A couple of things have been niggling me lately and I’ve meant to sort them out for ages but to be honest there really hasn’t been enough hours in the day recently. Somehow, however, I have managed to squeeze in a bit of a refresh of the site. I’ve played around with loads of designs over the last year or so (when I’ve had a few minutes to spare) and really haven’t come up with anything I love so I decided to keep it simple. Hopefully over time I can clean it up a little here and there.
My basic problem is I’m not a good enough designer or developer to make something spectacularly original, it’s a hobby and due to time restraints I just don’t get the chance to improve my skills enough, consequently I design and develop within my limitations using the KISS (keep it simple stupid!) approach!
So what have I come up with?
1. A simpler blog with less separate sections, a better archive to allow people to find posts easier so therefore negating the need for separate sections.
2. I wanted to make it easier to read so I have changed to a predominantly White
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I just thought I would write a quick post to let you know about a great event going on which is organized by a friend of mine. Geek in the Park is an all-day family event for web developers and designers, it is taking place in Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire on Saturday 15th August 2009 at noon. The event is split into two parts a nice relaxing picnic (families are welcome) and then an evening of talks by web industry leaders. Previous years events have seen talks from Drew McLellan, Jon Hicks, Patrick H. Lauke and Bruce Lawson. This year the event is welcoming Simon Collison and Remy Sharp. For more information about the event visit the official Geek in the Park 2009 website.
The website is designed by the design frontier and developed by Trovster. It’s a really nice little site with loads of little features which make it a really interesting site. I’ll leave you to discover all the little ‘active’ features but one example is as you move the mouse over the clouds they move with your mouse – very clever!
If you’re interested in web development and/or designing then I’d highly recommend traveling down to
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Sorry for the temporary strange appearance of my website I am trying to do a bit of redecorating, most of it I can do behind the scenes until I’m ready to release the chances, but some changes I am making mean I have to adjust various properties of the existing posts such as the images attached to the post. I feel the changes will be worth while but I apologies for any inconvenience while I make the changes.
Update
Well I managed to get the refresh to my site done faster than I thought. Hopefully you think the improves are ok, I’ve kept with the same colour scheme but changed the layout, links, etc. I’ve also added a new section called eyes, I don’t really ever talk about what I do for a living on this site but I thought I’d try and write a bit about eyes (as they are a big part of my career), hopefully you’ll find the odd post interesting.
Work to do
I’m aware there are still bits and pieces to add/change in the new site. The new design is both XHTML 1.0 Transitional & CSS 2.1 valid and I have tested it on
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Seemingly twitter is the in craze in the web world at the moment, for those of you who have no idea what it’s about I’ll try and explain. You have 140 letters/characters to say what you’re up to, this is then posted on to your twitter feed which you can either keep private for just your friends to see or allow anyone to see in the ‘public timeline’. Your friends are people you agree to let follow your feed, so in twitter speak these are your ‘followers’. That’s all there is to it really…. oh,you can also add pictures to twitpic as well if you so desire.
There are 2 groups of people when it comes to twitter. The first group are those that say ‘what’s the point?’, ‘what a waste of time’, etc. The second group are those that totally get it. I don’t need to explain anything for the second group as they understand what the fuss is about. Lets just take a look at the first group, what I would say to this group is twitter is not for everyone, if you don’t get it that’s absolutely fine, but all I ask is don’t moan about those
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Apologies for the mess, I’m doing a bit of redecorating, to try and make the site easy to navigate and so I can add a few extra features. Could take a while but I’ll be as quick as I can. If anyone knows of a way of redesigning on wordpress so I can demo the theme I am using while the ‘public’ theme is still my old one I would be grateful if you could let me know.
The site may look normal if I’m not currently working on the site
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So I was just about to write another post (the next one), but thought I best write this one first. I’ve been using wordpress for a bit now, I had a little break from it due to spam problems (that I’m no longer getting) but have now returned. Why do I use it? Well I designed my own blogging tool and it worked OK but the flexibility and sheer amount of options of WordPress, just means it is so much better than what I produced, it’s free, easy to use and well supported. There are other blogging tools out there but for me WordPress is the best. Anyway back to 2.7 – I try and keep my WordPress install up to date (it’s really easy) but I have to be honest the vast majority of updates have not made a massive difference to the usability, it’s just been behind the scenes stuff. I was expecting much the same from the 2.7 update.
How wrong I was, they have massively overhauled the dashboard (administration area) in WordPress 2.7 or “Coltrane” as they are calling it. It’s miles more customizable, faster and just a much slicker interface to use, I’m really liking
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