Since I bought the Xbox I’ve been sitting on a couch a whole lot, playing GTAIV, Uno and others, as well as watching movies streaming from a my PC to my TV, works great, all wirelessly (sucked it up and bought the AU$169 adapter). Before the Xbox I use to watch most of my TV shows and movies on my PC, along with gaming on the PC, was perfectly comfortable, in fact I seem to feel more confortable there than on the couch, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. I’ve still usually got my laptop sitting next to me on the couch, so I’m not missing anything in terms of the casual browsing of the Internets, so what is it? I can only assume it’s due to the fact that I’ve spent soΒ  much time in front of the PC that I feel more at home with it. I’m also beginning to think that I get much more immersed in PC games than console games. headphones on, nice and close to the screen, it all seems more intense. Don’t get me wrong I’m loving GTAIV in front of the TV, but I’m wondering if I’d be enjoying it more if I was playing it at my computer desk. Maybe I should invest in a HDMI to DVI adapter and plug my Xbox into my PC monitor.

On another note, I’ve got a nice new widget in my sidebar that displays my Gamertag details, it’s simply called the Xbox 360 Gamercard Wordpress plugin. It doesn’t come as a widget, so I’m using another plugin to use it as a widget, that’s called the Custom Function Widget, nice!

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.Β  Links below.

Twitter, Twitter Tools WP PluginΒ 

Predominanty IE6, but IE7 is the still bratty, yet more mature older brother. Pure CSS flyout menus are a beautiful thing, they work, and you can adapt them to anything without having to edit any html. Unless of course you want it to work with IE6. I’m currently building a site for a client that needs to be entirely CMS based, pages, navigation bars, everything. So as I mentioned in an earlier post I’m using Wordpress, along with a very handy sidebar navigation menu called NAVT. A dynamic navigation list plugin that allows you to make a list of links ranging from Wordpress pages, meta links, blog categories and external links, which is great for a Wordpress site that is more a home page than a standard blog. Anyway it uses unordered lists to layout the links and you can nest links underneath other links and whatnot. This made it very easy to make a fully customisable flyout menu that they could add and remove links and pages to without any real hassle. It’s basically all done, except for the IE6 compatibility. I know need to mess around with the NAVT code and place conditional statements in certain spots so that it will work, such fun.Β  Other than the IE6 debacle, I’m pretty happy with how the site has turned out, and hopefully within the next week or so it will be in the portfolios page.

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.