I’ve just put the final touches to the new version of my long standing music website Baconmusic.

The site has undergone an total overhaul with the front and back-end both changing significantly.

After 2 years I finally managed to find a pretty seamless way of dumping Drupal in favour of a WordPress solution (of course). I hope to write more on this later as it was without a doubt the most challenging part of the project.

Using someone else’s theme

In order to achieve a fast turn around the site was themed using the quite wonderful Guzel Magazine Theme created by Ahmed Fouad over at www.customthemedesign.com.

I did a LOT of work transforming the original theme into a custom design. You can see the original theme has a very basic design and colour scheme:

I’ve kept the overall layout and structure of the original theme but the images and textures are totally different.

What I like most about this theme is the automatic thumbnail feature and the dynamic homepage. These features should make it simple for my users to add stories to the site without having to worry about how they will be listed on the site homepage. Something that was a huge worry with the old site.

This was my first experience in using a “pro” WP theme in a project and it was quite a pleasure to work with a solid, working base and only think about images and CSS.

Of course some mild hacks were required in order to get the theme doing exactly what I want (adding Google search for example) but overall its pretty much out-of-the box with my ‘sub-theme’ layered over the top.

Given time I hope to write about the Drupal/WP switch AND my experience customizing the Guzel theme. Keep a look out!

(FYI: The site is totally non-IE6 compatible. I’m working on a script which will warn users. Its about time web developers took a stand. NO-ONE should be using a 5 year old web browser.)

Its happened.

The words I thought I would never hear. The thing I said would never happen. Vista, oh Vista, they have betrayed you.

Ballmer-d

In a single comment Steve Ballmer has tarred Windows Vista with the same brush that killed off poor old Windows ME:

“It’s not minor because it’s a lot more work than a minor release. It’s a major release. Windows 7 will be Vista, but a lot better.”

Full Article

Its now official Windows 7 will be everything that Vista should have. Shame on Microsoft for doing this.

This is amazing.

I never EVER thought I would see the day CSS table values were introduced and working.

I can’t express just how amazing this is.

I mean, just look at the picture:

Click here to read the full article and see more examples

The cynic inside me knows that it will be another 5 years before anyone dare use them in a major site design.

You have to be kidding me

According to Mike Nash on the Vista blog, the company went with Windows 7 because it “just makes sense” as the seventh release of Windows, and MS doesn’t want to come up with a new “aspirational” name like Vista

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