SPIRALOZDOTCOM » Site News

A Month of Stuff.

Sebconn — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 05:33:29 +0000

If there’s any way to give yourself renewed interest in your own website, it’s a redesign. I think I’m just about due. Once I settle with a design and slice it up and write it, it will be the fourth time I’ve given the site an overhaul. This time round the site will focus on converging all of my social networking accounts on to one page, the blog will still be there, but things like flickr, twitter, last.fm, blip.fm will stand out more. So far I’ve done one concept layout, which I’m pretty happy with, I will try out a few different colour schemes and styles before I commit to writing up the HTML .

In other news, I’m still loving my Macbook Pro, just runs smooth as hell, and the new 4 finger exposé gesture is just magic, it genuinely makes me work faster between multiple apps. When I’m not working on my pretty Macbook Pro, I’m wasting time playing all these new pretty games that have been released this month so far I’ve bought the following:

- Fallout 3: This is probably the first RPG I’ve ever really enjoyed, I love the post apocalyptic steam punk 50s theme and there’s just so much to do, I’ve run through the main story so far but there’s so much more to do, I’d say once I’ve finished messing with all these other games, this is the one I will go back to.

- Left 4 Dead: This one is just pure fun 4 player Co-op and versus mode, all you do is simply shoot zombies, and it’s great fun nuff said.

- Guitar Hero World Tour: So far I’ve just bought the standalone game using the GHIII guitars, but after trying out the drums and mic that a mate brought over, I think I’ll have to get the full kit. It’s just too much fun, and after 10 beers it would be even more fun. Hoping to give that a try this weekend in between poker games.

- Mortal Kombat VS DC Universe: One thing I always enjoyed on consoles is the 2 player fighter, so I thought I better get one. This game is great fun with a mate and you can lose 2 hours very easily with it, and the characters are great all the good oldschool MK characters, and some bitchen DC guys as well, Batman VS Sub-Zero? Hell Yeah.

So far that’s it, I still plan to get Gears of War 2, I was pondering Need For Speed Undercover but apparently it’s rather crap, and I’ll probably get COD5 at some point.

Have fun kids.

I’ve got all things that are nice…

Sebconn — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:33:56 +0000

I really need to make sure this blog doesn’t turn into one of those 1 post a year wonders that always starts with “I haven’t blogged in a while”. They give me the irrits.

So anyway, I haven’t blogged in a while, I think Twitter may be taking up a lot of the time that I would/should spend on this site. This post is going to be a bit of a catch up rant.

I’m seriously backed up with web dev stuff to do, and I really want to get them all done and get a decent portfolio up and running, it’s looking rather stale at the moment, I tend to be a bit of a rollercoaster when it comes to web dev, sometimes I can find my creative side and quickly whip up a nice wordpress concept design, then I have a brain fart and struggle with making that concept into a theme, or vise versa, I think it depends on the music I’m listening to at the time, it has a big effect on the way my brain works. I might need to look at tagging songs for creative and for coding, I’m convinced it has an effect.

I recently bought a new toy to take my attention away from my iPhone, a nice Samsung 46″ LCD TV, it’s big and beautiful, and looks perty as hell, the purchase of this TV has given my xbox new life, through the HDMI cable I can finally play the games how they’re supposed to look, and since buying the TV I’ve bought 3 games for the thing; Guitar Hero III, which I already have on the Wii, but I wanted downloadable content and HD niceness. Project Gotham Racing 4, having heaps of fun with this one, haven’t got into a console racer in years, probably since the first Gran Turismo. The third game I’ve bought is Mass Effect, which is ok, only just bought it, not overly impressed.

I’m currently looking at Blu-Ray player prices, they are going for around $400 in the places I’ve looked, definitely a future purchase.

On to other Gadget goodness and me and my housemate have decked out the house with 2 airport expresses for streaming music, we’ve had one for a while but the things really shine with two, perfect synced streaming music throughout the whole house, one in the lounge, and one in the outside stereo with our recently partified deck, which proved to be awesome on Grand Final Day.

And Finally, just a bit of iPhone stuff, even though I’ve saturated this blog with it, I’ve finally hacked my iPhone, it was a breeze and the stuff I can do now is fantastic, live last.fm scrobbing, direct to device podcasting, themes, soundsets and video recording, particularly Qik.com streaming, which streams live video to my Qik profile, I’ve always been impressed with this service and now that I use it, I’m super impressed, check out my profile for some of the vids I’ve made.

I think I’ve rambled on enough, what a stupidly long post, oh well, kudos to you if you actually read it all!

Just a couple of changes.

Sebconn — Sun, 04 May 2008 11:40:51 +0000

Made a couple of additions to my site today. As you can see all of the titles to my sidebar items have corrosponding icons for them, gives it a splash of colour I guess. I’ve also brought the Moblog back after being on hiatus for a very long time. My old moblog was a completely independant PHP script that I wrote, but not having control of my web host’s PHP settings and wanting to enable certain features, I had to abandon it. This time round I’ve gone with a much more simple approach. This time I’m using Flickr to host my photos, I can send a picture message to my assigned flickr email address and it adds it to my photostream, I’m using a Wordpress plugin called Pflickr, which was designed to display a random image for a desired amount of time, I modified it slightly to not grab a random picture but to grab the latest picture added. It works very well and I’m pretty happy with how it works. Kudos to Christos for developing such a nice simple widget for me to mess with.

Twitter… Huh?

Sebconn — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:38:10 +0000

I’ve been reading all this hype about twitter, didn’t really have any idea what it was. As far as I can tell after signing up it’s pretty much just like the facebook status updates, but open to the public, which is kinda cool. The main thing that I like about it is updating your status with a simple text message, and it doesn’t charge you any extra for it, standard text message rates. It integrates really well into Wordpress, I’ve got my twitter status updates (or tweets, as they’re called) on my sidebar now. I can also setup twitter to work as a direct blog post, which, I’m not real keen on. I don’t really understand the hype at this point, being that it’s such a basic service. Links below.

Twitter, Twitter Tools WP Plugin

I Forgot How Much IE Sucked.

Sebconn — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 16:47:26 +0000

Having not done any web development in a while I think I’d forgotten why I hate IE so damn much. Stupid rendering issues of a WC3 compliant page, just so damn annoying. All I can say is, praise jebus for the workaround

Wordpress theme creation.

Sebconn — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:07:50 +0000

Wordpress is now my CMS of choice for any freelance work I do. Once you get the hang of developing themes for Wordpress, it’s incredibly easy, and you can pretty much lay it out however you want, my first theme was simply the one you’re looking at now, basic, but functional. I finished developing a theme for a school website I’m doing at the moment and I got it together as smooth as if I was building a static page. Usually when I’m designing a layout for a web page, I just mock the thing up in Fireworks first, get it looking how I want, that probably takes the longest, I have trouble getting a layout I feel good about. Once I’m happy I slice up the images I need and then go write the code (don’t worry I don’t export the Fireworks HTML, yuck!). I think the main thing I like about Wordpress is the pure simpleness of the administration section, it’s basic as you like, and should be easy to show not so savvy people how to use it. A lot of people I’ve shown the Joomla admin section to have looked at it a bit wide eyed, but Wordpress is a lot more straight forward. Until recently I thought it was just a blog application, but if you wanted to, you could ignore that altogether and just setup a site with editable static pages. I’m almost done with the current freelance Wordpress site I’m doing at the moment and I’ll plug it when I’m done.

If you want to learn how to develop your own Wordpress theme, I recommend the Cyberhackz tutorial, it’s straight forward and to the point, and honestly, once you’ve done one, you’re ready to go. One suggestion I’d have is to follow the tutorial with an XHTML layout already developed, and cut and past the segments you need from that into the segmented theme files, works quite well. After that, keep yourself a blank basic theme for reference.

Pretty Much Finished. Quicker Than I thought.

Sebconn — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 14:13:24 +0000

SO I guess I’ve pretty much finished the layout. Just need to re-add my static content again. The sidebar widgets are bloody fantastic, you just drag your sidebar items where you want them. I also found a nice little menu plugin which allowed me to make the navigation menu at the top of the sidebar. Pretty happy with how smoothly it all happened, got 98% of the side done within a day… Ok so it’s 1am, but close enought.

Say Hello To Spiraloz V4.0 Fully Wordpressed.

Sebconn — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:02:15 +0000

So I’ve decided to vamp up my site a bit. I’ve always used wordpress but previously I have been using my own layout and grabbing data my own way without using themes or any plugins. This time I’ve fully integrated Wordpress on my site allowing me to customise my sidebars easier, add plugins and generally make things a bit easier. I’ve spent most of my time trying to work out how to develop a template from scratch. I Followed a tutorial from Cyberhackz I think it’s mildly outdated but it explains very well how wordpress themes are segmented. I’ve pretty much finished it, I just need to mess more with the CSS to get it right. Then I’m going to try and integrate my custom scripts as Wordpress plugins. As you can see I’ve stuck with the same basic layout, but with a slightly cleaner look. Should be a lot less cluttered when I’m finished with it.

Better Choonstats

Sebconn — Fri, 14 Jul 2006 13:29:50 +0000

I updated choonstats and am using a different Winamp plugin, it now posts song data from iTunes DRMed music (yes there is a plugin to play iTunes DRMed music for Winamp).

Listening to a lot of the new Muse album at the moment, bitchen album. Still a lot of good hard stuff along with the melodic chillin tunes, very keen.

Moblog Fixed

Sebconn — Sun, 09 Jul 2006 05:32:07 +0000

Hmm well it seems the attribute I was using to determine what was an attachment and what wasn’t with my moblog script doesn’t exist in these new fandangle phones, so I had to do some messing around. Currently it’s a bandaid, waiting to fall off and cause serious issues, but you know what…. meh.

As you can see the camera on my new phone is a pretty darn good improvement, it feels like a camera when I’m using it, I can feel it focusing when I prepare for a shot, and as you can see the macro capabilities are pretty bitchen. It will be good to see how the light goes on a night on the piss. Don’t get too use to those high res shots though, they are expensive to send.