mkjones

I love the new Reddit design. Its just perfect.

Not too many changes, just enough.

It seems I missed some clear rules on WordPress Domain ownership when starting my new project:

WordPress Domains

If you already have a domain with “WordPress” in it, redirecting it to the “wp” equivilent is fine, just as long as the main one users see and you promote doesn’t contain “WordPress.”

After a messages from Lorelle and Matt a re-think was in order which forced me to update my plans.

‘WordPress 360′ will new simply be known as ‘WP 360′ (www.wp360.org):

Delays have occurred due to site re-designs and my unfortunate recent 3 week stint of illness (nothing too serious).

Into The Flame

My personal expectations for the site have also been vastly expanded after doing a lot more R&D into “the overcrowded niche of WordPress.“.

Frankly, I was terrified by the sheer breath and depth of the content out there and was left wondering “Does WordPress NEED another site/blog/resource clogging its arteries?”.

But after a lot of brainstorming, some alcohol and a little tinkering around my initial ideas I decided to go ahead with my plans.

I don’t as yet think I will ever be able to dedicate as much time as I like to the site. I’m pretty busy at my NHS development and this tends to burn away a lot of my creativity. I mean, I can only enjoy looking at code for 8-10 hours out of the day. After that, my eyes need a re-boot.

Also the fact that the World Snooker Championship tournament started last week has not helped at all (it has made for essential watching from day 1).

But, I can still at least hope for a May launch. So stay tuned!

Just as before if you are interested and would like more information, please get in touch:

email: info [at] wordpress360 . com

With the release of Wordpress 2.5 its seems that the worlds best open source publishing platform has come of age.

I have been a Wordpress user for just over 2 years now and, like millions of other users, have been using it to run a number of sites (including this one) since then.

Working with Wordpress is really a dream. Its open, but not too open, its easy to install, update and easy to use. Also, anyone with a basic knowledge of HTML/CSS and a little effort and determination can quite easily create their own Themes.

For these reason, and others, I have decided to dedicate my spare time on a new project, Wordpress 360:

Sure, there are already 100s of other Wordpress-based-websites around the web, but I believe there is room for one more.

In order to somehow stand apart WP360 will cover absolutely, everything to do with Wordpress. Not just the standard themes and plugins stuff. Instead a concise lexicon of information for anyone out there who loves Wordpress or wants to get more into developing with the platform.

The design is pretty well zipped up so at the moment I am working on content for the site. This includes a fresh new batch of tutorials based around 2.5s new features and hopefully a WHOLE lot of Video tutorials (screen casts) which will help the n00bs and the l33ts get more out of Wordpress.

If you are interested and would like more information, please get in touch:

email: info [at] wordpress360 . com

Also, if you think you would like to contribute to the site then drop me a line asap!

Its been 2008 for a few days now so I thought I would spend a while re-styleing my site.

I started by deleting the 100s of useless categories I had littering the site. After a mass culling I ended up with:

# Design
# Games
# Interest
# Music
# Science
# Software
# Sport
# Technology
# TV

Which should cover pretty much ALL of my blog posts over the next year. Needless to say the culling made one hell of a mess of my old content but it had to be done.

Eventually I hope to further refine these categories and doing so find a better voice for this blog. This will of course limit in some way what I eventually decide to write about.

Simpler

The new layout and design of the site is small, simple and easy to use. It only took me around an hour to code the XHTML and CSS and re-work the header image.

There are no fancy gradients, a sheer lack of colour, no tricks and no fancy unwanted code. Overall the new design files fall in at 25k compared to the 100k I had for the old site.

Happy New Year!

Thank you Laura Milligan (whoever you are) for this amazing list:

1. FreeFoto: FreeFoto.com claims to be “the largest collection of free photographs on the Internet.” They’re available for offline projects as well, as long as you’re not using them to make a profit.
2. KAVEWALL: Look for images and textures in unique categories like tattoo, smoke, and food.
3. Digital Dreamer: Free, royalty-free stock images can be found here.
4. Free Photos Bank: This features a handful of the newest photos in their directory, so check back often.
5. Free Digital Photos: Find gorgeous, easy-to-download photographs in categories like animals, celebrations, home & garden, and lots more.
6. PD Photo: Browse through the categories and subcategories in this site’s database, most of which depict the urban and rural landscapes of the United States.
7. Visipix: Search over a million photographs and fine art pieces.
8. Cepolina: On cepolina, you can choose to save photos in up to five different formats.
9. DexHaus: A wide array of beautiful images are found on this well-organized site.
10. FreeStockImages.net: Chances are you’ll find whatever it is you’re looking for on this terrific site.
11. TurboPhoto: TurboPhoto has 10 categories keep the high res photos easy to find.
12. Yotophoto: An immensely popular site, Yotophoto is worth checking out.
13. Stockvault: Search by photo subject or by the newest and most popular photos on Stockvault.
14. Dreamstime: While most of the photos on this site cost a fee (some as low as $0.26/image), Dreamstime provides a few free stock photos.
15. Open Stock Photography: This site offers over one million images for you to download and use however you want.

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Rejoice! There is a new PayPal logo:

I ask you. What was wrong with the old one?:

Now, I love re-designers and re-branding exercises. But this seems like a pointless waste of what was probably a lot of money.

I miss the old Burger King Logo:

In 1994, Burger King modernized its first logo by using a smoother font with rounded edges. By 1999, the company again updated the logo that is a stylized version of the “bun halves” logo. The new logo featuring a blue swirl gives the Burger King logo a circular appearance making it look more contemporary. Read more..

I gift?! For me?

New elements in HTML 5
Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) 5 introduces new elements to HTML for the first time since the last millennium.

New structural elements include aside, figure, and section. New inline elements include time, meter, and progress. New embedding elements include video and audio. New interactive elements include details, datagrid, and command.

I think I may hyperventilate any minute now.

Last last night I was working on a new logo for a project I have tasked myself. After a few weeks working on and fine tweaking the design I was almost done. All the remained, as ever, was the transition from Photoshop to a usable image format such as PNG, GIF, JPEG.

Problems soon arose. Without going into great detail about the inspiration or even the usage of the logo here it is in all its glory:

The above image is the hi-colour PNG 24bit version. Basically the bees knees of image formats when it comes to web publishing. PNG 24 essentially gives you a carbon copy of the original image. You retain all the colour and even get advanced transparency effects. But this comes at a price.

The above image is around 52k. A beastly size by anyone’s measure. Even in the days of quick broadband and dual-core PCs this is an unacceptable size for a web-based logo. I generally stick to the rule of no larger than 20k for images such as this. 10k is the sweet spot, any lower and it becomes a no-brainier.

So what to do?

First of all I experimented with other formats. (Keep reading)

A few months ago I approached the newly founded ‘Give Us Back Our Game!‘ organisation to offer my services and design them a much needed Logo.

I found out about the campaign after tuning in to a Radio 5 Live! interview with their founder Paul Cooper.

After a few attempts I came up with this:

Which thankfully Paul and his team loved. It was recently used on their newly launched website:

• giveusbackourgame.co.uk

The strategy behind ‘Give us Back our Game’ is quite simple. They hope to re-ignite passion for football in today’s youth.

From the website:

We are concerned that the beautiful game is in decline. Football for children is now very different from earlier generations when the only adult involvement was a call from your mum that your tea was ready. Football is no longer beautiful for our kids anymore: it’s ugly.

I was instantly hit by this campaign as I was never a fan of the beautiful game as a child mostly due to the ugly and sometimes quite scary environment in which it is played.
(Keep reading)