This is a complete redevelopment of the previous template, “Seraph” whose rounded corners and other various design elements were all made using images. This time it’s all CSS3. If you don’t have a CSS3-enabled browser, no dramas, you just won’t see drop shadows or rounded corners.

New Homepage Design

Homepage Slider

I love the Zenpressed plugin for WordPress. It’s just so hackable!
Seriously, if  you know some basic PHP you can take Zenphoto images and do pretty much anything. I’ve demonstrated this fact by creating a jQuery slider that shows the latest 5 posts, along with title and album name of the image.

New Post Types

Tutorials

Tutorial Post Type

I occasionally post up tutorials here, and I’ve never really thought twice about just creating them as blog posts. Now that WordPress has developed custom post types I decided it was time to rethink that and have developed a completely different look for tutorials, to separate them from normal blog posts.

Along with the new look is a custom taxonomy for the application the tutorial is for.

Quick Updates

Update Post Type

Sometimes I want to post something quick, that doesn’t really warrant a full blog post. Sure, I could always post the link to Facebook or Twitter, but where’s the fun in that?

Now I can post small updates that support permalinks and comments, as well an optional link.

Themes with Hover Previews

Theme Previews

I wasn’t really satisfied with the small circles in the previous theme. All I had to tell the user what the theme was, was the title tag. This time I’ve added screenshot previews that show up when you hover over the icons.

New Theme: Valve

Valve Theme

Loosely based on Valve Software‘s website, it’s mostly charcoal black and dark red. Unlike “Bob”, this theme is much more than just a background and colour change.

Wordpress Login Page

Wordpress Login Page

Something I’ve never really bothered with templating was the login screen for WordPress. I’m the only user of my blog so I never really saw the point. It really makes the whole thing feel complete

QuickAdmin Panel

Quickadmin Panel

My templates have always had quick-access buttons, usually at the top of the page to add a new post or a new image to the gallery.

This time I’ve gone all out, and added a whole bunch of QuickAccess admin buttons that only admin users will see when logged in.
If you’re logged in to WordPress, you will see a blue bar on the left of the page. Simply hover over it and it will slide out.

There are a few conditional links:

• If you’re on a blog page, it will show “Edit Page”.
• If you’re on a blog post, it will show “Edit Post”.
• If you’re on a art gallery album, it will show “Edit Album”.
• If you’re on a art gallery image page, it will show “Edit Image”.

Portfolio Watermarks

Along with a few refinements to the Zenphoto template, I’ve started using the watermark feature. For now some images are going to have two watermarks over them. This is an unavoidable side-effect of using hard watermarks in the past and post-effect watermarks now.

ZenPhoto has the option of setting watermarks for each individual image, so I’ll go through the serious offenders and turn them each off when I get some time.

function my_get_posts( $query ) {

if ( is_home() || is_feed() || is_search() || is_archive() ) {

$query->set( ‘post_type’, array( ‘post’, ‘tutorial’, ‘update’ ) );

}

return $query;

}

add_filter( ‘pre_get_posts’, ‘my_get_posts’ );

Three types: Microblog, Post & Tutorial

That’s great, but what if I want all of my post types to be shown on my blog page but look slightly different. Well, you can use get_post_type to do exactly that.

You can echo that code inside your post class to allow changes on a purely CSS level, by targeting the my_post_type class. However, if you want to go all crazy and have a completely different output for each post, you could do something like this inside your loop:

<?php $type = get_post_type(get_the_ID());

if ($type == “tutorial”) : ?>

.. tutorial display ..

<?php elseif ($type == “update”) : ?>

.. update display ..

<?php else : ?>

.. normal post display ..

<?php endif; ?>

And viola! You now have completely customisable post type displays, all in the single loop.

dBaines.com - First Theme (Green)

You can find the theme switcher in the top left corner, opposite the search bar.
If you’re using either IE6 or IE7, you won’t see it. Instead you will see a message to upgrade your browser. You should probably do it

The themes are also available as alternate stylesheets, selectable from your browser’s stylesheet menu.

I hope to develop a couple more over the next few months. I don’t really want them to be too different, just to give a different set of colours to the existing template.

Speaking of Co-Opp, I’ve been working on the site for the past week finishing everything off. The contact page for example has probably been “coming soon” for about two years now. I figured it was about time we put something on there
I made a pretty sweet 404 page too

All software across the website is now fully integrated and working aces. The templates have been written to accommodate for easy updating, so hopefully there shouldn’t be any surprisingly horrible looking profile pages or anything when we update next time.
The only part I’m currently not happy with is the article comments. They were designed based on the previous look of the forum, so I’m thinking about updating them to reflect the new forum look a bit more.

I’ve also fixed some minor bugs here and there around this website and made sure every thing’s working properly in IE8. I also added some tweaks for IE9 and webkit browsers. I have no intention of removing the warning for IE6/7 or supporting those browsers in any way.
I started playing around with alternate stylesheets for slightly different looks. My coding is freakin’ awesome so it’s really easy to create new colour schemes and so forth. I might chuck a few together and put some colour switches opposite the search bar or something.

A small freelance job I did over the holidays went live this week, Technical Urethanes, a small South Australian plastics company.

In other news, I found my twenty-third hat in Team Fortress 2 the other day.

I go back to work fulltime on Monday

All up I added almost 100 new lines to my htaccess
Most of them were linking directly to my (pretty awesome) screenshots from Infernal and various other games.
There were a few cases of people posting my screenshots in forums, and using my wallpapers for things like their myspace background which I didn’t block.

PC Powerbaines

Thanks to White Falcon for pointing this out to me.
An article running in the January 2010 issue of PC Powerplay features a screenshot from the best person in the world, me.

To the right is a scan of the article by White Falcon. Here is the blog post in which the screenshot was taken from.

I figured some dust was on it and activated the buttons or something, so I wiped my hand across the buttons. My monitor turned off and turned back on (as it does when switching input modes) and when it came back on it had a big blue box in the bottom right with an error saying, “No Composite Input Signal.”

The rest of the screen was OK, I could still use my PC and switch to my Xbox and it was all good, except for this giant blue box in the bottom right.

So I went to Google searching for help.
I found a lot of people with the same issue, but nobody really had any idea of how to fix it.

I hopped in to the menu and played around for a while until I came across PIP settings. After a few minute I realised PIP stood for Picture-in-Picture (something I didn’t even realise this monitor did) and it made sense that this big blue box in the bottom right would be for PIP. I hopped in to the PIP settings and turned it off and voila! The blue box was gone.

So rather than signing up to all these tech help services and posting the answer, I hope my strangely high google rank helps people find this answer

Mine is a 2009 model, so my menu/options may differ slightly from earlier/later models, but here are the exact instructions to fix this issue:

1. Hit your touch button to bring up the touch menu.
2. Hit the “menu” button and scroll down to PIP settings.
3. Hit “PIP Mode” (which should read at the moment “PIP”) and change it to “Off”.

dBaines.com 200910 "Seraphim"

I’m on the fence if I’ll continue using this new logo. I think, like the last logo redesign, I’ll just keep it until I make a new template. At which point I’ll promptly return by to Old Bessy.

I do like how flexible this logo is though. I’ve even developed an animation for it which I’ll hopefully chuck in to the animation gallery soon.

Everything should be exactly where it used to be, unless you’re looking for my design work, which has been shuffled around and split in to several new folders. Splitting them up should make them easier to find this time though.

I’ve created two new subalbums under webdesign for some of the work I’ve done for Bakas IT.
Unfortunately, when I was re-arranging the design category I accidentally reset the db for one of the albums, so Zenphoto treats them as “new” and they’re back in the “latest images” list. No biggie, but that’s why something from 2007 is the latest image

Lately I’ve been really surprised at how well IE8 handles the code I throw at it. I designed both the WordPress template and the Zenphoto theme using primarily Firefox. When it came to browser testing I cringed before opening it up in IE8. Lo and behold it worked almost perfectly. The only bug (so far) is the lack of support of :last-child, which I used for the hover/active states in the last nav button.
Sure I could get around this by giving the last element a class, but I probably wont. IE users can suffer in their jocks
I won’t at any time be testing this browser in IE7 or IE6. If you are using either of these browsers, consider upgrading.

I’ve been putting off developing the new forum template for Co-Opp. I think now that I’ve gotten my hands dirty with php again I’ll dive in to it, and hopefully get it live before Borderlands releases next week (afterwhich most of my time will be taken up in that game )