As this is my personal website, I tend to try things out here first. Like this design… I am unsure about the colours, but I like this layout and it only took me a weekend to put together. I’m calling the theme Bubblegum temporarily, and its written specifically for wordpress. That said, lots of it doesn’t work yet, so I’ll be working away in the background trying to fix everything. If you read this, let me know in the comments if you come accross anything that doesnt work! Thanks!

In other related news, I recently started a new project – 26Squared. I’m going to use this as the umbrella for all of my other projects – They will all become part of the 26Squared network – along with some new things in the coming months. More details on this I’ll try to announce later.

As with all things in life – A major change requires a bit of reorganisation, so many of the current posts on this site are not optimised for the current theme. I will be working on this in the coming weeks… but expect a few hiccups! Oh and I dont have the logo/site image ready yet – hopefully in the coming days! Without it, the design looks like its leaning to the right a bit. This will be resolved soon!

So there it is – another new beginning on this site, but beginnings are the best part so hopefully many more to follow!

Update – The site logo(A poor as it is),  is now up!

Just as an aside here – I really wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with this process without the help of my mortgage advisor with Bank Of Ireland on Camden street. They were really helpful and I can’t recommend them enough.

So besides all that, what else have I been doing? I just started a couple of projects that I can’t really dedicate enough time to at the minute but I will as soon as the house is finished. There will be more info on these shortly… They’re interesting to me and I hope they will be to a couple of other people.

Also, It would appear that either the bots or something have at least a sense of humour. I wrote this article on website comments recently – Comments, Comments, everywhere… and it is being hammered by SPAM comments. About 100 comments in 2 days. It’s interesting and gave me a chuckle. Though once you think about it, its probably been sent my way from an outbound link on the Boston Globe Website. I’d like to believe it was a funny spammer but alas it probably isn’t!

So then I decided to look at my comments again and came across a web service called IntenseDebate which is a way of beefing up your comments. At first I liked it very much but now, after looking at it for a bit longer it seems to be a tiny bit over the top for my this place. I’ll be looking into it again. It also has built in Akismet support so I suppose I’m doubly protected… or its cancelling each other other out… or its now become so difficult to get a comment into my blog that no-ones going to do it anymore.

Then came a project that I’ve wanted to complete for a while – my Gallery. I always wanted to have a gallery on my site but didn’t want to host it here and elsewhere too(duplication of effort more than resources…). Then I came across the flickr API and more specifically – the tantan flickr plugin for WordPress. The plugin is good because it creates the gallery with a little flickr magic and was up and running pretty fast. I had to make a pretty huge amount of modification to getting working the way I wanted but I felt that it was worth it. I’ll also be writing some of my own queries so that I can do some of the smaller stuff that the plugin doesn’t do. I’m looking forward to that! I’m also trying to get jquery lightbox to work but can’t at the minute. I think it might have something to do with the image class stuff that’s built into the plugin, but I’ll have a bit of fun trying to figure it out. I have it kind of working but have it turned off at the minute until I have it the way I want it, hopefully that wont take me too long. And then – I will be basking in Gallery goodness and will eventually throw loads of my photo’s up there.

I’m also buying a house with my beautiful girlfriend so that makes for some really interesting times as neither of us really, has time to do any of the huge amount of paperwork that is required… mortgages, life assurance, home insurance, surveys, quotes for other work… It really mounts up. So as its late I’ll keep this one short and sweet…

While out and about recently, I came across two examples of sign writing genius that I just had to share with the world…

What does this sign say to you? I know what it says to me… that I would save absolutely no money in their End of Year sale… That I saw walking past the particular motor showroom on Parkgate Street in Dublin.

And now look at the bottom right of the next photo… what does that even mean??

Your! Food on the Move – I’m sorry, what? What is that even supposed to mean? How did it get past the spell checker on MS word for that matter! So there you go… A nice quick post before I resume normal service some time next week!

I’m also working on the gallery section of the site. I’m looking to use the flickr API to help me with that. But that wont be working for at least another week. After that is complete, on the bottom right of the front page I’m going to display a random picture or maybe a square of maybe 4 thumbnails. When I get to that stage I’ll have to look into what works best.

Im also looking t the menu on the right hand side. I’d like to maybe separate it from the main content. Again I don’t want it to be a distraction but I’d like people to know that it was there But maybe they already do? hmmm… I think I might introduce a mootool effect in here too to Liven the menu up but then it might just be adding it for the sake of adding it. We’ll see how it goes.

So overall I think the the white may be changing with a light grey taking up most of it but I’m not really decided yet – I’ll put the two of them together and let the irish webmaster community give me their feelings on the two options.

Anyway – Apologies for the state of the site at the minute and we’ll then get back to our 6 month change intervals…

This site has seen a couple of redesigns in the last 6 months. And that was before a single post has been written, before a single tutorial was published. Maybe I have a short appreciation span. Everytime I think I’ve got a nice thing going with my sites I seem to just lose interst in the design and wipe it. Or I buy a new domain and decide to move on to that. I’ve done that more times than I’d like to admit.

This time, however, I’m changing my tactics for the future of this and my other sites. For all the other sites that I’ve done I’ve hobbled together a quick blogging platform from scratch. But I don’t really have time now so I’ve moved to WordPress. And so far I’m impressed. Slick interface, Good theme system so that the upgrades don’t break my site, and nice and fast too.  Twice I’ve upgraded now and my theme has only had to have minor adjustments. But how long before I want to move to another platform? Lets hope that wordpress stays innovating and that I can control my tinkering so that the site gets a chance to mature… Not likely! 

Even now I’m considering another project for this domain. One that may or may not keep me interested for a while. I think it will fit the name of this site. And I’ll probably move this to another domain that will serve as my personal site. But I’ve said that before and it didn’t come off. I now have more ideas and projects than I have time to complete. I might enlist some help for them and see if I can’t start a small empire of sites… Somehow I see myself getting bored of that too and moving on. But we’ll see.