Emptiness

Five months since v0.1 was released, Emptiness Theme has been downloaded 5,867 times and given 4/5 stars average rating. Not bad. Even though it’s not as popular as other themes with fancy graphic design, I think Emptiness has its own target audience with it’s simplistic style.

I’m particularly happy to find (via Google search) more than 100 blogs using Emptiness Theme with customised header image and some with customised css. Check them out on my Picasa Web album.

I used Nautilus Image Converter to resize all images via a simple select all, right click, and resize. If only it also has an auto image quality compression then it would be perfect.