It’s been quite a long time since my site and blog have seen any major visual changes. I thought it was about time to give it a visual refresh, so over the past few days, I have put together this new design.

Hopefully, it retains much of the visual identity of its predecessor, while giving a welcome refresh, making things visually cleaner and making it a little less bland than previously.

I particularly like the new main navigation bar, which I think is more attractive and clearer than it used to be, while also removing the old hack I used to get the ‘button’ effect (there is no more ‘button’ effect)!

There are also a lot of changes behind the scenes to make the integration between the non-WordPress portions and the WordPress blog a lot easier.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new design. Comments and suggestions for improvement very welcome!

Summing my thoughts up and dumping them as quickly as possible:

• Snow Leopard. Why do I always hate Apple’s product names, then warm to them eventually? It’ll have to grow on me. Looks relatively boring. Apple ran out of ideas - lack of innovation.
• iPhone 3G - nice.
• iPhone 2.0 software - looks solid. Nothing earth-shattering that wasn’t really expected. $9.99 + UK VAT + mild extortion will be leaving my bank account soon.
• Mobile Me - reserve judgement. I’d like to give it a try. Not sure I need yet another email address. Probably too expensive.

Any other thoughts? Accepted in brain-dump format or more eloquent versions.

Just a quick post to wish all my readers a Happy New Year and a very happy and prosperous 2008. Hope it’s a good one!

Just under 45 minutes of 2007 to go here, so I’ll see you all on the other side.

Just because I thought it deserved its own post, here’s wishing all my readers a very Merry Christmas if I don’t speak to you individually otherwise.

Have a good one!

It’s taken me a little while to do some testing and making sure everything is all good - but my personal blog is now upgraded to WordPress 2.3.

WPGet is also upgraded to 0.7 as well - so I’m now actually using the latest version of my own software too!

Recently, I made the decision to use Dokuwiki as my wiki solution. I’m going to put up a wiki which will feature developer stuff and documentation for all of my coding projects that are hosted here.

The URL is http://peter.upfold.org.uk/devdocs/. There is nothing of any interest on there at the moment, but I’m going to get some content on there as soon as I can. With any luck, you can expect to have some good stuff up there by the end of this week.

Please note - due to some continuing issues with email sending from the new server, you may not get your password via email if you register for the wiki. This is likely to happen with at least Gmail, possibly other services too. If you don’t get your password, email me and I’ll sort things out.

This wiki should address the inexcusable complete lack of documentation thus far. I’d also encourage people to contribute to it as well if they can and want to. That’s why I’m going for the wiki format.

Yeah, OK, I’ve just committed (well, actually, I haven’t, but to keep playing I will have to) to paying quite a lot of money every single month for a computer game.

It is actually quite good though. I was convinced to buy it due to my friends. Quite a few of them play it and desperately wanted me to be able to join in. They first got me to install the client on my MacBook, then got me to patch it (which took roughly an afternoon), then got me to play the 10-day trial and finally they got me to buy the box.

A lot of people who do play it end up getting addicted and playing it obsessively. I can see why that happens, but I’m pretty sure it won’t happen with me (I hope anyway ). Throughout the trial period I still managed to get to college, keep up blogging on FOSSwire and Gizbuzz and get quite a lot done. All it did was push other games out of the picture, not affect any of the other stuff I do online.

It is great fun and the scale of the game is just on epic proportions. I won’t bore non-WoW players with too much detail, I’ll just say that it is an awesome game and now I’m playing it.

It’s funny, because I never was (and still don’t really consider myself to be) much of an RPG gamer. Well, I guess I am now.

I’m on Scarshield Legion (European servers) and my character name is Hybridoracle. If you do get in touch via WoW, mention you came through this blog post.

Apple just released Mac OS X 10.4.9, and this marks my first ever Mac OS upgrade! What a milestone!

Apple today released Mac OS X 10.4.9 via its Software Update utility and on the Web. Apple says: “The 10.4.9 Update is recommended for PowerPC and Intel-based Mac computers currently running Mac OS X Tiger version 10.4.8 and includes general operating system fixes, as well as specific fixes or compatibility updates for the following applications and technologies: RAW support; handling of large or malformed images that could cause crashes; image capture performance; mouse and keyboard shortcuts: font handling; playback quality, and bookmarks in DVD Player; USB video conferencing cameras for use with iChat; Bluetooth devices; browsing AFP servers; Apple USB Modem; Windows digital certificates; Open and Print dialogs in applications that use Rosetta on Intel-based Macs; time zone and daylight saving for 2006 and 2007; and security updates.

Bearing in mind the last update to Panther was 10.3.9, does this mean Leopard is pretty soon? Or will they flow over to 10.4.10?

I’m downloading it right now (10.4.9, not Leopard, unfortunately).

While it’s pretty much done, there are a few things left I need to address:

• Get WPGet’s Ajax comment preview re-enabled (I need to restyle it for the new look first!)
• Fix the weird WebKit rendering bugs
• ‘Block the links’ on the navbar instead of using JavaScript (teach me how!! )
• Find somewhere to put my Google Reader shared items (you might have noticed, they disappeared because I now have only one sidebar!).
• Rid the world of Internet Explorer. Oops - no, that’s next year. Hey - for the most part, the new design works in IE, so don’t complain.

UPDATE: forgot this one - make a proper secondary navbar for the projects page.

Hello everyone. In case you’re reading in a feed reader, click through now.

You’ve probably just noticed that there’s been a bit of a change. “What, where’s the orange?”. Let me tell you a story.

This morning, I woke up and I had an idea. I knew what I wanted my site to look like in the future. So I rushed onto the computer, launched The GIMP and did a quick mock-up of how the header image for a future revision of the site might look. I decided it looked awesome, so I saved it.

Then I wondered “hmmm - I wonder what this header image looks like if I put it in a veryplaintxt theme?”. So I got the local copy of my blog on my MacBook, installed veryplaintxt and put in my header image.

I then got really inspired and started a marathon CSS hacking session (the style kind, not the DVD kind), so I whipped through veryplaintxt’s CSS and designing my new blog style.

Interrupted between a random 16-mile, 2 hour cycle ride, I worked on the CSS all day (bearing in mind I’m not all that good at CSS) and finally, I integrated my static pages with the new style too.

By that time, I liked it so much I wanted to put it on the site, make it go live, today. Actually, it came close to not going live today, due to an incident involving Mac OS X’s Finder overwriting and not merging directories, but I don’t want to relive that moment.

If you visited the site in the last hour or so, you will have been greeted by a nice page telling you a new design is coming. Well, here it is.

I’m really happy with how it’s come out. The Blogger-era orange from those days is now long gone, and has been replaced with a nice white/red/blue look. The design looks and feels cleaner (and is - the code is now a lot better than it used to be). I just hope my readers like it as much as I do!

Thanks to veryplaintxt, which was the base style that I worked from to make my theme and of course two of the best operating systems in the world. And the Konqueror, Cyberduck and Smultron projects for allowing me to upload, erm - upload, and code my new theme.

By the way, what do you think? Please do let me know your suggestions, praise, complaints and all other feedback via the comments.

At the current time, I’m aware of a few minor issues with the design, including strange navbar rendering under WebKit (but not KHTML) and a couple of pixels being off here and there, as well as some minor IE bugs. I’ll keep you posted as to when I have ironed these out. If you see any other rendering bugs, let me know please!