Just a quick note to commemorate a design refresh of this site. Have been looking for ways to create seperate attention for main text and the sidebar. Can’t say I haven’t been inspired by Jon Hicks (and others) who has also just implemented a differing-colour-main-part-with-border on his site. Kept the main nav in the middle, to add ugliness give the design a quirky edge. If I have time to put the searchbar up top the nav may be able to move over to the left.

You’ll notice the logo is a lot smaller. What can I say? My cream ran out, plain and simple. I’m much happier with it, now it’s smaller. I’ve still to update the logos for the inspiration square.

The sidebar still suffers from mixed header styles headers have been updated too. Haven’t managed to add any other colours to the red & gold colour scheme yet though!

Make sure you visit my (on site!) Tumblr page. An upcoming post will describe how I managed to create internal links to the content there – the “latest interesting stuff” links in the sidebar are generated on the fly.

Of course, if you find any quirks, let me know.

Now here’s a treat: two Jason Brooks wallpapers from his time at Fierce Angels. He’s left now, and Fierce Angels have taken on Jason Jaroslav Cook to create their covers.

The first wallpaper is taken from the beautiful Jason Brooks illustration on the website of Fierce Angels, from their september 2006 re-style. A beautiful dark angel, with a big sword, high heeled boots and a thunderous sky above her. What more could you want?

Next up is a disco girl, taken from the cover of a Fierce Angels CD, Fierce Disco, in stores from 16th of April 2007. Somewhat less dramatic, but still nice to have if you’re a fan of the style.

Download: Fierce Angel 2006 & Fierce Disco. Enjoy!

Good news! Google Chrome is getting full page zoom, and it’s the default! That only leaves Safari to implement it, as IE, Firefox & Opera have had it for a while now. [1]

Full page zoom is important because it means no more mucking about with elastic layouts (em-based) or liquid layouts (%-based). That just leaves fixed layouts (based on pixels), which is good because images, videos and other media are in pixels too!

[1] Update: Safari 4 (beta) has implemented full page zoom too! All major and minor browsers have implemented full page zoom. Until widespread updating of Safari 3 with 4 and (more importantly) IE 6 with 7 or 8, approx. a quarter of visitors will only have text-based zoom available to them. IE 6 users are likely not to know anything about zoom-capabilities however.

Second in a series of articles about tinkering with improving your wordpress installation, we return to custom 404 error pages; adding a list of possibly related posts when visitors have followed an outdated link. Other 404 error page improvements can be found in the first article of this series.

One of the most useful things on a 404 page is a direct link to the page visitors were trying to get to. Now we can’t read minds, but we do know the URI (explained in the third paragraph of the previous article) and that’s good enough. The following code is adapted from this archGFX article. The method used to transform the URI into a search query is very simple. If you would like a more advanced please refer to “A better 404 – Redux” at Urban Mainframe, where Jonathan Hollin expounds on his (downloadable!) 404 page code.

There are two parts to this “related posts” code. The first part makes it possible to get from “/wrong/link.html” (the URI) to “wrong link” (the search query). Read the rest…

First in a series of articles about tinkering with improving your wordpress installation, today we tackle custom 404 error pages; the page everyone dreads getting when they’ve followed an outdated link.

Four-Oh-Fours are hot again! Just recently came a across the article A Better 404. I remember reading the A List Apart article “A Perfect 404″ ages ago, but had never done anything about it. Time to improve. 

First some quick vocab: the part after your .com (or .co.uk) is called the URI, so if www.google.com/analytics/provision/ is the address,  /analytics/provision/ would be the URI. The URI is the part that’s wrong when someone’s followed a outdated link which means we can use the URI to create a more helpful 404 page. To create a 404 page for your Wordpress theme just create a 404.php file in the directory of your theme (/wp-content/themes/default/ is the default). Read the rest…

And now for something completely different. A set of music samplers, tastety bits of songs, compactly mixed together. The first two are filled with tunes you can dance to, while the third one is much more restful. Enjoy!
Read the rest…