Freelancing – Dan Bernardic

New Mini Business Cards

I just ordered a set of 100 mini business cards ( half-size ) for just the price of shipping, 6.75 CAD, from moo.com. Order your ~~free~~ cheap 100 cards ( really ).

Every few months they have a promotion by teaming up with another online company to bring this kind of a special. I’d ordered through Movember last year, in April 2011 through About.me, and this time it’s the Klout service.

p.s. Thanks to Terry Smith, a Winnipeg Front End Developer, @DesignCollider for tweeting out that she got the cards. Couldn’t have gotten them without you!

Career Consultor

Designer:: Joshua Balleza
Plugins:: Custom Post Widget, AddThis, AVH Extended Categories Widgets, Relevanssi – A Better Search, TubePress, and Widget Logic
Project URL:: Not online any more.

Mai Kosaka

The home page is an about me page with different sections triggered by hovering over the images

The website features a portfolio section with a collage of the various portfolio images on the front page

The blog features beautiful images taken by Mai herself

Mai designed a personal site with a portfolio and blog section for herself. It was one of my first WordPress-based website builds.

One thing I got my first try against in this project is how to make that footer on the short home page stay on the bottom of the browser window.

Designer:: Mai Kosaka
Project URL:: Not online any more unfortunately! http://www.maiksdesign.com/

Site-branch-specific Styling with WordPress

For the second time now, I’ve been asked to style some elements in a page based on the branch of the sitemap tree being displayed.

You can see it at http://rupertsland.ca/wp/about/ still in staging, will move to http://rupertsland.ca/about/ vs. http://www.rupertsland.ca/wp/reference/ and http://www.seniorscircle.ca/directory/health-well-being/ vs. http://www.seniorscircle.ca/directory/home-and-housing/

Here’s an explanation:

Say we have a sitemap like this:

about
- our company
- our history
blog
- news
- snippets
- portfolio

For example I need to style all the h1s in the blog branch to be blue, and all h1s in the about branch to be purple.

I’ve been putting “if (have_posts()) while(…): the_post();” of the loop before the get_header() call of a given template. I thought that $post is not available before the call to the_post(), but it turns out it is. Then after starting the loop, I would write a function to use as a filter for the body_class filter which would add a class to the body based on $post, and then I have a branch-specific CSS class to hook into it.

I’m probably going to stop moving the loop beginning before the get_header() call now that I know that the global $post is available before calling the_post(), and also I am just going to give a parameter to body_class() in header.php instead of hooking into the body_class filter.

Let me know if you have some ideas on how to do this better!

New Project Management Tool for my Freelance Work

Bigger Playground for my Website Building Projects

I’ve recently moved my domain, bernardic.ca, to Network Redux web hosting servers. Chris Lowry originally registered the domain for me, in return for some advice I gave him and out of the goodness of his heart. The network redux account is provided by Mark Johnston for free. Mark is my friend and mentor who I met at a call centre I previously worked at. The new hosting allows for more websites to be hosted, so I installed a project management web app written in PHP, called Project Pier.

Professional Project Management Tool

This app provides me with a way to enter projects I am working on, enter associated tasks, and indicate when the tasks have been completed. I can create accounts for clients, so they can keep up to date with the status of the project, add new tasks, and share files. I hope this will improve the communication, as well as act as a reminder of what is left to be done, and it should work well as a central repository of information and files related to a particular project. It is fairly easy to install and use, and since it is written in PHP, I will probably tweak it to my need, and contribute bug fixes & feature enhancements back to the project.

Mai V2

Mai decided to refresh the look of her portfolio site, and created another clean and crisp design, ready to be implemented into her website.

Mai is a visual designer originally from Japan, currently living in the U.S.A. We met through ProgrammerMeetDesigner.com

I’ve created a WordPress-based site and developed a WordPress theme based on the PSDs she provided.

Technologies used: PHP, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, jQuery, MySQL, WordPress.

Wordpress theme developed for MaiKSDesign.com

oDesk

I recently discovered odesk, an online marketplace website, and joined it. The thing I like the most about it currently is the test-taking feature.

You can take tests for knowledge within different areas of Web development, and once you are done, your profile lists that you’ve completed the test, what score you achieved, etc. They even give you badges to put on your website, and they link to the oDesk profile page: