Fear and Loathing on the Learning Curve: Observations on Life, Tech and Web Design from a Slightly Misanthropic Mind

Public Service Announcement

Right, where shall I start?

The more per­cept­ive among you will have noticed that BigglesZX.com “as we know it” has com­pletely changed. Gone are the vast expanses of green (or red, for the colour-blind), replaced instead by a crisp array of greys and shiny images. Yep, in my never-ending quest for a site UI that can please me for more than a month, I’ve taken the drastic step of mov­ing the site to the WordPress blog­ging backend. This means that for the first time I’m using a sys­tem that I didn’t write myself — which is a slightly unset­tling feel­ing — but it’s coun­ter­bal­anced by the fluffy feel­ing I get when enter­ing posts through the WP Admin pages, which is noth­ing less than a joy­ful experience.

Yes, instead of an ever-so-slightly shal­low home-made inter­face, I’ve spent my time design­ing the new BigglesZX.com as a Theme to be plugged into WordPress. That should mean it’s port­able to anyone’s WP install­a­tion, but that’s not 100% true, as it includes some homegrown bolt-ons like the Chatbox (which had to be included really, didn’t it?) and BOFHcam. But tak­ing the Theme approach means I can make it “mine” as a site while still using all the han­dy­ness of WP.

So any­way. Frankly, this new site is more about me than before. The col­lage of images that form the header are inten­ded to rep­res­ent my dif­fer­ent interests, and you’ll note also the suc­cinctly organ­ised list of cat­egor­ies into which posts will fall. Rather than just infre­quent posts about inter­est­ing media morsels, the site will carry more blog-like mater­ial on what I’m up to, as well as — of course — trum­pet­ing pro­jects that I’m work­ing on.

I need not (but will any­way) say that this is a work in pro­gress — my first WordPress theme was never going to be per­fect — so expect to see vari­ous bits tweaked, improved or oth­er­wise. The Comments sec­tion and popup will be first on the list, as I just used the defaults, and could do bet­ter. I just wanted to get a func­tional sys­tem up before I enter the gaunt­let of University (in 3 days), and here it is.

When I get a chance I will see about repost­ing some of the old art­icles here — in the mean­time they can be found at the old site here. Thanks to the mir­acle of timestamp fak­ing, I can back­date them to when they were ori­gin­ally pos­ted, and for all you know they could have been here the whole time.

Well there you go, intro­duct­ory announce­ment dis­pensed. Stay tuned for more.