Just putting my thoughts in one place to check up on later.

Computer Meltdown. I’m currently experiencing my first hardware meltdown. If you remember I had a bit of trouble a while back with my windowz box. It seems that problem was more hardware induced than software, as now I get a blue screen straight away, and installing Linux on the box does nothing either. It’s weird because it works fine when I format and install the OS (windowz or linux) but once I shut the computer off and turn on, that’s it locks up.

Tomorrow taking it with me to work (which should be great fun) for Franchesco (my knight in shining armour) to take a look at it. I’m crossing my fingers that it’s just a faulty harddrive. I can deal with being £40 down, just hoping it’s not my mother board.

Currently writing this off my 4 year old laptop, which is a COMPLETE workhorse. It’s slow as arse, but at least it works, and I’ve never had this sort of problem with this machine. The screen is dead, but I believe that’s just the cable so I’ll probably sort that out after I’ve got my proper computer done.

Also I’m investing in an external harddrive as well. Those things are easily worth their weight in gold.

Broken Kode Shop I’ve finally gotten round to sorting most of the details out with Streetshirts, now it’s a question of modifying the designs (I’ll be sure to explain everything later on) and sorting out the actual shop itself. Anyone know any slick looking/operating ecommerce package software that allows you to track things? The actually buying would happen from the Streetshirts site (for the time being), in the future I might (depending on whether the sales model supports that) integrate that into my site proper, but that’s for another time.

Saida Updates - Gallery Decisions I’ve been slowly tinkering around with Saida for the past couple of days (before the meltdown). The main thing that I’ve been working to sort out properly is the Gallery section. I’m still trying to decide on what I want to use to power the thing. While Zenphoto is a great application and has a lot going for it , there are things that I just can’t manipulate it to do. I’m not that knowledgeable with PHP. I think I understand most of what Tristan has done, funnily enough, it’s just a question of understanding how to do it what I need it to do. I completely understand it’s in beta, and to be honest I actually delayed getting stuck into any other system because I really wanted to use this one, but alas I might have to look elsewhere, since I really want to avoid a flash system. Not for anything other than the fact that unless it’s got a cms, I won’t be up for updating it. I know how lazy I am when it comes to this sort of thing. I don’t want to give myself ANY excuses. Specifically:

1. Being able to post the images in their original size, and controlling their rotation aspect (this is in the main image.php page).
2. Showing the thumbnails of the category within the image.php page.
3. Sub-folders within an album. Currently we have 4 levels. The main page where all the categories are shown. Under that are the albums showing all the thumbnails, and this can page paginated. Then the image file comes along, standard size, with the option to put comments. Final full image. I want to add a fifth level, having albums within albums, or at least the way to paginate a specific set of images. I'll be the first to admit this is a bit anal on my part, but it's my wishlist ok :).

Web Design projects I’ve got a couple of sites I’ll be playing around with in the next couple of weeks, mainly by buddy Stathi’s website and my brother’s website. I guess both of those are slow burners as I’m not getting paid by the bastards, hell I’m even hosting the damn sites, but I enjoy reading them and I actually had a couple of really good ideas for the sites to mirror the content itself. Stylistically they will be completely different to things I’ve done in the past, and very different from each other as well.

In terms of paying jobs I’m just getting into the coding for Alfonso’s website as well. I didn’t actually design this site, just commented on the design in general and put it all together and got the man some hosting for his start up company. I’ll be writing about that in the future when I’ve completed and finished the design for it.

Then I’ve got a random blog design, which will not be something I put too much time into, however could be something I build a cheap blog design business model out (money is tight on this one). I’m speaking aloud here, and things might not pan out, but I’ve got a couple of ideas, but as I’ve found out, ideas are easy to come by, implementation takes serious time and effort.

Side Projects Shuttle is chugging along, I generally do work on this in bursts. So I think I’m due for another burst. Once this project is completed then I’ll be able to jump in with both feet into that little protal idea I talked about a while back. It’s funny but the more I think about it the more excited I get about what it can actually be. I’ll be calling in EVERYONE for help and support, but the aim is for the site to be the defacto first place ‘Pressers will be going to, I know big words, but I’ve got an idea (heh where have I heard that one before).