13 steps

Here’s an interesting read about the importance of tagging. I still haven’t decided yet which route to take. Categories, technorati tags in the post, plugin for tags… there are so many choices. The plugins are nice because they make for some lovely eyecandy as well with tagclouds and ranks, but ofcourse that also means additional maintenance. Plus I’d love to find an article somewhere that shows the benefits in terms of how tagging a blog impacts search results/traffic. Seems like everyone’s just doing it for one reason or another without much in the way of hard facts to back it up.

It’s liiiiiiive, even though we’ve had to kick it and drag it screaming into the open. Wordpress 2.0 got released less than a day ago and the new 2.0 compatible version of K2 was released 20 minutes ago, and the Fear Hamster webcomic is already running both.
Meaning I’ve had 0 time to do any tweakage yet or add any plugins, so to properly view the first comic; right click on the thing and select ‘view image’.
And leave comments! Mmm, comments.

Stay tuned for the webcomic launch some time next week…
Thanks to ElCapitan.

Firefox 1.5 is trickling down the mirrors, so it should hit the main page at mozilla.org any minute now. I’ve steered clear of all the betas and RCs for once so I’m looking forward to grabbing this one, hoping the bump in numbering is a sign of good things.

I’ve also signed up at Technorati which is sort of the blog grapevine. At first I went meh to see the rank for X111.com was 231236. Only later I read that they track over 22 million blogs, so hey, not bad at all. And I’ve only just begun.

For those commenting here I’ve added another plugin which enables you to receive a mail when an entry where you added a comment gets another reply. Should make it easier to track things and keep a discussion going.

The K2 theme got updated to revision 118 and lo and behold, all the IE layout issues that were driving me nuts have automagically disappeared, leaving me with a quiet tuesday evening to check out new plugins or finally buy Mint instead of having to pull my hair out trying to figure out the CSS. 3 cheers for Michael!

the new layout is starting to come together nicely. Lots of white and lots of things not working yet at the moment, but so far so good. I like the white and the space arrangement, for now. I picked this color because it’s the trend at the moment and I have to be a trendwhore. ;)
It’s still pretty messed up in IE but meh, get a decent browser. Being momentarily out of Mac I can’t test it on Safari alas, I hope it renders well. I hope to finish things up over the next week and then maybe I’ll get round to fixing it for IE… maybe. Please let me know what you think of it so far, and keep in mind that it’s far from finished.

The more I play around with the K2 skin the more confusing it gets. It rocks, it’s just comparable to learning to walk on a rollercoaster. Too much CSS and too much wicked php to tweak. So I’ll probably switch back to Kubrick or something like that and take it from there. As soon as the design part is finished and chopped into slices that is. Which eh… could take a while.

Hi there, if you’re a return visitor you may be wondering what the hell happened with the front page of the site. Well, this is it now.
Whereas the old one was nice and showed a lot of info in one go about what was going on in the forum, the gallery and the blogs it didn’t necessarily offer anything extra that couldn’t be seen if you just clicked around the site or checked the forum.
So now it’s exit and you’re looking at this. This being my new blog where I just post bits and pieces I find interesting or stuff that’s keeping me occupied. And ofcourse the occasional brainfart about life, the universe and everything else.

In true X111.com style it’s kicked live looooong before it’s finished, in fact I haven’t even properly begun yet. What you’re looking at now is pretty much a standard wordpress installation with a few plugins and the K2 theme slapped on.
So it’s all going to change quite a bit over the next few weeks, might take a while given my lack of spare time. I also have to get used to using a totally tableless design for the first time ever. ¬.¬

I hope you’ll find my random postings interesting and/or fun, please leave comments, for comments make me all warm and fuzzy inside.

Ah yeah, regarding those comments, I’m using something called gravatars, which stands for globally registered avatars. Go to gravatar.com and register with the email addy you intend to use for comments. Then you can upload an avatar there and no matter where you go to from then on, if you leave a comment on any site that supports gravatars your avatar will show up.

While spending lots of time this week struggling to get back up to speed with current web development I’m discovering more and more things, developments I’ve missed, techniques people use, the most gorgeous designs (like here, here, here and here). And every link I click on leads to a new blog or site with articles containing even more links. Argh! Good vibes though. My current plan is just to soak up as much as possible, collect a bunch of scripts I come across and then let it all sink in before I get started on the design for this thing. And with this thing I mean the blog you’re currently reading and which will eventuall turn into the front page for X111.com.

It really does make me feel like I’ve been out of the loop for too damn long with everything that’s been going on back in ye real world. We’re still in table hell on the main site for fuck’s sake, heh.
So maybe this blog will spin off into a total redesign of the site itself, not just in terms of layout but of functionality as well.

I’m also starting to get a better idea of what’s out there at the moment in terms of web apps which will help me manage all my info, from bookmarks to to-do’s to RSS-feeds to photos and contacts.
There’s so much around, gotta try ‘em all! I’m trying to stay away from all the so called webservices though, call me old school, but I still prefer running a script myself instead of having my personal data managed by someone else.

Time to get back to webhopping and bookmarking like crazy.
Enjoy the weekend and carpe diem!

After some brainstorming with Corvo the idea came up to boost the wallpaper section, which is why I’ve been making them like crazy over the past week.
If any of you happen to have collections of pictures sorted per series, zip them up and send them my way. The more the better.
And ofcourse everyone is welcome to join in the madness and make some wallpapers yourself.

In general we’ve been looking at the site and I’m planning to beef up everything one way or the other, so everyone is always welcome to join in and contribute, be it for the gallery, the forums, the blogs or FFMO.

The site’s doing remarkably well in terms of the traffic we’re getting, so people seem to find something of their liking here.