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.

Martin Sargent has been doing video podcasts for a couple of years now. I first watched him in the 3 pilot episodes of Web Drifter (now a full series), I absolutely loved them. Take away production value and turn it into a.. I guess talk show, and you have Infected. Infected was a bit more of an aquired taste, it started off as an audio podcast with still images jumping across the screen and they eventually went to live action, he had a co-host called gator, a redneck moocher from Gainsville Tennessee and you have an incredibly weird show. The first episode I watched I was kinda cringing throughout the whole thing, for some reason, I kept watching them and I eventually became a fan. Segments such as Gator’s Galz, Stripper Pole Folleys and the odd episode where he actually had a decent guest on, it was actually a pretty good show. Eventually, it got cancelled, or so Martin says, hey it makes a good story. After a few months Internet Superstar was released, which… is essentially the same show, Martin Sargent as host, Gator is the co-host, but with more production value (Although Martin insists it’s his mother’s shed) and I’m guessing more guests. In the first episode his guest’s were some guy that likes to draw a fat version of Wonder Woman, and Tom Green, it will be interesting to see what other guests he can wrangle up over the weeks.

Anyway, go watch it.

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.

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.

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.