Recently I have seen many well-known sites undergo a design change to give it a brand-new look. Below I list some of my favorite redesigns of 2008, or at least most of the recent ones for this year.

These are in no specific order!

(more…)

It’s been a long time since the blog has gotten a fresh coat of CSS and Design (or paint..), so I finally decided to sit down and take what I know about WordPress and create a brand new theme. So here you are!

The colors are taken from my previous theme because they do go very well together. The structure and layout somewhat remained the same, though few unneeded items were removed for now, such as advertisements and recent posts/comments.

With the new design I have incorporated some of my social network accounts, such as Flickr and my Twitter account. The Twitter can be found at the very top with the text linkable to my twitter account, which I might change soon.

There are still a few things I need to work on, feedback would be appreciated.

Update: I will be updating WordPress today, so things might be buggy for a little while.

Update 2: Updated to WordPress, everything seems to be fine.

I’ve always ben going back to past projects and fixing some bugs and adding some new small features here and there. But there’s always been a small part of me asking, what’s next? What bright idea will hit me next? Don’t get me wrong, I’m very pleased with Vine’s results and some other small projects I’ve done for either personal or for some of my classes. But I do want to start getting a little more serious in some of my approaches when it comes to working on either new or old projects.

For my Senior Project Development I am working on Vine and restructuring it from the ground up. It’s being powered by a MySQL Database and uses extensive caching to provide the information in a more efficient way. It’s taking up most of my current time apart from work but so far it’s definitely looking good, and not only will it get a framework update (my code-word for back-end stuff), but it will also get a refresh in the design which will also support wide-screen monitors.

I have been toying with an idea for a new project but I’m not sure whether or not it will be successful, isn’t that the story for everything? Hopefully over the next few weeks I can flush out the idea into something substantial.

What are you working on?

Vine, one of my many web projects, has been a project I’ve been fond of using myself to gather news on certain topics. After a few months of closely looking at how users use the site, I’ve discovered some interesting things, such as which topics gets read the most, how they navigate from topic to topic and other useful tidbits.

The most recent update to Vine was the updated vine theatre for YouTube (obviously beta), where you can watch videos directly on Vine without having to navigate to YouTube.com. The only problem with some of the updates, visual or technical, is that I’ve been neglecting adding more topics, which is essential to the growth of Vine.

And this is where I come across a crossroad, how do I split up topics? Do I go into the niche and drill down, or do I keep to the surface? How many levels of categories should I support? These are some questions that I’ve been mulling over the past few days and have come to a conclusion: Add as many as I possibly can!

To do this, I will have to rework some of the back-end to support larger quantities of information, improvements such as caching data, fluid layout to support larger monitors and a way for me to add topics in a fast and easy way.

During these updates, Vine will be getting a refresh in design but still keep it’s simplicity! If you have suggestions for topics, let me know.

A while back I discussed one of my newer web applications called Apricot, a small application aimed towards small teams wanting a central place to communicate and share information.

It was set to have a beta release early June but with some things not working on the production server (online), it has been delayed until all the bugs are ironed out for a beta release. Thankfully, I have a good friend from MeltingIce.net helping me out on some of the issues and optimizing the entire application.

Hopefully I will be able to have a release date soon. Keep your fingers crossed!