Chris Jennings

Today Ben Bloch launched a redesign of BenBinary.net with the help of yours truly. In the end, the Wordpress theme I developed for him turned out really great. As a matter of fact I am super jealous because I have wanted to redesign my own site and have been rocking this Default theme for long enough.

Without any further ado, here’s a little taste of what I’ve been cooking up:

Congrats goes out to Ben and stay tuned for an “Under the sea” edition of ChrisKJennings.com.

I don’t know what it is about this time of the year but I have been absolutely swamped.  I don’t think I’ve even looked up once since New Year’s and I am very thankful.  I have worked with some great people and have learned so much already in 2007 that I can’t imagine things getting much better…more about this in a moment.
In other news, my friend Eric (notice the sweet blog design) has nominated me this week for a Thinking Blogger Award.  I’m not exactly sure on what they are all about, but I appreciate it all the same… thanks for thinking of me!

Things really kicked off in January when I was commissioned to code a site for my friend and ex Facebook / Microsoft marketer, Noah Kagan.  After finishing his site, he referred me to Tim Ferriss, an entrepreneurial author, who was looking for a blog design to promote his latest release, “The Four Hour Workweek”, which was released earlier this month.  Please note that I only designed the blog portion of his site.

As I was finishing up on Tim’s site, I was able to land a deal with Joe Rogan, the guy from Fear Factor / News Radio / The Man Show / UFC, to help his team develop a blog for him.  He wanted to be able to have RSS feeds and a mini-blog from the road so of course I recommended the love of my life, Wordpress.  I wanted to take the design in a different direction, but they were worried it would not be consistent with the work they had done… so no worries.  Hopefully he’ll hook me up when I’m out in LA. Look for the launch of the New JoeRogan.net later this month.

Soon after the Rogan era, Noah came through for me again in mid-march with his friend and venture capitalist Dave Feinleib.  Dave wanted a design that wasn’t too cluttered and I am pretty confident I was able to come through for him.  One of my best designs in my opinion.
And if things couldn’t get any better, I was able to join the Miami based startup, OurScene.com, by designing their landing page and blog.  Jason Calliero and the rest of the Ourscene crew are doing big things that are going to effect the way music is done locally and globally so definitely check them out and reserve your seat for the beta.

That’s all for now, thanks again for a great year so far.

Recently while developing a blog for author Tim Ferriss, I implemented a CSS based menu that used background images for the visual navigation. One major problem when using roll-over menus, no matter if it’s javascript or CSS, is the fact that the browser will not load the “hover” image until it is initially hovered over with the mouse. Until recently I have made use of a few lines of javascript to pre-load the images, however, due to the fact that Tim’s book isn’t necessarily targeted towards tech-savvy people, there’s a good chance that a few older browsers will make their way onto his site.

The Solution

To achieve the same effect, without all of the Javascript bulk, I simply made a new class in my stylesheet:

.invisible {display: none; }

Then, I loaded all of my images onto my page (they can be anywhere). Then, I simply set their class to “invisible”. That’s all there is to it. No more loading flickers for Tim’s navbar. woot.