Hey folks,

I’m trying to get back into the swing of posting on YouMakeMedia so I’m trying a new service called “Writetomyblog” that’ll let me more easily post when I don’t have access to my blog itself. (It’s banned at my school, I’m trying to figure out why)

I don’t like their implementation of TinyMCE, imho they should rip WordPress’s straight-up, but heck– it does what it’s designed to do.

I’m posting this here cuz (obviously) I won’t know if it’s posted to YMM since that’s blocked, and the FeedBurner feed takes time to update…

Chris

I’m playing around with some ideas in my head for a new design for RO.

I’m pondering some ideas that Chris Pearson spoke of in our last PodDev and I think that I’ll try to apply some of that to my redesign. I want to make it different… so you come here and don’t get the “Blog” impression, rather a “wow, that’s damn cool” impression.

I want to have the ability to include all sorts of goodies. Blogrolls, delicious widgets, revver embeds (I’m trying revver, more on that soon enough), odeo widgets, well, basically lots of widgets. I want them to feel like they are a part of the site though. The site needs to be modular, easily configured to suit different environments. Stylish is a bonus, I’m a designer, I should be able to design a decent site for myself.

I don’t know what colours I want yet. I’m sick of the red and would love a slick black site but black is picky across monitors… white is safest. I’ll probably end up with blue since that’s in (thank you Apple iTunes logo!).

I don’t have a clue how I’ll achieve this, I don’t know what will make me different, but I do know in the end, regardless of what happens I’m sticking with it. I’m far too sick of redesigning my own sites.

By the way we aren’t recording PodDev this weekend, too many conflicts. No worries, we’ll work something out!

Chris

[no tags cuz i’m lazy]

Hey everyone!

Sometime tonight I’ll be moving this blog (and praying the whole time it’ll work). My friend Huw from Gizbuzz just moved his blog across hosts and the experience was less than stellar, hopefully moving mine from one folder to the next should be a lot easier.

I’ll be redesigning as well, although that likely won’t be finished until tommorow. I’m planning on making a new personal homepage to showcase my web design as well, because right now this blog looks terrible, not at all a good representation of what I do.

Here are the new URLs so you’re all ready:

http://chris.comitar.com/
http://chris.comitar.com/blog/

Everything should be totally up and ready by tommorow night.

Thanks for your concern.

Chris

what is rightfully mine. Thanks Technorati Profile.

[rate 4]

New WP plugin. Maybe I can start rating movies and crap now.

I’ll be out tommorrow by the way. Party and fun stuff like that.

My goal for tonight is to wrap up the Cool-Teens contract. For those who are uninformed as to what the “cool-teens contract” is, I will tell you. The site originally found me through TeenDev (a fantastic resource for teens into web design), and over a period of the past 2 years I’ve done their graphic design (as of this post you can see my first design at coolteens.com). A few weeks ago, Marc (the newly reinstated admin of the site) approached me asking me to help in the redesign process of the site (so, in effect, I was redesigning my own design).

You can sample my new design at comitar/coolteens/. It’s designed to be significantly more contric (content-centric). I cut out the huge amounts of green I had before (background primarily) and especially got rid of the grunge (except for some tasteful grunge in the new logo). I also cut the weird green crescents. I don’t know why I put those there other than I had a ton of white space. Now that the site is contric, I have made it totally XHTML/CSS compliant. I think. As far as I can tell. I haven’t validated yet.

The site is wider by about 80 pixels (give or take) so that ads room for the new Flash rotating banner, a la AOL Music/Moviefone, the new Yahoo, or even the Comitar Shop.

Fonts are easier to read, (georgia and tahoma and verdana), colors are nicer, and its just an overall cleaner design. I have yet to incorporate the ad space (hehe, I can hardly wait), but I’m predicting it will be tricky to keep it above the fold and keep it all clean. CSS isn’t totally finished (headlines and links and such are yet to be made) but it is at the point where Cool-Teens can integrate it.

I give this design a [rate 5]!!!!!!!

Chris

[tags]cool-teens, graphic design, web design, teens, css, html, xhtml, blog plugin, wordpress, rating[/tags]