Aside 1: New Theme!

You may have noticed that the Excerpts now use a new theme.

Don’t get me wrong, I loved the old one — but it was beginning to feel its age next to all these new-fangled themes that roll out every couple of weeks. All I really wanted was the same thing with new tech (Custom Header, Custom Background, Custom Menus, all the Customs you don’t have to pay for) and with a wider main column, but as I live my life wanting totally different things from everyone else that was clearly never going to happen (and though I want to build my own theme to submit for free use for everyone, that’s an exceptionally long term strategy).

So I’m now using the fairly generic but solid Twenty Eleven (last year #latetotheparty). Please bear with me while… things go wrong.

But it does have some nice new features, like these little micro-blog-type posts… May come in handy for when I don’t have a thousand-word epic to spew all over your screen.

LoneWiki: Version 1.2.0.0

LoneWiki has had some serious changes going on the front and under the bonnet. Bug-fixes, new features… All sorts of fun. So much fun, in fact, that it’s going up a major version number (at least I’m not like Firefox or it’d be LoneWiki 6.0.0.0 by now).

Download LoneWiki version 1.2.0.0 here.

As always, let me know if you find anything dodgy or would like something new!

2011 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Syndey Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 17,000 times in 2011. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 6 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

LoneWiki: Version 1.1.0.3

Does anybody care about LoneWiki? Well, I do. I’ve been sitting on 1.1.0.3 for a while now (test driving it on my own wiki) and it’s time to let her go.

The changes are mostly under the bonnet; a bit of refactoring for my own convenience, a pile of miscellaneous bug-fixes I can’t remember… I need to start marking things as done rather than just removing them entirely from my to-do list.

The most notable change is to the page index window, which now uses a handy TreeView to display with regard to categories. May need further refinement in the future, but let’s see how it goes.

Download the new version here.

Blog 472: Art for Art’s Sake

Over the last eleven Wednesdays (bar one as a holiday), I attended the City of Glasgow College to further my education. I paid a fair sum for about 30 hours of art training. “Drawing for Beginners”.

I decided that, in order to further my presentation of concept art for the likes of Y4, it might be wise to learn to draw objects that actually exist before trying to articulate those that don’t.

So, I’d like to invite you in to take a look at some of the delights I produced during my education…

Blog 465: All Bricked Up

Relatively recently that I’ve finally reached the critical mass of Lego Star Wars sets that I’ve decided to start doing things with them (I’m a bit anal about mixing different ranges — we’re very lucky I’ve got expanded universe and original trilogy sets mixed up here).

So of a Saturday night, when it’s past bed-time but there’s still a good hour or two of the modern equivalent of Classic Dance Saturday left…

Lego is wonderful.

Blog 453: Cute Netbook

I never had much use for a portable computer before. I always preferred to invest in a single behemoth to squat in the corner of my room, powerful, brooding and mysterious. For all those modern games I don’t play.

Then I realised that I spend an hour every day on the bus doing absolutely nothing (and let’s not go back to grinding Donkey Kong on the GameBoy because even my levels of masochism have limits).

I got to wondering how I could make use of this down-time…

LoneWiki: Version 1.1.0.2

Another big pile of new features await! So many that you’ll have to read up on them after the break.

Download the new version here.