SPIRALOZDOTCOM » dev

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.

Pure CSS Flyout Menus & IE6

Sebconn — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 10:30:51 +0000

I’ve been spending quite a few hours lately trying to refine a pure CSS flyout menu for a clients website recently. I wanted to use CSS because I didn’t want to mess with the html that the dynamic menu I was using (NAVT) output. So I went with a nice one from CSS play. Nice and basic, pure CSS, even for IE6, although, it required a table to be placed around nested un-numbered lists, which meant screwing around with NAVT PHP, which I wasn’t real keen on. Today I stumbled upon the holy grail. It’s a tidy little htc file with some javascript, that, in short, allows any tag have a hover option within IE6, allowing your nice CSS flyout menus to work in IE6, fantastic stuff. It’s called Whatever:hover and I highly recommend this little gem, it takes the stress out of IE6 optimisation in an XHTML world… wow that was lame.

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.