uStream's New Design

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 26th, 2009 | 0 Comments

First off, for those who do not know what uStream is, it is basically a video community where you can go and watch live shows covering various topics from sport to entertainment and gaming. Also you can take part in the discussion that is going on live by interacting with other users through the IRC chat available on each live show's page.

I signed up for a uStream account about a year or so ago, i do not broadcast a live show nor do i ever intend to :D But the reason why  signed up was so that i could take part in chat rooms and favorite certain live channels. You can join in the chat even if you are not a registered use however you have some undefined name given to you, but you can set a temporary username but i find it just easier to sign up once and not have to set my username each time.

Up until recently the uStream site looked like this..

It looked okay, but i always thought it could of done with a complete re-design. Now however they have done just that and have released there new design that looks like this..

I think the new design looks great and looks more modern. They also finally changed the look of there video player, i am not too pushed on how it looks now but it is better than the old one :D Also another thing to note with the looks of the new site, it looks a hell of a lot like hulu!

New Theme Live

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: April 8th, 2009 | 2 Comments

Finally after over a month of me saying that i would be getting my new theme completed, the time has finally arrived. Today i added the new theme to the site.I have also incorporated a new section 'Photos' which links to my Flickr account, and pulls in all my photos.

On the right hand side i have an updated method of displaying my latest tweets and below the search bar is a link to the main social sites that i use.

In the footer of the theme i have a tag cloud which lists the most popular posts in my blog. Also it shows my latest blog posts and the most popular blog posts. When viewing my posts on there own individual page there is an option to share the post across multiple sites including stumbleupon, twitter and digg. Also below the posts it shows a list of related posts which may interest you, such as another post talking about the same topic that you are currently reading.

Finally i have a new great looking logo. I paid to have this logo designed and i think it was well worth the money. It cost me about €20 from logonerds. I am really happy on how it turned out and they really do include exactly what you want. And they seem to have taken the Irish part of my site to the extreme with the shamrocks, i like them though they look great.

Working on a new blog design

Posted by: Sean | Posted on: March 3rd, 2009 | 0 Comments

I thought that since i am going to make an attempt at posting regular posts to this blog then i might as well make it look better. I have been looking around for some decent looking wordpress themes and even though there may be a lot to choose from, for the most part i dont like them.

They all tend to be the same in appearence and a lot of them have too many spaces for content. I want a nice simple layout that is not dark, i know this current one looks a bit dark and i find that it can be distracting when trying to read the page. I finally found a theme that i am happy with and i have begun to customize it to my liking.

It is a light coloured theme, that i think will better suit the site.Instead of putting the new design up immediatly i have just set it up on my offline blog so i can chop and change the appearence of it, and then when i am happy with what i have done i will finally upload it to this site.

I am editing my website offline using XAMPP, you can find out more about that here.