Discover the new Kusarigama, my free WordPress theme for bloggers

February 1st, 2015

A long time ago (it was 2011) I created Kusarigama, a free and highly customizable theme for WordPress with a “classic” blog design, focused on readability, typography and ease-of-use.

With its clean layout and 3 built-in styles, 2 widget-enabled areas (sidebar and footer), its full support to some of the most useful WordPress features (such as custom menus and threaded comments) and an additional set of custom options (e.g., Google Analytics and easy banner inclusion), Kusarigama is perfect both for the newbie blogger – looking for a simple and ready-to-use theme – and for the WordPress ninja, who will enjoy its advanced features in all their glory.

Anyway, after all those years, it needed a graphic refresh and a code revision. Finally I’ve found some time to update it with a series of improvements listed here:

• Improved typography with Google Fonts integration
• Added a new font-type combination with mixed serif/sans-serif
• Kusarigama has now a HTML5 doctype
• Support for Google Universal Analytics code snippet
• Everything has been tested on WordPress 4.1
• Bugfixing and minor code imprvements

Preview Download

Kusarigama is available for free download as my personal gift to the amazing WordPress community. You can find a complete code history on GitHub.

Share: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn · Tags: freebies, web design, wordpress

jQuery.RandomBlinker: The Plugin For Useless Random Animations

January 26th, 2015

A couple of years ago I created a nice jQuery-powered random animation for a web design project I was working on.

I recently found some time to recover that work and I thought it could be easily customized for other projects, too. So I cleaned up the original code and I trasformed it into an easy-to-use jQuery plugin.

The effect principle is actually very easy to understand and customize: a full width table is created in the target container and its cells are randomically turned on and off at a given interval.

Go to the official jQuery.RandomBlinker page to see a working demo, read the full story, get usage instructions and download links!

Share: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn · Tags: freebies, javascript, jquery, web development

Wakizashi, free video portfolio theme for WordPress

January 6th, 2015

During this holiday season I found some time to release Wakizashi, my new WordPress theme designed with filmmakers and video producers in mind.

Wakizashi is a clean, simple and powerful video portfolio with the following features:

• Built-in Vimeo embedding
• Beautiful home page thumbnail grid
• 4 different stylesheets to choose from!
• 2 different templates for Pages (3-columns and 1-column)
• Contacts template with full-width Google Maps embed
• Good out-of-the-box SEO tagging and og:graph support
• Google Analytics integration and other easy-to-use custom options

» Read more about Wakizashi and take a complete look to its features.

Adding an item to your video portfolio will be as easy as creating a WordPress post: add title and description, upload a thumbnail image of your choice (yes, you won’t have to use random-selected still frames) and paste the Vimeo ID of your video. That’s all.

Preview Download

Wakizashi is released for free download under the GNU License. Wakizashi’s source code is also available on GitHub.

Share: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn · Tags: freebies, web design, wordpress