Ikiru Design

I’ve been working, on and off for a while, on a theme that translates the date of a post — or in the case of multiple, the topmost — into a color and uses that to determine the color of the page. This was inspired in no small part by the now-retired look that Shaun Inman used to use.

I honestly don’t remember when I started working on it, but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out it began in January. That isn’t to say that development of this theme has been terribly difficult — though there were certainly parts I’ve struggled with — but also that I’ve simply been short on time I’ve been able to devote to the project.

It wasn’t until Friday, after what felt like a too-long wait, that I finally saw the then-current version, 0.7.6 in the newly opened WordPress Theme Directory. This release, as signified by it’s less than 1.0 status, is less than I intend to do with the theme. But I’m hoping that finally making the project public will force me to spend more time to add the last features that I’ve been waiting so long to build.

Enough about how my development process works however, let’s cover the highlights of the theme itself. The primary feature, the one for which it is named, is the algorithm that translates dates into colors. This is done with a few PHP functions which take advantage of cosine curves to generate colors that are generally suited to the time of year. Essentially, the three colors of the red-green-blue system commonly used in HTML, all peak at different times. The blue is at it’s height around January first, green peaks around April 1, and red peaks around September 1. All of these are estimates, as I’ve fudged a bit with the peaks and valleys of these curves to give me colors closer to what I want.

Taking advantage of this date-to-color algorithm, I’ve made my favorite feature, the quilt. The quilt is, as you may guess, a collection of differently colored squares to create a blanket to keep you warm… err, display your posts. Rather than use the month-divided list-style archives I’ve built for my themes in the past, I’ve made a single collection of all posts, with colors serving to give you a rough idea of the date. You can easily tell posts from January from those from August, and you can also tell posts from 2008 are different from those from 2005. Of course, this feature is also made even easier to understand by the fact that the post are themselves shown chronologically in the quilt. The real result of the quilt, however, is that you get a beautiful rendering of your archives.

There are many more little features in this theme. I’ve added a rather novel system to hide the default gravatars when a user hasn’t set them. Trackback are seperated from comments so they don’t break the flow of conversation. The whole archives page is prettier than any I’ve made. Heck, the theme itself is just prettier than any I’ve made. And page titles have a novel organization I’m rather fond of.

Mostly though, I’m glad to have finally put this out into the world. It’s still not done, but I simply can’t continue to sit on it. I’ll keep you updated about changes I make to it in the future, and I hope to write a few tutorials explaining the most interesting features of Kaleidoscope to anyone interesting in using them in a different context.

You can, of course, see a demo of the theme at the Ikiru Demo Blog. Be sure to look at the archives page. (Or you can just look around here, as it is the theme Ikiru Design is currently using.) There is also a demo, lacking an archives page, at the WordPress Theme Directory. And you can download the theme from there. You can find even more rambling about it at the theme’s page. And if you have anything to tell me about it — be it bug reports, complaints, or compliments — feel free to contact me.