The Joy of Customization: Tubular

This project was one near and dear to my heart, mostly because of the TV series that the website represents.

Charlie Jade was a wonderful, gritty, atmospheric detective noir series with a little scifi mixed in for flavor. It was a Canadian-South African co-production that aired in Canada, South Africa and the UK in 2005-2006, but wasn’t sold to the US market in time to garner funding for a second season. The series is available on Region 2 DVD, and when word came out that SciFi Channel would begin airing the series in reruns in June 2008, there was the chance that good ratings might lead to a domestic DVD release.

But any hopes for that Region 1 DVD release, and for an official soundtrack release, were dashed by the SciFi Channel’s sudden decision to change the broadcast time of the reruns they acquired from Friday nights at 9pm to Tuesday mornings at 3am… after only airing the first two episodes.

Before that happened though, series creator Robert Wertheimer had agreed to do a podcast of creator commentary for the show for FarPoint Media, and we had completed half of the commentaries before SciFi Channel made the broadcast change. After the switch, we still managed to get commentaries done for all but one episode (a pivotal one, unfortunately), and there’s going to be a complete, finite podcast series once the discussions and final interview are finished in July.

The site started out in May 2008 with the Dust theme, because it had the rotating banner I wanted to use, but it wasn’t until April 2009 when I chose to take the Studio Press Tubular theme and do some heavy modifications to get the look I wanted, including adding in that rotating banner code.

The base Tubular theme turned out to be a good fit, and easy to modify away from it’s intended feature video design to the sectioned layout I wanted on the front page, and the only changes I needed to make to existing posts was to use larger versions of the images and add custom fields for the front page thumbnails.

I got the colorful yet industrial feel I wanted in the theme, with most of the information that’s good for newcomers to Charlie Jade being easy enough to find to help get them started.

Site: Charlie Jade Verse
Theme: Tubular