About Me

I’m currently a student at UCL [London] studying Architecture. Apart from term time I live in Penarth [Wales] where I went to Stanwell School. At A-Level I studied Art, Maths, Physics and History. My main interests are Architecture, Ceramics, Gadgets/Tech, FileSharing [BitTorrent] and Guitar.

The Site

theojones.net was born on January 24, 2006 and is my main presence on the interwebs. It runs on a Linux server with Surpass Hosting and is powered by WordPress.

It’s been through several design stages with more to come, often using the site as a sandpit for my web design experiments.

The initial design went live in November 2006 using basic HTML and images. It was used as a landing page linking to sub domains for ceramic work (never completed), architecture blog (WordPress), ‘friends’ media gallery (Coppermine) and ‘moblog’ (WordPress) that used photos sent via flickr from a (now retired) HTC C500.

In July 2007 it was redesigned in WordPress and sub domains (except friends.theojones.net) discarded in favour of 1 unified CMS. The design uses a header image with navigation and examples of my work. Initially I was seduced by ‘Web 2.0′, it was ‘hip’ but wasn’t me – I decided to show more flare and ‘ease of navigation’ wasn’t essential, it could be fun and exploratory.

I took objects that said something about me and photographed them in an organised mess. Using CSS I created navigation and effects. The WordPress theme I used was Derek Powacks ‘Depo Clean’, simple design with a single column, flickr support and large footer – But I was soon hacking. I integrated Last.fm, made valid HTML/CSS and tweaked it to my liking. The theme lost most of the ‘Depo’ code and I then released it for anyone to use.

I am planning to update the header photo and put work into the Architecture and Ceramics pages.

Thanks to WordPress, Derek Powazek and W3.

WordPress Plugins

Akismet, cforms, FeedBurner FeedSmith, FeedList, flickrRSS, FLV Embed, Google XML Sitemaps, Last.Fm Records, Postalicious, StatusPress, Viper’s Video Quicktags, Wordbook and WP Security Scan.