Hello all,
no I haven't had botox or gone under the knife but instead my site Creative Web Specialist has gotten a major facelift with thanks to ex-collegue and friend Sam Marks who is a great designer. A few months ago I met up with Sam to see how things were going and after a chat we decided to do a little partnership. What we agreed on was that I would help build his XHTML templates and put it onto a CMS for him, of course I recommend my favourite CMS, umbraco. In exchange he would design me a slick identity and a redesign to fit the new ident and so he did !
With this redesign I wanted an entirely new site not just some XHTML and CSS changes, so with this I took on the development task of putting this blog onto Umbraco. This has been quite a long task mainly due to moving the old blog posts and comments over to the site, but the effort was worthwhile.
Before and after
Lets take a quick look at a before and after screenshot and take a look at how much better the overall site is.
My Links
This section is used as a good ole fashioned blog roll, with links mainly related to the topic of Umbraco, the lovely people over in Norway at Xeed who I work with and links to my various profiles on services scattered all around the internet, so you can easily find me.
Twitter Feed
This speech bubble displays my latest tweet from micro blogging service Twitter, so you can see what I am thinking or what I have to say. This is updated very regularly and if you are interested in what I have to say either keep coming back here or follow me on Twitter. This section was slightly tweaked from my latest Umbraco Twitter package to achieve this, as instead of showing my latest tweet I only show my latest tweet that is not a reply to another twitter user. I will most likely make the update to the package after the site is launched.
My del.icio.us
This section is an XSLT script in umbraco that allows me to use the RSS feed that del.icio.us provides in order to display the 5 latest links I have bookmarked. I must give credit to colleague Christian Melybe who originally wrote the XSLT to do this. (Thanks Christian)
My Last.FM
This section allows you to see what songs I have listened to recently on my computer or via the Last.FM radio service. So if you ever interested in what I listen to then keep an eye on this section. This section was very quick to implement due to the package I have already created.
My Flickr
This section could have been easily created using Flickr's RSS feed however I am using the .NET Flickr API wrapper which allows me to have further control of what photos I want to show. Instead of showing the last 6 uploaded photos to Flickr I could rearrange them by the date they were taken instead or even show more photos than the RSS feed supports.
Comment Form
Well this is very experimental but I am using the .NET wrapper library for Akismet the spam comment service that WordPress uses. After using Wordpress for a long time with the Akismet spam service the detection in my eyes has been very good. So I have coded a custom .NET usercontrol that uses the Akismet service and if it detects a comment as spam it creates the node but does not publish it in umbraco and sends me a notification email. So if this works well you could possibly expect a package release for it.
Hidden hCard
In all of my pages is a hidden hCard which is a microformat for marking up contact information in a webpage. If you use the Technorati hCard to vCard service which scans the URL you give it which then creates a vCard for your address book application. My implementation was based on the technique from Bruce McKenzie at Bioneural.net.
Download my vCard with the Technorati service
And finally...
Well now you have seen the new design and read this post, I would love to hear your feedback on the design. What do you think of my hard work? Leave me a comment and tell me exactly what you think.
Warren Buckley
is a Creative Web Specialist based in
Leigh on Sea, Essex
,
UK.