I’ve been looking in to Tumblr and Posterous in recent months and wasn’t happy with the way I wasn’t in possession of my own content. The old design, another WooThemes blog (just like this one) didn’t give me the freedom of writing very short posts. Recently on my blog I’ve been dabbling in writing short posts, comments and other types of content. It definitely didn’t look right and I needed a different way to do things, hence the change to another WooThemes blog called ‘Retreat‘.

I’m looking to expand the varied way in which we can now deliver content, written, voice and video. I believe this design will enable me to do that for the foreseeable future.

“In theory, it would be a fantastic opportunity to do/make it…”

It’s bollocks.

A very one sided view from me but I believe that it is the right point of view. If you’re thinking about theories behind things that you’d like to do in the future, you have WAY too much time on your hands. The reason being that if in ‘theory’ you did want to do it, someone, somewhere on the planet is already well on his/her way to doing it.

Why can’t we just stick by our guns and aim for something and just do it? If it’s a gut instinct that something may work, just run with it and see where it takes you. Granted it may be on the verge of being a bit gung-ho but so what, sometimes you just have to trust your instinct and throw theory to the wind. If things don’t work out then you’ve just done a wonderful thing, you’ve learned a few lessons in messing things up. It’s not all bad though, in learning how to mess things up, you also learn how to make things better.

So the next time you’re thinking about theory and how to put something in to practice, stop yourself quickly and just get on with it. See what happens, if all turns out well, then that is fantastic. If it doesn’t, don’t blame me, just get on with working out how you’d do it differently next time and learn from your experience no matter what it was.

Bollocks to Theory, once youve got round to it, it’s already being done.

I wanted to produce a design that encompasses what I like when I’m at home and comfortable. After all this blog is my personal space.

The old blog was held together with shoe strings and bubble gum, it was a carved up older theme for which I liked the look of. I’ve never known much PHP so was rather apprehensive about starting to amend and change a theme when I had only started using wordpress. Using wordpress was the first time I had really known what was involved in this thing people called blogging. Browsing the web enabled me to find so many more bloggers, one of which was Matt Brett. I enjoyed reading Matt’s gaming reviews and still do today. Looking and reading Matt’s various posts about wordpress made me more intrigued at how it all worked.

WordPress has come a long way in such a short time, a year has passed since I first started using it and there have been so many noticeable improvements. The interface for the dashboard has changed entirely and even though the differences between 2.6 and 2.7 were so huge, the usability got better with it. There are more plugins than ever before and with the likes of jquery making an ever impressive gut punch into our web world you can do so much more with the front end. It’s now a time for enjoying what wordpress can do, and all though it doesn’t tick every box it certainly covers a lot of them.

I started reading Adii Rockstars blog shortly after Matt Brett’s last year, I can’t exactly remember why I ended up at Adii’s but it may have been after seeing a post about his premium news themes. His premium news theme at the time reminded me so much of nvmax.com that it brought memories flooding back. WordPress as a news theme is tremendous, it is one of its largest uses today.

Fairly recently Adii joined up with Magnus Jepson and Mark Forrester to start WooThemes. They have developed a range of different premium themes which you buy a licence form, of which all a fantastic quality and build. They’ve pulled out all the stops to provide their users with themes which they know they want, some of which have now been used for websites like gomediazine.com.

I’ve learnt a lot about wordpress from Magnus, he seems to hint at what you need to do rather than tell you all the gory details therefore you learn so much more and quicker.

I’M A HYPOCRIT

I am a hypocrit. Why you might be asking. I don’t believe designers should be using a premium theme which they haven’t designed. Yet, I’ve went and done this myself by using the Over Easy Theme. I listed my reasons for using Over Easy in the “why I’m overeasy” post, it was mainly because I was so busy with work and other projects that I couldn’t devote the time I wanted or needed to a new blog design. I am yet to find the perfect life/work balance which I can enjoy the best of both worlds. My old blog theme as I said earlier was held together with shoe strings and bubble gum and the easiest way to fix this was use a premium theme as I trusted the build quality.

I do believe that designers and even some developers should prove their worth as such by working on their own blog (if they have one already).

My overall view is that it would be slightly weird if I was to sit and use a theme designed by Veerle Pieters, Matt Brett or Elliot Jay Stocks rather than doing my own blog with my own unique tastes. I simply do not have the time.

It would be interesting to see what other designers and developers views are?

Back in February I talked about nvmax and how much I missed the old days of being a part of a bigger web community centralised around one subject. I dabbled with the idea of revisiting those times and setting up a new nvmax. After chatting with Andrew (the original founder) about doing just that we decided that it would be extremely difficult to build up our contact list again as so much time had passed. Not going ahead with it wasn’t a major issue as my diary was jam packed with other things that I didn’t know what to do at that present moment in time.

I’ve now taken a role of Creative Director at a Newcastle Design Agency called carrotmedia. This was something that came out of left field and wasn’t planned, it fell into place. I believe in fate and things that happen will happen regardless of what you try to do.

Over the year the whole team has been through a lot at carrot,we’ve launched some pretty nifty websites like Victor, Designer Desirables, Poplar Tree Garden Centre and Brambledown to name but a few. We’ve got a wild client base ranging from Industrial underwater equipment to a holiday let in Italy and an awesome cosmetic dentists. Every day is different and I love it for being just that. The clients I work with are tremendous.

Something majorly changed in 2008, I’ve grown in confidence. Whilst I believe I am fairly confident, there were certain issues I had to deal with personally and one of those was my work. The growth in confidence is shown by the fact that I’ve now started opening up quite a lot and showcasing my work which I’ve not done before. Together with uploading my designs to flickr and being showcased on various CSS Galleries it does give you a sense of pride and the thought that you’re headed in the right direction with the work you’re producing.

I setup Validation Icons in 2007 however it didn’t have as much of an impact than I thought it would and because of this I redesigned the site  in 2008 which brought a ton of traffic. Since its launch the website has been showcased on a number of CSS Galleries as well as the icons being showcased on various design resource websites. It’s an honor and I hope in future the icons can be of some use to someone. I’ll be developing some new icons in 2009 so watch out for them.

I changed the design of my blog after a long wait, the original was held together with shoe strings and bubble gum and was plainly not robust enough for the amount of things I wanted to do with it. I opted to go with WooThemes, I’ve admired the work the guys are doing over there for a while now and had to tell everyone why I’m overeasy. Although I have a strange stance on premium themes which I will be writing about in the New Year.

In November I launched floobe.com, it’s a mix of showcasing, resources, interviews and freebies. It houses everything under one roof and the Interviews are going well. It will grow more through 2009 so I’m looking forward to that.

And now it’s Christmas, it’s time to relax, enjoy and look forward to a busy 2009.

It’s certainly been a while since I last wrote a post about anything on my blog. It hadn’t been updated since v2.2 and was held together by shoe strings and magic dust. I lost all feeling towards it, I lost the urge to review movies and books and rarely logged in to see if any comments had been left.

After logging in last week I noticed that users had been reading and making comments on the blog so enough was enough. I had to bring the blog back in to shape and quickly. I generally blog more over Christmas time with having more time off anyway so Friday 31st October I made a stand over my own defeatist attitude.

WHAT I HAVE TO SHOW

I’ve now got something to show, or at least I have the willingness to let every seen what I do and what I have been doing over the past couple of months. I’ve got a couple of personal projects that I work on outside of the 9-5 work (or sometimes 7-6 depending on my diary) that I finally want to put my name to and would like to showcase some of my day work to the general public.

I’M ALL OVER EASY

WooThemes launched their new theme Over Easy a few days ago, initial thoughts were that it was a pretty cool theme which a lot of people could get to grips with. I have a lot of time for Adii and the guys over at WooThemes and respect their work. The quality of their themes is second to none and they always go out to bring the best themes to their users. (hats off!)

I’ve been thinking for ages that I would simply redesign my blog, code it up and get it live but work isn’t allowing the time off to do it. With not being freelance I can afford to not sell myself through my blog, but provide content for people to read instead. Over Easy has given me the ability to show off the proejcts I am working on and finally sort out the organisation of my posts.

The colour schemes were great but I wanted to add my own personal touch. The blue and dark grey colour scheme came from a satchel bag I saw months ago, liked the way the colours worked together and grabbed a quick photo with my phone to make sure I remembered.

With Over Easy I’ve achieved;

• The organisation of the blog on a whole
• The organisation of posts in to relevent categories
• Make the blog stronger instead of the shoe string method
• Show off my projects