Maya McDougall

Freelancer

The theme of this very site, which I ported to Pico for it.

This marks the second time I've ported Freelancer to Pico, with the first time being five years earlier. It was long overdue for an update (more like a down right overhaul), so I ported it again from scratch, this time utilizing my extra five years of experience to develop a much better end result.

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Freelancer is a one page portfolio theme that features several content sections, a responsive portfolio grid, modal windows, and a contact form/buttons.

Features:

• A responsive portfolio gallery supporting high-resolution thumbnails and header images.
• Elegant popup modal dialogs with details of each portfolio item.
• Customizable "action" buttons for your About section, Gallery Items, and standalone pages.
• Limited support for separate, standalone pages giving you extra versatility.
• Choose between contact buttons and a contact form (extra setup required). Or have both!
• Social icons for all your networking needs.
• Easily configurable entirely in metadata. Never change a line of code!

CheriPom

CheriPom is a simple and minimalist pomodoro timer for iOS.

What's a pomodoro timer? If you're new to the Pomodoro Technique, it's a common time management strategy comprised of doing short periods of work, and taking small breaks between them.

So what's the timer for? To remind you to take those breaks!

In a world where we push ourselves to constantly be more productive, it's important to remember that sometimes those little breaks can make the difference between being stuck on a task and finding your "eureka" moment.

Stellar

Stellar theme by HTML5 UP! - ported to Pico.

I ported this theme to Pico for use on my CheriPom website.

Since this was my first theming work since learning to program (Python, Swift), I leaned a little heavier into giving it a fuller feature-set than some of my older work.

In this theme, Pico's Pages are used as chunks to build a larger main page. There's several layouts available for each chunk, letting you really make Stellar your own.

All configuration is done through metadata, giving the user an easy, coding free customization experience.

Astral

Astral theme by HTML5 UP! - ported to Pico.

I ported this theme as part of personal project, for use on another website. Nothing really special was added to this version, just the usual improvements.

Metadata variables have been used to configure pages, and each page is rendered as a tab/icon at the top of the site.

As usual, I've also included the ability to add CSS overrides for easy customization.

Pico CMS

I'm a long-standing contributor to the PicoCMS project.

Pico is "A stupidly simple & blazing fast, flat file CMS".

But what does that mean? Good thing I wrote an About Page for them.

I revamped Pico's Themes and Plugins pages to utilize a long-forgotten "portfolio" layout built into the website's theme. I set up this gallery as a Jekyll template that generates the portfolio tiles automatically. This allows the Pico project to easily accept new submissions by simply adding new markdown files to the website repo.

I wrote an in-depth Guide that explains how to set up Pico running on Nginx.

At one point, I was working on rewriting the entirety of Pico's Documentation as a series of guides to replace the existing single-page "Docs", but this project fell through over time due to real life changes I was facing.

I do plan to pick it up again in the not-too-distant future however.

These days, I'm the usually the one answering the tech support questions over on the Issue Tracker. Always happy to help. I guess that also makes me the resident expert on Pico and Twig theming, which is an odd thought.

I'm also still the person in charge of maintaining the website and accepting contributions on GitHub, which you can do via the Site Repo.

You can find me there under my GitHub username, mayamcdougall.

NotePaper

A web theme made exclusively for PicoCMS. I designed NotePaper for my own writing sites, but the theme is Open Source and available on GitHub.

NotePaper has grown to include a number of features, including widgets, a blog-style front-page, page-specific sub-navigation, next/prev arrows, integrated Disqus and Facebook comments, easy CSS customizability, and more.

The NotePaper Demo Site (which features the readme) includes extensive documentation on how to use and configure all the available features.

Also included are two sub-themes, one that is a color palette swap of the default and another that is entirely different. These are mostly included as an example of how you can create your own customized sub-themes using only CSS.

NotePaper represents a decent amount of work, and the time I spent learning the ins and outs of PicoCMS. Whether you're a seasoned web developer or a newbie, check out PicoCMS, and give NotePaper a try.

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NotePaper's looking a bit "long in the tooth" these days. I'd like to rewrite it from scratch at some point, as it needs some TLC. Features I was once proud of look more like spaghetti code now. But that's life right?

Writing

My own personal writing blog. I started this as a place to put works of writing that were not part of my main story, Devil's Advocate. While there isn't much content here at the moment, I hope to return to it in the future and post semi-regular content.

It's been a long while since I've done much creative writing, but I've been feeling the itch to write a story lately, so stay tuned.

Devil's Advocate

My own personal work. Devil's Advocate represents my first serious writing attempt. I was aiming for twenty chapters or so, but only ever finished fourteen of them. Maybe I'll finally finish it someday? Who knows. But I am still rather proud of what's there, even if I never got to write the ending I had planned since the very beginning.

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Devil's Advocate is the story of a young man named Axel, who is quite literally the right-hand man to the Devil. The story takes place in a single, expansive Afterlife. There is no Heaven, only a "Hell", though most people would find it quite comfortable.

Axel spends his day-to-day (after)life as a keeper of the peace. He is tasked with tracking down disruptive individuals and sending them back to the Devil to be judged for their deeds. It's all business as usual until a strange group of criminals learn to cross the borders that divide the Afterlife. What are their motives, and how did they gain this power? You'll have to read to find out!