Eoghan O'Brien.com - Cork Web Designer/Developer, Ireland

October Update

The update to version 6 seems to have gone off without a hitch, I’ve been featured on CSS Mania again and I’ve recieved almost 2,000 hits in 10 days which is quite good for this site. I still have some work to do on the site but I doubt any changes will be made in the next week because of the amount of work I’ll be doing.

In other news, on Wednesday night I won 1200 euro in the lottery, which was quite a nice suprise, as I never usually even do the lottery, I dont even have any frequent numbers that I use, it was merely a two line “quickpick”.

I’ve also recently discovered Symphony CMS , a truly amazing system which makes it easier than ever to create a powerful system which can be altered exactly to your needs. One example would be a gallery I created in under 10 minutes which allows you to enter a title, decription, upload an image and also set width and height restrictions so the image can be cropped down while keeping its original quality. This kind of programming is likely to take a few hours if you were going to write it yourself, however Symphony’s powerful custom field and section creation makes tasks like this an absolutly doddle. I was so impressed with this system I was literally laughing out loud at just how easy they make it. If you’re looking for a CMS you should definitely check it out. (Did I mention it was free.)

Version 6 Is Upon Us

It’s 4:30am and I’m still up puttin some final touches to version 6 of the site, I’ve put a lot of work into the little details this time around.

So! Whats new in this version? I hear you ask. Well, V6 will be the first design to feature “Sidenotes” (basically a blogroll) which will contain any random interesting bits of information I see around the Interweb, I’ve added a Books section where I’ll be adding all the books I’ve read into an online library and I’ve finally Categorised all my posts for easier browsability.

Whats gone? With progress there comes deprecation and that is certainly the case with the V6 update, I’ve removed the Colphon and Gallery pages because they were’nt getting much traffic, the Colophon page will now be integrated with the About Me page but there is nowhere in V6 for a gallery however I will definately add more features as I go.

Whats Cool? I’ve been working with script.aculo.us for a while now and so I decided to show the public a bit of tidy progressive enhancement using the effects library. Enter the busy bee image acts as a cover for some hidden features, go ahead click the button, I know you want to. Its pretty cool huh? I’ve also added in Christophe Beyls Livesearch Plugin which I found very useful and quite fun.

A couple of other small updates to each page will be completed later in the week, for now I’m happy with this. If you find any bugs or errors please let me know so I can iron them out ASAP.

Let me know what you think of the new site, Leave a comment! :D

Textpattern Update And Backup Scare

Hey, I’ve just updated Textpattern from 4.0.2 to 4.0.3, and I have to say it was absolutely painless and remarkably easy. I’ve really been impressed with Textpattern since I moved over last December.

In Txp 4.0.3, they’ve started to clamp down on comment spam, which was one of two things I wasnt happy about with Textpattern. However, there’s now a myriad of ways comment spam can be stopped by the system so I’m not so worried about it anymore.

I was playing around with some CSS stuff earlier on today and I accidentally overwrote some style info which caused the site to look a bit dodgy for around 20 – 30 minutes, thankfully however I had a backup at hand. This is the second thing about Txp that I dont really like, if you’ve changed a part of the CSS and you dont like it and want to return to the way it was, you MUST have a backup on your own machine. If you had the ability to undo/redo in the Article Editor and Presentation Editors, I think Txp would be far easier to manage and use.

I’ve also changed the admin section with Empty Spaces’ updated and restyled look. If you use Txp but hate the look of the Admin Section this may be a good option for you.

Site Update: Version 5.0

If you havent noticed, I have updated my blog and made it a bit brighter. The old blog was getting a bit depressing and I was starting to justify not making any posts with the fact that I didnt like the look.

This re-design will force me to re-organize my site info and structure and will hopefully make it easier to read and use. Grab my RSS feed for updates or just do it old school and come back in a few days.

I will also be posting a few new tutorials in the coming weeks and months along with more stuff from my phone, which will become a regular feature on this site.

Missing Blogs

So after all of the installing and configuring of this blog I lost/cant find all the old blogs/articles that I had. I recently formatted my Laptop, on which all the articles/blog were and I had backed them up on CD but typically, now I cant find them.

So now I’m starting from scratch and I’ll probably make about 3 posts a month from now on and try to build up a respectable archive. However, I know I must keep “Quality over Quantity” in mind.

Text Pattern Blog

I have just installed Text Pattern 4.0.2 as my new blogging software and I’m currently making the neccessary changes to give it the look I want. My first impressions are quite good, the Admin section is a lot better than Wordpress or Nuclues, theres much more options and its quite easy to manage.

I still have a lot of styling to do, the default theme is very dull so I’ll have to make a few buttons and stuff like that. I’ll also add some more color as soon as I have everything sorted out.

• CSS Naked Day
• IE Operation Aborted
• Safari Clearfix Bug
• Mmm...Launchy
• Moving to Magnolia