Here’s a little sneak preview of what the new site is going to look like. I’ve been spending most of the day trying to tweak the blog into something more tasteful, vibrant and most importantly, incorporating larger images for my photos. So yeah, this is kinda what I was looking for, for those who happen to be browsing the blog tonight may or maynot have actually seen the theme in action (was the easiest way to show friends and folks) but otherwise we’re still using the old one.

The theme was built from scratch and should work on previous posts, older posts will have some pixellated photos but meh! But yeah, let me know what you think.

Slightly trippy seeing a screenshot of the site you're seeing (if that even makes sense)

Last night I spent the evening coding like no tomorrow till 4am (hence no tomorrow). I’ve revamped my sidebar menu to allow a sample shot section, a better introduction to my blog and a fancy flickr bar showing the latest 15 photos I’ve taken on the side, this was part of my site fattening procedure where I screwed all 800×600 users and move to the 960px territory.

The site will be more flickr integrated than ever (don’t know what i’d do without it!). Of course the quality of posts will improve with time as well as more features here and there being implemented, so yeah, if you’re a previous visitor, hope you like, if you’re new, hope you like! Please leave comments on your thoughts and opinions on the site redesign, since the code hasn’t settled in just yet so I can still do additional tweaks to it.

Flickr integration, thanks to the lovely Flickr Photo Album Plugin

Thought I’d update you on some new features here and there on the blog, nothing worth talking about but you know, if I keep talking about gigs you’d think I’m not actually a geek! There’s still lots of backend stuff that I occasionally do out of curiosity and for coding pleasures (mmm code). Today I’ve been doing a bit of plugin shopping and downloaded/installed two useful plugins, a flickr photo album plugin and a google site map plugin. The latter is mainly used for informing google and other search engines of newly updated posts and whatnot, I’m not really seeing any immediate benefit from it but I hear it’s useful *shrugs*, I kinda got bored reading it’s use on wikipedia (and I find it weird how my readers are actually reading this for me if they dare click on the wikipedia article).

The former (I always love saying “latter“, but never really keen on using the word “former“, it’s just weird) is a pretty useful tool in shoving photos into my blog. Typically I use flock to drag my flickr photos onto my blog but lately I’ve found it a bit tiddly to use. It’s still pretty slick but when I’m on computers that don’t have flock it’s a pain in the rectal region. I thought having all this built in would benefit so much more, so I opted to install this friendly and pretty awesome plugin. The plugin allows me to insert photos from my flickr photostream, all nicely linked up and ready to go. Not only that, it has more flexibility in terms of what size you want to insert it, the alignment of it and even captions. There’s loads more features but I won’t get into detail.

So what does all this mean to you? Absolutely nothing, well, not nothing. That is a lie I do apologise, whilst I’m still mastering it the thing you’ll notice most is the use of small thumbnails for photos. I really like using them now to really bung a lot of photos in a post with minimal effort (back then I had to copy the image location, paste that, and then put the link over it). I’m still in experimental phase so don’t expect that much difference, just be happy about the fancy search bar!. My next plan is probably to work on multiple stylesheets and having a different site design for the “photography” and “muse” sections. I was thinking of a nice black site for the photography one but we’ll see. It’s an idea for now but it might come true if I find the time and patience.

Oh and here’s an example of those thumbnail thingys I’m talking about. Using my pinching album as an example.

A lovely pie chart showing the resolutions used by crazybobbles.org visitors

Haha sorry 800×600, i still love you and everything but I thought this was quite a punchy title for a post and all. Right, more geeky blog changes. Kinda wished I wrote this with the other one but hey. When coding sites and blogs we make sure everyone can read it nicely and easily. If you look at most blogs and sites their width is about 760px or so. Reason being is that this means users with 800×600 resolutions can view the page without too much hasslehoff in terms of horizontally scrolling the page in order to view the content. Most people have stuck with this and that was all fine and dandy. But it also meant that most webmasters are restricted to damn 800px wide websites in order to conform. Content usually should be minimal but sometimes it’s just annoying knowing you can’t benefit from the extra width, so I’ve decided that I’m more or less going to screw the 800×600 users and make a w i d e r site.

Upon more research I’ve also looked at my stats to see what kind of resolutions you guys have and the results are quite interesting, only 1.12% of folks visiting my site have the oldskool 800×600. So really I’m not killing off too many users with prehistoric monitors. So what triggered the decision? Well, one of the biggest examples of sites that are doing this is good old www.facebook.com, notice that the newer site is actually wider now? This is so that they can fit more status/wall update goodness into your page (as well as ads) at the expense of those poor 800×600. Expect the update to happen very soon, I need to create new background images for the header (just wider, not killing off katamari).

“You’ve got to search for the hero inside yourself”

The all kinds of crazy search bar!

In addition to that I thought I’d direct the attention on you LiveJournal users that I do actually have a lovely LJ feed account (thanks Stephie for making it) that you can subscribe to, so if you’re an avid fan of Livejournal and would like to have all my entries fed into your friends page, then feel free to add me and read up it up in the comfort of your own custom stylesheet (I almost make it sound homey!).

Add me on LiveJournal + roar!

Tonight will be an awesome night because I shall be heading to the hoods of Shepherds Bush and checking out some hot Brazilian Electro Music from a band you all know as CSS. Hopefully it should be a biblical riot.

I suppose while we’re on the subject of blog changes, feel free to drop me a comment if there’s any features you’d like on the blog to help you navigate around it, and since I haven’t used polls in a long time and we’re on the same subject, here’s a poll.

I am also happy that our news is now published through my blog crazybobbles.org. It means I don’t need to deal with finding an easy way of clearing the current place up. Not only will there be updates on the site but also articles about the band or the muse commnuity, I think there needs to be more blogs and articles related to Muse that offer a more opinionated point of view, no other fansites seem to be allowing users to submit their own non-news articles, it’s all facts and news. So yeah, I’m pushing on getting some people to start publishing articles on the site and use the momentum of crazybobbles.org to allow users to read it. I think it will definitely work since quite a lot of success was made on crazybobbles.org from articles such as 4th album theory by Max and the legend that is the Matt sex face. So yeah, if you feel like publishing articles similar to 4th album theory or my recent articles about Royal Albert Hall, then start sending me stuff to publish, you’ll get full credit and editorial rights to the blog if you have more articles that are interesting to read.

So what stuff can we see this year? Well what do you want folks? Feel free to post comments on future changes to the wiki and hopefully I can roll out stuff that’s feasible. I’m hoping to overhaul certain places to ensure everything is easier to read. I might get that damn logo sorted once and for all and I might look into getting a forum setup, granted the idea of a forum might end up in an epic fail since the official board is the best forum out there still, but yeah, just an idea. You’re more than welcome to suggest some

So yeah, thank you once again for making Musewiki the most awesome site there is for Muse and we’ll hope you’ll enjoy you stay, it’s good to have you with us, even if it’s just for the day (oh yes I went there)

On another note, I’ve also upgraded the wiki to the latest version, no significant changes I’m afraid just some bug fixes and whatnot.

• Stuart’s birthday
• My new ipod
• My phone which everyone seems to hate haha
• Christmas with Alice
• New Years Eve at Stu’s
• Murder in monochrome gig
• Graduation Weekend
• New york new york!
• Comparing new york and england
• Super jetlag meetup
• Okkervil River
• Polysics
• Weekend up with Alice

Yes, that is a killer list haha, doubt you can read all of it!

The selling point (or niche) is you’ll be getting a informal array of posts about Muse from an old time Muse fan who’ve seen them far too many times. More insights and discussion fuelled posts which you won’t get on other sites. I want to keep my vibe from the old site of having a site about musers, and not Muse. I will also integrate my musewiki updates on here which will in turn feed into the wiki to keep those who like to wiki informed of new developments, got to love integration eh?

Not only will I be updating about Muse here, I will start redoing my covers here and give them some life. That was the original purpose of my site so it’s only fair to start doing them again. I’m looking at using various sites such as youtube and myspace to host and spread my covers too so hopefully it will be awesome. Some songs were simply too cringeworthy so hopefully you’ll see a new refresh of covers that I’m happy about :).

Think that’s about it, enjoy the new site, more changes of the blog can be found on my previous posts. Read my old personal posts too if you want get to know more about me and my horrid past haha. Will be looking forward to giving you more unadulterated blog action. Hope you enjoy my new theme, take care and hope to see you soon (yes my blog is a living entity capable of “seeing you”).

I’ve pretty much backed up crazybobbles.org so what’s left now is to finish the blog theme and start migrating. Quite excited since I feel like I’m not really making the most out of crazybobbles.org so migrating stuff from my blog seems like a cool idea. I just need a lovely place to dunk my covers and I can generate some flash player to play them (loads of people are using my songs for their sites and all :(). Another thing I’m worried about is the amount of spam and crap that’s been generated via crazybobbles.org, boy that was a legacy. Luckily wordpress is a beauty at managing spam. So yeah content you’ll be expecting on my blog:

• Muse related information, I’ll only post stuff that are super interesting, I prefer using musewiki.org to sort out the news since it rocks (hehe got to love self promotion).
• Musewiki news, I have a news section on the wiki but it would definitely benefit if it was stored in some more blog like than wiki
• Feeds seems to be the key for getting these things right, I’ll be generating individual category feeds so people can subscribe to the correct ones, so if you’re only interested in my banter (fat chance) than you’ll subscribe to banter, if you’re interested in musewiki updated than you subscribe to that, of course there would still be a one feed that will rule them all.
• The obvious addition will be covers, having the blog migrated to crazybobbles.org means I’ll need to start recording more music, I’m quite tempted to just making youtube videos of them all so it can all be hosted externally, we’ll see.
• A new email address! The old crazybobbles was spammed silly haha.
• I might start a music myspace account. Reason is that it’s by far the most productive way of storing latest covers as well as distributing them, and lets face it, I never use myspace correctly, won’t do facebook though, wouldnt work too well.
• Some focus on photography as well, I will try and include more flickr photos on the blog (got to love the blog feature) will focus on band photography but to be honest I’ll try everything that’s interesting.

That’s all for now, I’m just writing out ideas so yeah. Will hopefully incorperate everything mentioned since it’s all doable. Blogging will definitely easier since I’m really enjoying blogging on the tube, nice hour spot to get something done and all.