Hi, I am Zac Gordon and zgordon.org is my personal website. You can find quotes I find inspiring, occasional reflections, random day to day blog posts, and photos. If you are looking for my professional work please check out dabrook.org and wideskydesigns.com.

I use the wonderful ExpressionEngine publishing platform to run zgordon.org. 

For the last several years I have used WordPress, and had planned to use WordPress again for my new site, but I just keep coming back to EE.

If you develop websites, I suggest that you try ExpressionEngine out for yourself and learn why more and more designers and developers are choosing it for their projects.

I love Flickr.  I put my images there as soon as I get them off my camera (which sometimes takes a while) and now with my iPhone I can email pictures right from phone to online.

Yet, I also like to have photos on my website.  Huge thanks goes to David Rencher and his eeFlickr module which allows for easy templating of Flickr photos into your ExpressionEngine site.

Just in case someone wants to see a larger viewer of the photo I made use of the so trendy its almost just standard lightbox.  Since I use jQuery elsewhere on the site, I went with Leandro Vieira Pinho’s jQuery lightBox Plugin to accomplish this.

I dig how Sam Rayner has a live gravat preview on his site.  Thanks for the inspiration for live comment and contact preview on zgordon.org

Anyone who has made a contact form with EE hopefully knows about the free-and-so-awesome-it-should-be-core Freeform Module from the outstanding developers at Solspace.

What I did for the live comment and contact form preview was take my inspiration from Sam, read the Really Simple Live Comment Preview tutorial on jQuery’s website, and worked it in with the FreeForm module.

After I attended the Sidebar Creative Workshop in Washington D.C. I came back inspired to finally work with a CSS framework.

Since Bryan talked about the 960.gs CSS grid framework, I figured I would give it for a whirl.

I am familiar with the pros and cons of using a CSS framework, and let me say that I have mixed feelings about using the 960 grid framework.  But this site has a boxy, grid, layout, and it works.  Some things, like adding padding or margins in certain places was a little tricky if it didn’t fit in with the default CSS, but like I said, it worked.

Would I use it again, sure.  Would I recommend you give it a try, OK - if you want to

At the very least, download the grid package from the site and use the .psd and .png files for your mockups.  They are an essential part of my design toolkit since I learned about them from the wonderful folks at Sidebar Creative.

If you ever need reliable hosting or want to be able to call and talk to a technical support person who can actually help you with your problem, go with Liquid Web Hosting.

Since I offer hosting for clients through Wide Sky Designs I have a Virtual Private Server with Liquid Web that I use to host this site.

Having dealt with a dozen different hosting companies in the last few year, Liquid Web is my favorite.