Updating WordPress

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Since I’ve never really done much here since I built the original site, the WordPress version I was using was pretty old already. Today I finally got ’round to taking care of that, and it seems I was successful: the “news” page is now running the latest WordPress version, 2.8.2, and thanks to the new update routine, upgrading should be much easier in the future.

On the administrative side, there’s the new WordPress content management system/dashboard which makes quite a few tasks more convenient to handle for me. On the visitor’s side, there’s not much new at the first glance. However, you might notice the overhauled sidebar, which is now widget-enabled for more compatibility if I decide to add new sidebar items in the future.

2nd Anniversary

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There we go again. It’s been another year of zero contributions by me to my own website. *sigh*

Now, I never wrote this here, but I’ve been playing the infamous MMORPG World of Warcraft almost since the game was released in Europe. There, it’s done, I said it. Admittedly, the excitement wore off after a while, and now I rarely log on to the game anymore if there isn’t a big new content patch or something similar going on. I do, however, still enjoy designing and re-designing my user interface for the game. Blizzard has been very open to the question of UI customisation, and nowadays there is a wide range of AddOns developed by enthusiastic players all over the world. While I lack the skill to write AddOns myself (which requires in-depth knowledge of LUA coding), I use many of them to build my own UI, and sometimes I even modify the .lua files to change some small things in them.

So, while I don’t have anything really exciting to post here, I’ll show off a screenshot of my current WoW UI… here it is:

This is what my UI looks like while fighting.

This is what my UI looks like while fighting.

See you next year! :P

Anniversary!

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Oh rly? Looks like it. This anniversary marks me being inactive on my very own site for roughly one year now. Incredible.

On a more productive note, I have added a del.icio.us tagcloud to the sidebar on the right. Clicking one of the tags will take you to a list of my del.icio.us links filed under that tag. I’m aware of the fact that social bookmarking is totally 2007, but I wanted one of those fancy tagclouds for a long time, just never got ’round to actually implementing it. Don’t blame me too much though, I have a lot to catch up on.

As usual with these webdesign related things, I ended up tweaking my stylesheets for more than two hours straight, just to get some margins right. Doh!

Update

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I have revamped the page design (again), removing the bright red and toxic green (don’t ask if you haven’t seen it, be happy), fixed some smaller bugs and updated a little content in the “Projects”, “About” and “Contact” sections. If you like (or dislike) the site design, feel free to comment on it.

Omuraisu! version 0.1 is up and running

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After one week of working on several drafts, I decided it was time for a release of version 0.1. I wont give this release a full version number (e.g. 1.0) yet because there is still lots of fine tuning needed.

I started off with a simple HTML layout based on CSS. Like many others (I presume) I had only worked with tables for designing layouts, so CSS was a real revelation. I’ll never go back to using tables, really. After the first few days decided I wanted a more dynamic content management system, which pure HTML can’t offer (at least not when I code it). I chose WordPress for that. I lost about a day trying to work out its structure, mainly by reverse engineering the default theme and heavily modifying it to suit my needs. I never worked with PHP before and knew nothing about it so this proved to be quite a challenge – but I’m happy with the results so far.

The graphics have gone through three major overhauls during this one week, the current version is what I finally came up with today. I might change it again though, depending on wether or not I can still bear to watch it tomorrow.

For the next update I’m gonna try to get the structure of the subcategories sorted, along with uploading some content. I’m still not perfectly happy with using HTML for those pages – it’s not very convenient to update and I’m not sure if I want to go through that every time something changes in those categories. Other fixes will involve a consistent hyperlink design, some changes in font size here and there and maybe a restructuring of the sidebar.

Thanks go out to Mr. Fukai for advising me of the possibilities inherent in CSS, to the Lavazza coffee company for helping to keep me awake, and to my sweet girlfriend for reminding me of the fact that humans need to sleep in order to keep up the creative flow. ;)

So long!