I’ve actually attempted to redesign this site several times in the past few years, but I always said that I would only do that if it was an improvement over what I had. Finally after 2 and a half years I believe I have that design.

This version has been in the making for the better part of 6 months now. It is without a doubt one of the simplest designs I’ve ever done. So much so that the whole thing only has a single image (the logo image). The design is definitely an evolution rather than a revolution. The general minimal aesthetics remain, the typography has changed only slightly (although the horizontal spacing has been rigidly adheard to).

In an attempt to bring the links that I had hidden behind a ‘shelf’ has been brought forward to highlight other areas of the site as well.

###HTML5 and CSS3 In this design, one of the things that I decided to do was transition to HTML5. This wasn’t as hard as I originally thought it would be, and would highly recommend the following resources as the ones that I kept going back to again and again.

• HTML5 Doctor’s Element index was completely invaluable.
• HTML5 for Designers was an awesome resource and one you should definitely invest in.
• And finally the W3 HTML5 reference page.

I have not used any CSS3, but I think that’s something that I will eventually try as well. I’ve learnt over the years that a personal site is never complete and takes time to mature.

One thing that’s definitely going to be a new constant into my workflow is Joen’s Vanilla. Even if I didn’t do anything, this little bit of CSS gives me all the structure I need to make things look good.

###Responsive Design Another aspect that clearly came up, was that when designing a modern website, you are no longer designing one website anymore, you really should be designing a minimum of two. One for the large screen and one for the smaller screen. Each have different functions in a way, as if you put to much in one side, you end up limiting the other. It’s a balancing act that comes through in the design.

I’m not sure if I’ve achieved that balance correctly at the moment, but it’s something that I found very interesting. I was constantly working with a wider implementation of the site next to a narrow implementation. I found that actually there is a distinct difference between the minimum size that you can take your Safari browser to comparted to that shown on the iPhone. I have a lot of work to be carried out here still, but this is a start.

###Logo The logo has changed as well. It’s been stripped down and completely simplified, and in fact harkens back to the very first logo that I created for the site, back in 2004. I will be using the ‘X’ in a variety of ways over the next few years (as shown in my Cerebral Interviews newsletter, subscribe now if you haven’t).

###Colour Shades of blue have always played an important part in every Broken Kode design. This design brought back one of my favourite colours, turqoise. The dark aspect has been slightly tonned down a bit. While I’ve always loved the richness of the dark navy blue that adorned this site for the previous version, I always felt that you had to have a really nice screen to full appreciate it. This colour palette will seems faded out in comparison, but still provides a serious outlook.

###Typography and Fonts I didn’t change the font or the size from the previous design. I feel that if it isn’t broken which change it? Yes it doesn’t follow the trend of larger text, but to be honest, that’s not a big deal for me. There’s something consice by using an 11pt verdana font. The font that you use for a text heavy (mainly?) site, is profound of course. With the advent of Typekit and others, I could literally have my pick of just about any font that I could want.

Speed for me is important, but I’ve found that verdana serves the purpose very well. I might change if I find something suitable in the future, but it’s one of those things that I’d like to discover by happy accident rather than hunt for in a redesign.

###Future Evolution Hopefully this design will be tweaked slightly over the coming years, but hopefully I’ll keep refining it rather than redesigning it, much in the same way I did with the previous version. However I honestly feel that baring quiting blogging completely, I’ll keep this design for a good long while.

Cerebral Interviews - The official Broken Kode newsletter, powered by TinyLetter. Been meaning to do something like this for a while. The goal is to craft 12 useful and entertaining emails in the year 2012. No more no less. Published at the end of every month.

I know, it’s been a while and by this stage I’m probably talking to myself, which is fair enough to be honest. There have been several things that have prevented me from actually writing and posting, which is really down to both environment and workflow. I was originally going to write a separate post for each topic, but I found that the two topics were closely interrelated.

###Environment The environment to help me publish hasn’t been ideal. The first reason was due to the fact that I don’t have any internet access in my home. It’s been like that for over a month now, and it’s really starting to become disruptive to me. I could post from work, however the firewalls are restrictive and that makes it a colossal pain in the ass.

Apart from the technical aspects of my current situation, silence is reflective of the mood I’m currently in about the internet. Once upon a time I used to love the internet. I used to live it on a daily basis. I was actively involved in trying to bring something different to it on a regular basis. Over the last few months and even years now that has changed. I think the problem is that the internet has changed considerably - and I have not found my place in it.

The barriers are smaller and the noise is much, much larger. Over time I could see less and less people commenting on my website, and my silly Facebook posts would garner more attention and responses. And so you loose a certain amount of interest in keeping things fresh, keeping things moving on the site.

The great thing about this site is that it has a history and it has a distinct style about it. I’ve written some good stuff and some shitty stuff as well. I’ve learnt a great deal, interacted with some great people.

Is it time to retire the site? I don’t think so - after years, I’ve finally got it into a state that I like it (I’ve had this site design for nearly 2 years now). As I write this I wonder if I could take it to part of it’s previous glory. Of course the main issue here is that it’s a completely different place and time, so things will be more difficult and that took a hell of a lot of commitment.

The reason I am still confident in the future of words on this website, is because of my new found love for simple text. I have this appreciation now of words that I have written. I think part of this new found love is down to a few tools, Notational Velocity, my iPhone, Simplenote and the brilliance of Markdown. The seamless integration between these tools, and the fact that all of my thoughts and notes about anything and everything are always with me, (obviously organised in a meticulous fashion) helps me to feel more empowered.

Which happily brings me to my next point. Once my technical barriers that have an affect on my environment, the next barrier which needs to be removed are those to my workflow. I’ve outgrown the current CMS. The current crop of content management systems don’t really provide the level of respect to text files that I would want.

###Workflow So what is the system that I would like to adopt right now? Well after trolling through the internet, I’ve not found something that actually fits my requirements (well nothing that is fully baked).

One solution which I thought had some potential (so much so that I actually coded the next iteration of my site using that system already), was Stacey. This had a couple of problems, mainly the lack of an iOS text editor that could be readily integrated into the workflow (there’s that word again) and secondly there is no archiving system, even though this could be a prime solution if something like this was added, although I have no idea how active the project currently is.

Marco does seem to be working on something that might be exceedingly interesting. He’s not published the source code, because he’s tinkering around with it, which is REALLY annoying. Get on with it and just ship the damn thing Marco. Geeks will huddle around it instantly.

Trolling on Github, I found a bunch of options available that actually do this (clearly I’m not the only one that feels this way). The most promising of the lot was MopBlown, which I’m actually talking with Chris about at the moment, to try and help him move things along, we’ll see how that moves along.

The existing paradigm where you login into an admin panel, wait for shit to load, then click on pages, wait for more shit to load, then you type in things, the wait for shit to get published or built or whatever is not for a small website. There is a better solution for this. Here’s a list of the things that I would like to see in the next generation of website management system with a direct focus on text and markdown.

1. The system should be able to parse simple text files that are written in Markdown. I should be able to write something in my text editor, and either directly FTP the file (using something like Textwrangler or BBEdit). Editing would be as simple as opening the file locally and then editing away and saving again. An alternative method is to be able to put it in a Dropbox folder which is synched to a specific account set up for this sort of thing. The real issue here is that it should be able to do either of these things on any iOS enabled text editor with Dropbox synchronisation.
2. I should also be able to send an email, also written in Markdown and it will parse this accordingly. Save it onto the server, as per the rest of the files as well should also ‘publish’ a file as well.
3. The other part of this puzzle is how you get a bunch of other items into this system. If I see an image I like on a website, I read a quote I thought was good, I want to send a link, maybe on the very very odd occasion I want to have a video (very rare for me to do that), then I should have a way to do this. I should have a backend of some description that would allow me to actually send this information. The backend should then store the post as a text file and an image, saved in a media folder.
4. The final part of this system is that it should resolve archiving in a simple way. Depending on the date that the original date from file in Dropbox and then should be able to show an archive of the files depending on when it was originally ‘published’.

As you can tell, I’m in this weird transitional state at the moment. There are so many excellent and mature methods of publishing on the web, but none of them are for me at the moment, they don’t fit into my workflow.

The thing that I naturally permeate towards instinctively are are the things that I basically want, admire or are curious about. These are the things that I basically would like to have. These are the things that put a smile on my face, and which ultimately I like to talk about.

Cognisant: adjective [ predic. ] having knowledge or being aware of

This thinking actually can be attributed in many ways to Objectified which honestly completely changed the way I look and appreciate products and design. I guess that was the point of it all, but it seriously touched me in a profound way that no other documentary has ever done. A year and a half after I watched it I still think about things it said or tried to say. Sure there were several douche bags on there, but the message was there.

Crucially, in an in advert way it’s basically opened my eyes as to what this particular site will be about and has been building towards all these years.

While I’ve always wanted a space for my projects to live, and my art, it’s only a small part of me and there may be months before I am able to show what I’m working on a regular basis, even though I honestly am creating things on a relatively regular basis. It’s not just about what I create, it’s not just my therapy. It needed focus.

Which brings us to the here and now. Over the last couple of years I’ve been honing and observing things as I develop a sense of what I like and what I don’t like. Sometimes I used this site to achieve this. Recently I’ve been thinking that ultimately the site needed a direction, something it’s not had since it began. The focus seemed to be on design in general, then it meandered off to blogging software, which was like this loop of eating it’s own tail.

The thing that I hope to concentrate on in the future is the idea Cognisant Design.

It took a bloody long time to finally come up with this collection of words. I kept floating between ‘Considered’ and ‘Cognisant’. They are close to each other in meaning, but it’s more than thinking about something. It’s about knowing the reasons for those decisions. I’m sure I’m not the first to come up with these words together, but I hope to bring to the fore what this actually means and highlight examples of this design sense in action.

It’s not a question of minimal design. It’s not a question of functional design, it’s a question of design that is thought out completely, where things we done in a very calculated fashion, even if those calculations lead to what might be hyper detail or bright bursts of colour.

Although I’ve tried to describe it in this post, I feel that the best way to show what it is that I am talking about is to actually show rather than tell. I don’t think I can post this sort of thing on a regular basis, so the linkblogging will continue, however in addition to these quick things I will be focusing on Cognisant Design and hopefully we’ll all learn something new together.

I’ve been writing for nearly a week now on a regular basis. Most of the time it’s just words falling out of my brain and onto the page. On the side however I’ve been working on a pretty long post, that I knew had a point to it, but honestly I didn’t know where it was actually going.

The ultimate goal of this post was to define the need for this site in a world that doesn’t read ‘blogs’ anymore. The idea was that I change with the times and this site becomes more than me talking about my bonsai tree (which I love, but nearly killed) or my favourite iPhone application, rather it will be talking about these issues, however done in a completely different way, with a very different focus - it will become clear once I’ve actually posted that article, I assure you.

The thing that’s really struck me however is the fact that I wouldn’t have reached my goal and ultimately my focus had I not actually written all these other words and effectively made some space for the idea to come to the surface. The outcome of this particular post will be a complete shift in they way content is written and presented on this site, as I shift it and it becomes something different. In a changing world it’s important that one understands when you have to move on, adapt or start over.

In this case the ‘kode will remain giving some personal thoughts, and providing links, but ultimately it will be much more focused. How long will it take before I can deliver this vision, I’m not sure. I get married in a little over a month and as you can imagine we’re racing to the finish line trying to sort out all sorts of things, so I’m assuming that it won’t happen until after the wedding, but alas if I do get some time to complete these things I’m definitely going take that opportunity.

So I've been on an iPhone for a little over 7 months, and I've kinda stumbled my way through most things on my first iDevice. As of late, I've decided to sort myself out and by extension sort my iPhone out as well.

Email and Calendar Sync

The first thing that I sorted out was converting my email/calendar to a push notified Gmail account. The way you do that is not by using the Gmail option to creating an account, but rather using the Microsoft Exchange option on the iPhone which basically does that automatically. That I've found to be completely awesome as opposed to the Fetch protocol that I was using before, with my Mail app being updated every hour or something.

The next thing that I needed to sort out is my calendar options. I will use my Google Calendar on occasion, but will rarely use iCal really. In fact I probably use my office Outlook more than I've ever used my iCal application, it's just not something I'm used to doing at home. Calendars are definitely something I do throughout the day, rather than the evening.

Photos Mess

The last part of the puzzle that needs to be sorted out is my photos. What a complete and utter mess these things are in at the moment. The thing is they're also taking a whole slew of space on my iPhone as well. Ever since I migrated over to my new macbook install I basically put aperture...big mistake. Thought I was doing something clever. As it turns out I screwed myself as Aperture doesn't allow for the files to be deleted from the iPhone when you're synching. There are other options, but honestly I'm not all that enamoured by Aperture and it's just as slow as iPhoto (so I've not gained much in way of performance).

I need to get a few older files from my previous back, get iPhoto up and running on my mac, migrate back to iPhoto completely and then clean up my photo folder.

iPhone Applications Purge

Once that's done I just need to clean up my Files folder and also my Scanner Pro folder as it's got a bunch of additional stuff that doesn't need to be there, and I think my minimal setup is complete.

It's also probably time to purge a few applications off the phone as well, as the number of applications creeps back up to 45, which obviously I don't use all the time.

Also while I'm talking about iPhone applications, there are a couple of serious keepers for the forseeable future:

• Piggie: This is a direct change from MoneyBook
• Simple Note: Just can't believe I did without this application for so long. It's basically the gmail of notes. I'm finally bloody organised enough to have all of my notes with me all the time in a way that is clear and synced across my machines. Game changer.
• NightStand Central - The only alarm application that you will ever need. Or at least till something simpler comes along, but I have to say I love this application and the way it uses the hardware is excellent.

Damn, the whole news years thing came and went by and I didn’t get a chance to finish off my end of 2010 review. Still got a couple more posts on this.

Reading

The countless articles I’ve read online and in the various magazines I’ve bought over the year don’t get counted. The tweets I’ve read and wasted more time on, don’t get counted. That said, I am a bit embarressed to confess that on more than one occasion I would by the Economist (which I honestly believe is one of the best magazines for getting information on what’s going on in the world) and not actually read much of it, past the cover story. I think what I’ll try and do is, once a month try and actually get through an issue of the economist. Every week is a tall order, but once a month should be ok.

I also bought a few issues of Wired. The typical price in Lebanon is 19,000LL, which is approximately $12.5, around 8.5 quid, which is nearly double the cover price. Which is probably why I’m going to try and limit myself to reading this magazine once every couple of months.

I didn’t get into any new magazines over this last year, which is strange. I keep wanting to buy a Computer Arts, or a Mac World or something like that, but always end up putting it back on the shelf, as it just feels like a lot more disposable than the price tag requires.  The one nice thing that gets imported however is ‘The Guardian’ weekly. This is a digest of all the top stories in the Guardian provided in this A4 stapled format, which is easy to digest on a Saturday morning. It’s definitely something I’m considering buying more often in the future.

I guess I’m not being controversial here when I say I’d like to read a few more books. How I go about this is going to be interesting. Maybe I need to train myself to read at least 10 pages before I go to bed, multiplied over 30 days gives me 300 pages, which is roughly the size of an average novel. Sure some books are larger, but we’re generalizing here. Obviously best laid plans and all of that, but it could become a way of life.

It’s an interesting experiment, and will guarantee at least one book a month minimum.

Continuing with my year end review, I talked about blogging in general, now I get down to this site in particular and creativity and projects in general.

Website

I keep wanting to update with a lighter version, but I keep coming back to the darker colours and staying put. I know I will probably go for a slightly lighter motif pretty soon. Also I’d like to clean up the code finally as it’s a bit of a mess really. That’ll be the first thing I would like to do in January 2011. The design will pretty much remain the same, the underpinning will get lighter, the colours will change and I’ll probably add more doodles and images to places.

I guess I’m definitely of the mind to continue with the evolution of the site rather than a complete revolution. It works for me and it’s lasted the longest since I launched this site.

Creatively

Then there was this little drawing, which then got made into a glass painting which I get to look at every day.

I managed to make a few logos, some of which were actually used in the physical world, which again I thought was fantastic to see.

As if all of that wasn’t enough I got to complete my first draft and having been slowly hacking away at the second draft. It’s not as far along as I want it to be, but then again when was it ever going to be? Being this far along is reward enough. At least I’ve not given up on the dream. Given up on the dream, I’ve not worked this much on it ever. I’m waking up every morning and actually moving the process along.

Then finally, out of nowhere, I’ve even started off and created a little new robot character. I know I have a love for these things. It was completely by accident and it was inspired by me wanting to use my iPhone for something other than just consumption. I wanted to use it for creating. I am in the process of drawing a small backlog of pages so that I can start soliciting it on a weekly basis, which should be a nice distraction from all the other stuff that I’ve got going on at the moment.

When put like that, the output doesn’t seem too bad. There are a ton of projects I didn’t get to start, which I put the idea down on paper but never got around to. Ultimately however things actually were completed.

One of the things that I’m going to try and do next year is put rough deadlines. Even if I don’t meet these deadlines, at least I’ll push myself in the general direction of actually doing the work. Yes I might get a bit stressed while I do it, but that’s ok, it means I can look back on the year and be happy for what I completed. Actually completing projects is what keeps me happy. I’m also definitely going to buy this book.

That is pretty strange. I just was looking at the traffic logs on the site and I noticed a really really strange trend. At the start of the year I was seriously moving back up in terms of traffic. June was an epic month but I think that’s mainly attributed to the fact that I had a spreadsheet hosted here for the world cup and that generated a ton of traffic from Google.

But after that month there is this unbelievable drop of nearly 1/5 of the visitors. I mean even the months before this epic month were not as low as that. Did I change anything between the two months? Well for a start there was a less posting on the site? The ‘Kode is not like other sites where I basically post 3 or 4 times a day and have a super specific niche. The site is a personal blog that talks about all sorts of random pop culture items.

There is a ton of those on the web nowadays, but the question is finding which ones have got a unique voice, and that’s actually incredibly difficult to do. I neither have the time, nor do I feel like I am part of a community of people any more. Blog comments don’t exist any more, or no one really uses them as much as they used.

I guess it’s all a matter of perspective, and I don’t mind the smaller readership, it’s kind of fun to be honest, because I can go back to being as foul mouthed as I want without having to worry about anyone taking offence (or maybe less so than I would normally), it’s just what the hell happened in July to drive EVERYONE away :).

The plan is, and lets see if I can keep this up, is to give at least 2 posts a day. Sometimes they will be links, other times it will be longer based posts on things that i enjoy or am going through, lets see if I can keep this up.brok

So now that the plugins are working on the site, I’ve been able to get the archives plugin working, in the new Archives page. Still needs a lot of work to unify that look, but it’s nice to see all my posts over the years in one place. Definitely a slow down in the last year or so.

Broken Kode, there’s an app for that - not really, it doesn’t exist but if you like having websites as icons on your Iphone (you known by making a bookmark in mobile safari and then saving it to your homepage), the ‘Kode now has a customised icon just for that.

The way to do it is pretty simple, here’s a couple of links to help you with the “technical bits”, templates you might want to use and how to hide the address bar in mobile safari to show more of the site straight away:

1. Making an website icon without the gloss

2. Iphone 4 icon templates PSD

3. Hide address bar in mobile safari

Just to let everyone know, I can now be found firing shots (pretty shortly) on Dribbble. (Thanks to Chris for hooking me up with an invite).

The act of blogging on a daily basis, seriously seems like it was centuries ago, when only a few years ago I would have been doing this nearly every day a couple of times. The amount of words that I typed over the years now that I sit down and consider everything is a lot (others did a hell of a lot more, but then again others made it their business to do this).   I’d talk and discuss just about everything that was on my mind, in detail. Reams of consciousness would come out on a daily basis for people to digest, and there were many people at the time digesting it all. Now it’s very quiet over here. Part of me actually likes this quiet, and another part remembers the good old days when blogs reigned supreme.   I guess now it’s all about the 140 characters or the facebook updates or the plethora of other ways that people communicate online.   Also I don’t spend enough time tweaking the site, but that’s only because I’m actually happy with the overall look. The pages are clear (it’s taken me this long to get to this stage) and I finally have a mini portfolio section that I can point people towards. It’s not innovative in any way. Hell it’s not even particular exciting, but it’s clean and it’s minimal and it does it’s job to convey the information well. I would argue that it needs three more sets of colours to signify the changing of the seasons (which I very well might actually do).   The thing is that a site is only relevant if you actually continually update with current issues. From a promotional point of view I don’t do that any more. I hardly go online to other blogs, I don’t reply to many tweets. I don’t find things I’m interested in and go for it. The main reason? I guess it’s because I did that for years…not months, years. And now, I don’t really care about that stuff. I finally have what I want in terms of an online presence, one that I am happy with. I’ve tried over the years to give something back to people that gave me something and gave a great deal of my time and sleep to this.   Now it’s about my day job and the free time that I have I want to concentrate on my comic book. I’m slowly starting to creep my way back into getting my second draft completed. Obviously life always seems to get in the way, which I’m going to have to learn to either balance or deal with, but that’s a post for another time.

My god, it’s been a good long while since I’ve posted here, and honestly there is sooo much good stuff to talk about. The main issue I guess is that now my thoughts are distributed across the net. From Flickr, to Facebook, from Twitter to Instagram, to Google Reader. It’s no longer concentrated in one spot.

Also, I don’t update with personnal stuff, which really is what this blog was originally meant to be about. It’s a long form of expression, something that none of the above are.

So here’s the first bit of news, I’m officially engaged. Yeah, pretty sudden, even for me, but I guess, when you know, you know. And I knew very very quickly with Yasmine, from the first date I knew there was something up. Hopefully I might get her to start blogging on here as well.

Now all I need is a Habari app for my iphone and I’m good - yeah I got myself a brand spanking new iphone, which I love of course.

OhLife - If you start seeing more blogging action here on the ‘Kode in the coming months, it’ll be thanks to this site. Over the years I’ve used different methods to actually communicate online. First it was a newsletter to my friends as a long bastard email. Then it was this blog. Then it was Facebook for a while and a bit of twitter. Now, now it’s nothing really. But I love writing, and I love maintaining this site. Writing an email to myself every day, with my most banal things is a good way of getting back to blogging again. At least that’s the thought process.

One thing I love about the OhLife site is just how beautifully put together it actually is. It’s a single column design (just the way I like it) with subtle backgrounds and little details everywhere. The colour scheme is calm and the little bit of red brings out everything as well.

The guys have been smart enough to make sure to allow you to export your entries as well incase you wanna do something with them, and setting up an account is exactly as it should be, completely painless.

You probably haven’t noticed but now the ‘Kode comes with a completely responsive shiney design, and by responsive design I mean it responds to the size of your screen, well by responds to the size of your screen, I mean if it’s less than 480px (size of your iphone/ipod/blackberry?) then you’ll still be able to read very clearly (without scrolling horizontally) my AMAZING writing, and the brilliant commentary that I provide to you on an extremely sporadic nature - what can I say I’m feeling in a sarcastic mood today.

So if you’re reading it on your feed reader, I guess you could visit the site properly to have a look. The main area i’m pretty happy with is the fact that even the images resize to accommodate (like in the illustration section).

The truth of the matter is, the current version of the ‘Kode is soo simple that doing this was pretty painless, and took an a few hours to read up on how to actually do it. The best resource as you would expect is found at these two A List Apart articles:

1. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/responsive-web-design/

2. http://www.alistapart.com/articles/fluidgrids/

Then of course there are the prime examples to look at how this is achieved. Jonathan Hick’s for example has gone ALL out, with stylesheets for the iphone, ipad, 600px resolution, smaller, bigger whatever, it’s crazy - who the hell’s got the time? The general plan for the site is to keep doing general maintenance on the site and adding little things like this and generally bringing the design tighter together, trying to stay abreast with what’s going on the web (rather than being ahead of the curve).

Obviously, I could give a shit if it works in Internet Explorer.

So I’m there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.

That’s pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn’t really been modified since. What’s interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that’s a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.

Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode’s 1500th post.

Inspired by Coudal, I’ve decided to have a Page 2. It’s basically everything that doesn’t fit into my minimalist design. I’ll have to go into this design a bit more to be honest, because it’s basically longest running design. Every time I try and make it ‘better’ I always end up coming back to the same thing, only with a minor tweak here or there. I’ve not really talked about it, because it never seems all that interesting. What is interesting is that I’ve got over 15 iterations of the current design as I experimented with layout always coming back. I’ll have to post them in a gallery at some point.

If you’re subscribed to the site, then you’ve no doubt been bombarded this last day with 15 or so ‘new’ posts. These are all part of the illustration section which I’ve been putting together. Regulars of the site for a while will recognise a lot of these images, however there are several new ones and others that have never been shown in this way.

I kept thinking about the best way to put this section together, as there is a lot of stuff I’ve got on my harddisc that’s not seen the soft glow of the internet in years. Hopefully because of the general ease with which this section is maintained, I’ll be constantly uploading images to this section, because I’ve always believed that all art needs to be shown, because it gives you perspective on where you where artistically before and how much you’ve improved in the time passed.

Six years of Broken Kode. Here’s to many more.

I’m travelling down to the homeland (for lack of better word, Lebanon) tomorrow morning. It’s the first time in nearly 5 years and much I’m sure has changed (or maybe nothing has changed). Either way, expect a bit of radio silence from the ‘kode in the forthcoming week, while I sort out our home down there, the internet and EVERYTHING else that I need to deal with (really boring shit like bank accounts, passport, identity cards, buying a car, boring shit, but essential shit).

See you on the other side.

I can finally start talking about my sabbatical, as last night was the first time I felt slightly restless, which basically means that I’m calm and my brain isn’t being bombarded with work related thoughts. Until 2 weeks into my ‘sabbatical’ I was still having the most boring work dreams you can imagine. I’d wake up with a bit of a smile on my face since I didn’t need to do anything with that dream and my reality was the opposite, for once.

Now I’m back to not remembering my dreams, which means we can hunker down to get some work done. Maybe that’s why I’ve woken up at 5:30, because my body is telling me:

Get up you fool, we've got work to do. You've been sleeping till 9 for too long you lazy bum.

The sabbatical effectively starts today (at least in my mind). There are a couple of things that I’m hoping to achieve in this short period of time that I have in front of me and 6:30 in the morning is a good time to start as any.

After a moment of pure madness, I went back to WordPress, only to find that actually the creature comforts that I had become accustomed to in Habari were not present. It had such a detrimental effect on me that I could even post small links. The bookmarklets didn’t work, the thing felt heavy and I couldn’t wrap my head around the various elements of the code that had passed me by.

I’ll be writing more about Habari in the coming months as there definitely is a lot of work being done, but it just needs a bit of, consolidation of sorts.

If you’re reading this in your feed reader, then have a look at the site, which looks a little bit different, as I’ve also updated to version 9.

What’s the reason for going back to WordPress? Simply the plugins and documentation available to me to actually do what I need to get done. Yes I could called on the Habari community, but I just want to get on with things. Trying to write something like P2 for Habari is definitely out of my scope of knowledge. I’m not a developer. I’m not even a web designer. This is something of a hobby that I enjoy playing around with. But it should get in my way, and unfortunately due to my inadequacies as a developer Habari was getting in my way. I really really hope that in the future I’ll be able to make a proper and permenant jump over to Habari, but now is not the time (I did attempt it for a year, but my site looked more like it was created in 2006 rather than in 2009).

I am more than happy to play around with this and make it work for me, slowly moulding it and shaping it to what I want it to do, but writing this from scratch would be too much of a pain in my ass.

So here it is, comments are back online (for now) and I’m sure there is going to be a load more things to come in the not too distant future.

Although not an immense milestone by most blogs estimation (especially the professional blogs which pay you by the post), I think 1300 posts on ‘Kode is a significant achievement to sit back and take stock of. 1300 posts is roughly 216 posts per year, which is a little over 1 post every two days for the past six years. Truth is, there have been some pretty busy days and some very quiet days (nay months) over the years but overall there has been a consistent output of ideas, thoughts, critism and links over the years.

Changes

However the biggest change I’ve made here this year is removed comments. Comments were really sporadic in general, and the only thing I could count on was bloody spam. Getting rid of the spam has been great, but of course it’s also meant that if in fact I wanted to have a discussion with anyone then it’d have to come from an email, or on twitter.

Design

Future

It’s been nearly 4 1/2 years since comments were officially not part of this site. Back then it was because I couldn’t actually host them on my own site, until of course I moved to WordPress and during the blogging revolution of the early naughties. So what’s changed? Twitter and Facebook. Both of which have brought the internet to the world that hid themselves from it, but they’ve practically killed the blogosphere, or at least how it used to operate.

The funny thing is turning them off was on the cards for a while now. I’ve noticed this downturn for about a year now (probably a few months before I even moved to Habari as my blogging engine of choice).

Does it upset me? I guess it’s a different kind of change. While sometimes I like twitter, there’s too much noise for me on there. Also the fact that everyone only speaks in soundbytes does annoy me. I can’t read people’s thoughts about things because they’re limited and effectively people’s voices on the internet are silenced.

In the meantime I’ll be here writing more than 140 characters and hopefully sharing some good links from around the net. If you want to comment on something, drop me an email or you know…send me reply on twitter (maybe I’ll even integrate that twitter reply thing that Michael is attempting at the moment).

Thought I’d write down a list of all the areas that this site still needs work on. This is for my own personal use which I’ll be checking back on over the next few months to see what I’ve completed and how long it actually took me to complete.

1. Add a feature image at the top of the site (integrate design to suit).

2. Add gallery section. Either going to be via Picasa or a self hosted version. If self hosted then it'll need to be integrated into the design of the site.

3. Sort out the way comments are presented.

4. Write code to remove comments as a default (but allow previously posted comments to remain seen).

5. Add a decent contact form.

6. Integrate the forum design into the site properly (instead of using the general vanilla flavoured colourings).

7. Sort out the CSS file to allow a simple IE6, IE7 template. Also include some form of message to point peeps into getting a better browser.

8. Tart up the 404 page.

The great things I’ve found about the current design is that it allows me to get on with just linking to good stuff around the web. It’s not been designed to provide a showcase for my stuff, but that’s going to have to change or at least I’m going to have to think about a way in which I can tweaks things to not feel out of place. Building on the foundations I’ve set up.

The problem is that 2008 lacked focus for these areas, so it’s time to provide them with a slight bit of structure. I doubt I’ll be able to meet these deadlines, although I might try and attempt to do something about it, the harsh reality is that life will no doubt get in the way; however it’s better to have some structure than none at all.

Japan Photo Album

Finish the script

Clemency

Character Designs

Broken Kode

Broken Kode has finally reached the 1000 posts milestone. It’s taken nearly 5 years to get to this stage (I’ll be celebrating 5 years of the ‘Kode in January) and honestly there have been several times when I’ve considered shutting the blog down and just keeping a few images and a brief note on here, but I just could never do it, it was like shutting down a part of me. One thousand posts, some good, some bad, some controversial, some stupid, some clever, some offensive, some thoughtful, but one thing I’ve always tried to be is honest.

As always thanks for both reading and providing your comments on the site.

Today I was reminded that you cannot force design. You cannot force creativity. While thinking of something else the inspiration will strike. From my point of view, whenever I create anything I can actually see the final product in my mind. Sometimes depending on whatever it is that I am doing I will see this picture clearly and I have the necessary tools and skills to achieve that vision, othertimes I can see only my shortcomings…this is probably the norm to be honest.

The site’s design has been building slowly, organically as I got used to the Habari codebase and also what I wanted to do. I pretty much guarantee that the actual colours wil change, however I’ve got an idea in my head that if executed properly could be pretty good fun for me to see and also could be a good note to stop the redesigning of the site for a good long while.

Oh my dear god, why didn’t anyone tell me the colours on the site looked soo drab? I’ve been looking at the site (and the redesign) was done on my mum’s computer which was one of those ultra glossy screened things from HP. Problem is the colours that I see on my screen in London are definitely not the colours that I was seeing in Athens and definitely not the ones that will continue to be used on the site.

Be back in a little while sort this mess out and talk a little bit more about Habari and what would be cool to have.

Expect breakages, spills and loads of stupid things to go on the site, for a long while, until I get my freak on and actually get to the bottom of where-ever it is that I want to go. Either way I’m hoping to make something to move past my cables design from a few years back.

Edit 1 - So the colour scheme in my mind has settled down a little. There are three more base colours to come, but really that’s only going to be in full view once I’ve sorted out the artwork that is going to be pasted all over this site (from which those three base colours will come from). I’m still playing around with the typography and trying to see if I’ve missed something fundamental in the last 6 months that I’ve been out of the game. More about that laters I guess.

It’s pretty apt that I should be installing and using Habari in September to run the Kode. See I am seeing this month as the start of new beginnings for me. I’ve decided to take a bit of a new lease on life here. A new way of thinking about certain things, and really setting up the next goals for the coming year.

Maybe it’s because of my birthday, maybe it’s becasue I’ve just completed getting my chartership and everything else was put on hold until I had achieved that milestone. Maybe it’s because I decided it’s time to create things again as I miss that buzz, I miss the energy associated with this?

Really it’s a collection of things, you can’t possibly try and have as many irons in the fire as I had at one point and NOT getting completely burned out. Now that life has settled down a bit I can begin to concentrate on building things again. Slowly this time and with a clear goal of where I want to be.

Expect a LOT more opinion in the future, as honestly I’ve gotten to that stage, where I will say exactly what I think and not give a flying fuck. I used to be more raw, but seems I’ve calmed down a bit and I think unless you’re slightly angry creating is just not the same.

Lets see how this goes.

After nearly 4 years running the Kode on WordPress, I’m making the jump and going to better pastures. The internet in general is not high on my priority list, however I love the Kode and want the best for it, WordPress has not been the best for it for many many moons, which is probably one of the many reasons that the site got a bit left by the wayside.

Expect a little bit of breakage, maybe even come back later for the new RSS feed (which I think will probably be http://brokenkode.com/atom/1), as I transition over to Habari. See you on the other side.

My focus in the last couple of months has shifted. This is probably the longest I’ve not been creative in the traditional sense of how I would describe being creative. I’ve not been drawing, not been designing (graphics at least), not been creating. Which to me is something really painful. I’ve stripped by involvement online down to an absolute minimum and all of this in the persuit of one thing. Finishing off my script.

This thing has been brewing for YEARS now and has taken more turns than I can imagine, but thankfully the last couple of months have been very productive. I’ve got the first half of the book mapped out and written. The thing is that creating a whole world is extremely hard. Every single character is new, every single setting needs to be described and every word of dialogue is analysed.

In order to help me get into the whole script writing, I’ve had to really emmerse myself in the comic production side of things. I’ve been reading scripts that are within the comic books that I read, I’ve been hunting online for various resources and the one thing that I’ve found is that the actual method is completely unique to every single person. I’m sure there are creators that have got the same method of working as I do, however I’ve not really read anyone’s account of this yet. Mainly I guess because the people that I’ve been reading that write and draw their own stuff have reached that level of craft where they can cut corners.

I’m still learning the track, so there is no corner cutting for me. The great thing about this experience however is that I can see the fruits of my labour slowly evolve. I started off with one page which was incredibly difficult to write (how do you start off your epic after all) before finishing off the first arc. It’s a slow process but ultimately once I’ve got the script in my hand I can then concentrate on the next task of drawing the thing. The plan and I will do EVERYTHING in my power to achieve, is to have my first graphic novel completed by the time I hit my 30th birthday (I turn 29 next week). It doesn’t have to be published, but it definitely has to be completed as one package which I can then start shopping around to see if anyone is interested (I have only two companies that I would consider publishing to, otherwise I think I’ll go down the self publishing route).

My creative energies for the next year are going to be fully dedicated to the story.

Oh my that is a first. First time in 5 years of blogging that I don’t actually say anything for an entire month. I’ve been busy…if you’ve seen me in the office, you’ll attest to this fact. Thankfully it’s not been just work, as that would make Khaled a pretty dull boy all around….which I hope never to become.

Life has taken over, so much so that my online activities have been curbed to an absolute minimum. So much so that I even got rid of my Blackberry today. I was THIS close to waiting till next week for the new iphone. What made me stop? The reason is pretty simple actually, I’m trying to step away from this constantly connected all the time fashion. It wasn’t doing my psychology much good and I really felt wired all the time, which was a bit much for my sensibilities. There is something called too much information.

Does this mean I’m going to be back online anytime soon? Nah, probably not. I’ve got more important things to do right now. My focus is shifting and I’m actually really ok with that. The main reason for moving offline is to try and concentrate on the script, which has been going slowly but actually very well.

One thing I will say about creating a story, it’s INCREDIBLY difficult to create something cohersive. So much so that I have an even greater appreciation for those people that can come through with their vision and create something that truly is beautiful to behold. I will have some sketches online sometime soon because it’s the story is part of the reason for this haitus. I’m becoming 29 this year and I will have the fucking thing done before that birthday, so that I can actually have a chance of drawing it before I’m 30. Tall order I know, but alas strive for the hard otherwise what’s the point?

There is definitely something to be said about a slow burning design. At least from where I’m sitting. I started redesigning the ‘Kode last week but the deal I made with myself was that I would limit myself to doing one small thing every day. One element of the design. Be it the typography, or some colour changes or implementing how the asides look. Nothing drastic, just small increments.

The honest reason for this approach is that my life doesn’t allow me the luxury to come in every single night and just hack away and try and sort the code out test it make sure it’s all pucker both locally and online before I unleash it in one big fell swoop. I’ll average 3 nights a week (usually less) when I’m actually at home at a reasonable time and I guess in part I was also suffering from a bit of design fatigue.

Trying to get to that final result seemed pretty daunting at first. Soo many pages that I want to sort out, so many elements that need to be designed for and implemented that when I’ve tried in the past year to deal with them, I just get overwhelmed and often they just live in an electronic graveyard on my computer.

So my tip for all you hobbiest blog designers that do have a bit of redesign fatigue, I would definitely recommend this approach of breaking the pie into smaller slices. Don’t get too upset if things are not there. Start on a solid foundation (I started from my favourite coding base from a previous design) and add to the design in a slow but controlled and consistent fashion. It might not get there as fast, but you’ll definitely enjoy the process more, at least I can claim that I am enjoying this tweaking a lot more than I’ve ever enjoyed sorting out my site.

Maybe it’s because you’ll have moved the design forward, maybe it’s because there’s something fresh to look at every day, maybe it’s both.

Nothing new to add to the general conversation of redesigned website to be honest just that this is what has been going on with my thought process lately (ok from yesterday). I’ve been sitting on a redesign for the ‘Kode for many months now. It’s been going on for so long that it’s kind of embarrassing to talk about. So much so that I kept flitting back and forth between designs last year in an attempt to get my act together.

However what I’ve gone and done now is gone back to the design I’m most proud of, from both a functional point of view but also from a code base. It’s a solid and relatively light code base which I’m pretty happy with. There are somethings that I know I can do better with however I don’t have the energy to start from scratch and don’t want to dive into someone else’s code really, especially as I want to be able to tweak this to suit my own needs completely.

So I’m going to be tweaking and adding something new to this site every day. Some of the tweaks may be pretty drastic to be honest, while others will be less than obvious. I’ll bring the copy in my static pages up to speed. I’ll sort out some links that are dead. I’ll start to sort out my categories properly and generally bring the design in an evolutionary method to where I want it to be.

I’m through with these drastic redesigns, maybe a slow burn approach will present me with something that I find more enjoyable to use, as my enthusiasm for writing is directly linked to the look of my site. So if you’re reading this on your feed reader, you might want to check the site from time to time to try and spot the differences.

It’s not a question of getting everything right the first time out, it’s a question of slowly evolving and adding and tweaking in a methodical and periodic fashion.

I was thinking about this today and basically, blogging involves removing the additional thoughts that are in your head that take up valuable space. Things that you should think about but not necessarily keep in your brain knocking about. That way it leaves you with more time to do other things, like in my case watch ‘The Wire’ (best police series EVER created) and read a few books (got a couple of reviews for books you really should read) and most importantly for my sanity, create things. That’s when I’m most happy, when I’m creating stuff.

The issue with me is that that part of my brain has been laying dormant as I began thinking and doing a bunch of other things that seriously didn’t really add to my being,…overall…in hindsight and all that. Part of the problem I guess is that I’m not angry enough at stuff, so it’s time to start getting angry again and flex that muscle again. It’s time to start creating again, it’s time to start blogging again, none of this 7 posts a month bullshit.

To the internet. So last week we were offline at casa Khaled. Yes, that’s right, no net access whatsoever. At first I’ve got to admit that I was REALLY angry. Not at anyone but at the situation itself. I mean seriously, my computer felt like it was neutered. I felt completely cut off from the world and all because as it turns out one of the cables coming into the house decided to collapse on itself. Maybe because it finally decided to give up the good fight because of the cold weather? Maybe it was because the workers outside moved it a fraction and it was to frail to deal with it, either way I was cut off.

This has happened before to be honest, however this one I was a bit more composed with the whole thing. I was actually able to deal with a few things that I’ve been meaning to deal with for a while; like do a bit of writing, do a little bit of drawing and generally do a couple of things that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. One thing I did miss was this site. I realised that I need this place for venting, something which i’ve been doing a lot less of in recent times. One of the main reasons I continued to blog was because I liked the cathartic process associated with brain dumping, because after all that ALL I’m doing here. Sometimes I rattled a few cages, sometimes I make a couple of people smile, so I think I’ve found that spark that I need to really start making the words on this site start coming alive. So as of tomorrow, you can expect a lot more ‘Kode action coming your way, daily even.

It’s also time I kicked WordPress like a bad habit. Seriously, this shit takes FOREVER to log in. Once you’re in it’s kind of OK, but honestly SLOW as a fat man in water. Some things in 2.5 are nice, but alas I’m thinking too damn little, too damn late, I guess I will write something about it at some point.

Elsewhere.brokenkode.com (powered by Asaph) is a an images dumping ground for things that inspire me and has been up and running for a week or so. I’ll hopefully get around to skinning this as well, but I’ve got to say that Dominic really did a good job on this little application and can’t wait to see future iterations.

So yesterday I finally saw a celebrity I actually gave two shits about seeing. I creator who’s work I’ve actually enjoyed greatly. We went for a few drinks in Belsize Park yesterday and then decided to go for a bit of food after that. Of course, four people trying to decide on food sometimes can go smoothly and sometimes can go horribly wrong. Well in this case as we were walking up the road towards Hampstead and we see this little French restaurant that’s part of a hotel. I instantly dismissed it as not something I’d really like to go for, however Sophia had been there and recommended the food as being pretty good. So we go have a look at the menu and it was wide enough to allow us to actually cater for everyone’s crazy mood of food that night.

I was last in line and Stathi was right in front of me, so he quickly turns around to me and says ‘Dude, is that Helena Bonham Carter? I quickly turn around and say “Nah, her hair’s all over the place, she’s not looking as glam as i would expect”. In that split second what I hadn’t noticed of course was the person she was with. As we got seated, I did a quick glance over and lo and behold there was Tim Burton. See for me THAT is a celebrity. The actors are not the important bit (more on this later). The director is the captain of the ship. He’s the one that touches the movie in absolutely every single way, story, script, casting, sets, money, promotion, the whole lot. A great director will take unknown actors and make a great movie. A great actor won’t be able to make a bad movie great. He’ll play his part in a great way and shine himself but the movie doesn’t really benefit…not really because it still remains a pile of shit, regardless of how great the actor’s performance actually was. So I generally will follow directors, rather than actors (there are VERY VERY few exceptions to this rule). This little snippet was the source of a relatively heated discussion yesterday as i tried to explain to everyone that I was properly star struck by a creator’s who’s work I’ve been following since Edward Scissorhands, and well I liked Helena in Fight Club, a lot. But i wouldn’t exactly consider myself a fan of her body of work, since except for that movie I’ve only ever seen/heard her in….Tim Burton movies (Corpse Bride and Sweeny Todd).

So there you go, the first ‘celebrity’ that I actually was kinda star-struck. See NEXT week I will be 100% COMPLETELY and utterly star-struck as I am going for the Alan Moore signing in London. For all those that don’t know who Alan Moore is, you guys really have not been paying my attention.

This weekend I’ve decided to finally get down to completely my chartership forms. For those in the dark, part of a professional engineer’s life (and I’m not talking about your electrician or telephone repair man, who while both are great fields, they are definitely not engineers) is to try and achieve his chartership status. The status means a lot of things for different people and once you’re in the group you are really part of a group of people that have fulfilled specific criteria (ranging from their technical knowledge to their project management skills to their people skills and so on) and therefore you look at them in a completely and different manner.

I felt it most recently when I was sitting in a meeting this week with another consultant from another company and his business card had the letters CENG. That was in many respect enough for me to understand that the guy in front of me wasn’t pretending, he was the real deal and therefore I could discuss things with him on a specific level. Obviously he couldn’t really look at me with the same light as I’m missing those 4 little initials after my name. The thing is that after 6 years of work experience in the construction and building services industry, I’m no longer pretending either. I’m doing these things that are required of you as a Chartered Engineer. The only thing that is stopping from going forward is myself. So this weekend in the History of Khaled, I will be spending nearly EVERY waking hour to dealing with these forms once and for all. All that vigor that I put into my art, into my work on a regular basis, into my online contributions will now be put into my Chartership status. I will not go into work on Monday without that form completed as a draft and ready to go to my mentor as a first stab for him to pass comments.

However in order to do this, I’m probably going to need to sort out my supplies early in the morning for the weekend, and I’m going to have to turn off the internet. I’m only allowed specific toilet and food breaks. I’ve got the evening off, however the entire weekend is dedicated to this goal, fully and totally. Lets see if I actually get things done.

Today was the first time I used Awaken from Embraceware. It was a whole new experience for me waking up today to a bit of Soundgarden. Tradiitionally I’m jerked out of bet through the bitter sound of my cheap £4 alarm clock that’s been going strong for YEARS. I tell you what, I am most definitely not going to miss that horrible, horrible sound.

Loads and loads of things to write and talk about, especially as this blog is now officially 4 years old today. Got a great deal of exciting things to talk about in the coming month but I think I’ll share this excellent quote by one of my favourite authors Neil Gaiman:

May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you're wonderful, and don't forget to make some art -- write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Seems like the most apt way to begin this new year off. Happy new year everyone.

It’s been a while since i’ve done something like this, but I can’t help myself, i’ve been sitting on this for months now.

So I had myself a bit of a Facebook purge today. As Facebook is becoming more and more part of the cultural landscape it’s become a bit more important to be a wee bit more careful regarding which people can actually see your details. Maybe I’m being a bit too cautious but the thing is I have been slapped once before regarding the ‘Kode at work. I know sounds strange since I’m extremely careful to make sure I don’t really say anything about what’s going on at work except regarding which projects I might be working on and having a picture taken off the architect’s website. The point is, you never know when certain information is going to come back and really bite you on the ass, and as such I’d really rather not get into too many of those situations in the future (hey I am a blogger and therefore I will no doubt get into trouble at some point down the line).

So I’m off any groups, won’t find me as part of any networks. The only people that can see me are the few that I allow in. Any photos I don’t like I take the tags off and hope they never get seen (exceptionally bad ones are asked to be removed).

The thing is I find Facebook as a concept to be awesome, and I love the implementation of it as well. I like it’s clean lines and distinct design. I like how functional it can be (although finding a decent Flickr plugin is like pulling teeth) I just want all my Flickr photos to be part of my photo albums and that’s it. However as with everything moderation is the best option.

Over 1000 photos , but here is a small slither of what is to come:

Well, I have not been near a computer for about a week but it’s good to see that the internet doesn’t stay quiet. I am specifically referring to the exodus of members from the 9rules network. Now to all those out there scratching their heads and wondering why I am calling this an exodus, you’ll understand soon enough. A little history for those in the dark or who don’t actually care all that much about such things, 9rules is a blogging network that reached it’s zenith (at least in terms of popularity) about a year and a half ago…give or take a several months. It was an incredibly vibrant place, with a great website and really active members. This was back when bloggers were rock stars….erm you know what I am saying, back when blogging was fresh and new as opposed to the norm in the web landscape.

I have not had the time to formulate my reasons (in a proper post that is) for leaving the network and all my miscellaneous thoughts about the process and aftermath (as I am in Japan at the moment and can’t sleep), however what I would like to do is try and compile a list of all the 9rules members that did leave.

My reason for doing this is to address one of my main gripes about the way in which departures from the network have been handled, or as the case may be, not been handled. While a new site is celebrated, a departing site (or even original member departing) does not even warrent a small mention on the offical blog. While I can understand how the powers that be might feel like a failure that people would choose to leave, I personnally see this in another way.?This should really be a time to wish everyone well in all their future endevours and thank them for being a part of the network (as long as those members were not kicked out for shoddy conduct, which I don’t think any of the listed members were). In this particular case a least 16 sites have left the network, one of which was there from round one, I have been there from round two and several others have been extremely active members in the community (I doubt anyone will reach Paul’s forum count, ever).

So with that in mind I would like to start a little list of the 9rulers that have recently left the network, it was an honour being seen in such great company as yourselves (if you have left recently and I haven’t included you, please drop a comment and I will update this post):

1. Broken Kode

2. Binary Bonsai

3. Chris J Davis

4. Warpspire

5. Paul Stamatiou

6. Openswitch

7. Christian Mohn

8. h3h

9. Seopher

10. Dan lockton

11. Standards for life

12. Baires Elsur

13. i-marco

14. a-rain-of-frogs.com

15. Smarandayal

16. Wynia

17. Transformatum

18. Ryan Arrowsmith

You know what I find the absolute weirdest thing in the world? I’ve got this Canon LiDe scanner right, got it something like 5 years ago and has served me pretty well in all those years. It’s not the best scanner in the world, but to be honest, based on the fact that most of my stuff is put on the web rather than in print, it’s not exactly the end of the world. The weird thing is that my scanner works right out of the box in Ubuntu. Don’t need to download any drivers, don’t need to mess around with anything, and it works quickly and perfectly. Obviously it’s not all roses right, my Ipod shuffle obviously doesn’t want to play nice with Ubuntu, even though the latest version of Banshee is the music player that I’ve been waiting for all my life. So many great little features have been added to the latest couple of versions since I played last with it. Yeah like that’s any good to me as my fekkin sound card that doesn’t work for toffee and keeps giving me trouble all the time.

So I get back on Windows (because it’s got Photoshop) and fekkin Apache has decided to stop bloody working through XAMPP, so I can’t honestly get any work done for Habari as doing it on a live server takes forever.

I did download the latest and greatest Oxygen icons onto Ubuntu and I’ve got to say they are definitely some of the nicest things I’ve seen in a good long while…shame I couldn’t get the latest version of the Crystal icons to fekkin install (lovely redesign by Everaldo btw), as those look great as well.

Obviously I’ve upset someone in computerland and they’re trying to punish me in every painfully frustrating way. Seriously it’s times like this that I think the magic bullet is getting myself a Mac. But then again everyone says that when all manner of software decides not to work right?

One year older, one year wiser. Damn that one went by pretty quickly. I’ve got to say that when I was younger I used to get really pretty depressed about my birthday, nowadays I’ve come to accept the inevitable, so now the plan is to grow old with dignity….so I’ll be working on that last part later on. In any case happy birthday to all the Leo/Virgo cusp people born on the 23rd of August have a great one.

So you might have noticed a certain lull in activity on the Kode. The main reason is the fact that I’m EXTREMELY busy at work right now. It’s been absolutely insane. The thing is though, it’s pretty standard fare for the summer as most people with kids tend to take their holidays in and around the same time which makes the rest of us crazy ones that are left behind to hold the fort in the meanwhile. The good news is that I’m actually enjoying a lot of the work that I’ve been involved with (not that I haven’t enjoyed my previous work). One of my latest projects is this tiny little project in Egypt. The architects on the project are Michael Graves. We went to see them in Princeton last week and that was actually pretty cool. My first visit back to the states since last year when I went to my brother’s graduation.

I honestly doubt that I’ll be blogging much during August, as I’ve got very little to say and generally soo tired, I can’t even talk. The thing is though that I really miss my website. I miss the interaction with all the crazy cats and dogs on the net. I miss being involved. Hopefully come September I can have more time to remedy this situation.

Just sorting out the html and slowly hacking the css file. The idea is to slowly chip away at the actual code slowly but surely. I’m not in much of a hurry as I’ve got SOO much stuff left but I find that I enjoy writing more by actually having this new evolving design live.

Geeze that took a long time but I can finally report that I’ve actually sorted out the Kode’s version 6 mockup. Now you might say:

"How the hell is this relevant you lazy fuck? Sort out the full implementation of the site instead of telling us about the damn mockup".

Ah patience young Padawin one, the significance here you see is the fact that this final mockup has only come after 21 FAILED attempts. 21 attempts, and iterations and tweaks and modifications. That’s an insane amount of time spent on designs that are not going to be used….EVER. Some of the ideas where pretty nice but the overall package lacked a je ne sais quoi.

So how is this interesting to you? Easy, I actually realised what I was doing wrong and to be honest it’s a fundamental element that I employ in all of my works that seemed lacking in this instance and I decided to go down a completely different route, one that was more clinical rather than conceptual as I usually do. I’ll try and elaborate. When I design or draw something, I usually think of a concept and run with it. I may be trying to emulate a specific feel or idea. Version 4 for example was influenced by my rereading Akira at the time. I loved the cables and the detail which is where that particular design came from.

For this one, I just wandered aimlessly. Moving from one idea that I thought was killer to the next. Sadly only some ideas were any good. In general I was missing the overall picture that combined the design.

A new Broken Kode will be appearing shortly.

Well it’s been a bit too long coming, but I think I’ve found a theme that I can get to grips with relatively easily. I’m going to be hacking Depo Clean, adding parts of Fauna and some K2 in for good measure. I had a look at Sandbox and I’ve got to say that I was pretty turned off by the function.php file that they’ve added in there. It just makes the markup so much more difficult to understand at first glance which is what made me keep looking for alternatives that just did the job cleanly. In any case Depo Clean probably best resembles what I’m aiming for in the end anyway so it helps that I like the markup as well. The next time I do this I’ll be converting this markup into something that can be used with Habari.

So I’ve decided on the final design (after something like 19 iterations all of which I will show everyone in due course) but I feel some of the html that I have been using on my site is slightly out dated since to be honest I have definitely not been keeping track of the comings and goings of the wordpress software and a lot of that code was based on practices of version 1.5 and before.

So the question I pose to everyone is what is the most up to date theme that has super simple html markup and most importantly doesn’t try to do too much. What I mean by that is a theme that has not been designed with additional cruft to include for an admin options panel, hooks for widgets that fit within wordpress.com etc. I’m not looking for a mod like K2, although I’ll be sure to have a look at some of the things done on K2 for inspiration. I’m looking for something that I can use and modify myself. The look is completely irrelevant as I’ll be dumping the css file straight away anyway and starting fresh.

Any recommendations ?

Now see that is bloody interesting. A month ago I kinda asked about whether or not people actually look at design or not. Since that time I kinda have this inprogress site design going on and have noticed my readership and hits to the site seriously fall by half.

So for all those thinking to themselves and wondering whether or not design is still important to traffic, hell damn yes it is important. You’re all fickle, you know that don’t you :). Which also means I’ve got to pull my finger outta my a$$ and just finish off the design, which I more or less completed as a mockup last week. So expect something soon.

So I’m reading the Eddie Campbell interview on CBR and he’s talking about his recent love for blogging. As such he’s still got that amazing enthusiasm for the whole experience that I feel, over 750 posts and three and a half years of doing this, I might have lost a little bit of it. I can’t imagine Broken Kode not existing in one form or another but it’s definitely not as regular as it used to be. However one part of the interview that got to me was when he says:

I feel exhilarated by the challenge of writing something interesting every day of my life.

See that is a challenge isn’t it. Every day; something interesting. I’ve not had that sort of thinking in ages. Back in the day I used to wake up early blog for like 15minutes or something. Now instead I wake up in the morning and read my feeds. Expect a little bit more traffic from the Kode.

Well for the first time ever, I’m actually going to be going through the live redesign process. Fuck it man, I’ve been playing around with countless photoshop mockups and NONE of them are really jumping out at me, so I’m just jumping into this with two feet and see where it all goes. I know there are some things I want in a certain way, so lets see how this all rolls out and how long it takes me to get to the finish line. It’s going to be sporadic at best, but hey it’ll be interesting to see how long this actually takes me.

Is it just me, or has the yearly ‘reboot’ phase kinda gone down like a bit of a whipper this year? I’ve read one website that I actually read participate in this year’s event. No the ‘Kode hasn’t really jumped into it this year, although I’ve been working on a redesign for a little while. The problem is actually two-fold. One is that I’m not feeling as creative as I have been in years past, and secondly I’m failing to see the point in doing this anymore as most people who read this don’t visit the site. They read it via their RSS aggregator. It’s only those crazy souls that come via search engines and actually typing a comment in here (I love you both, although those that leave a comment even more).

Does it matter anymore what my site looks like? I’m finding it hard to convince myself at the moment, and I’m lacking that dramatic flair and energy that is needed for a proper redesign.

The more I think about this the more embarrassed of myself I feel. Basically I sat down today to take stock of what I should be doing in my free time (yes I have to have to be doing something in my free time, I bore extremely easily). I decided earlier last month that I was going to finish off my commitments from last year as soon as possible.

These are basically Priya and Stathi’s websites. For the eagle eyed of you, if you go over to the illustration section of the site you will see the very first completed illustration of 2007 (the first of many to come I hope). It’s the basis for Priya’s website which I should go live by the end of the week (make a deadline public therefore making sure I deliver, nice). I’m about 50% into the coding; it’s a simple website that really should not have taken the stupid amount of time that it has taken but alas better late than never. Also by next week I should have the next illustration up there as well (it’ll be the basis for Stathi’s website) which is definitely one of the most detailed sites I’ve worked on in a very long time.

After which I will only delve into the world of websites when I’m fucking about with my own web space. It’s funny but the code that is currently running the site was originally written nearly a year ago and it’s been tweaked slightly over the year. I don’t really intend to screw around too much with the site to be honest but the colours and graphics will be changing in the coming months as I delve deeper into Aitus Moralis; this is the tentative title (and may end up being the actual final title) of my first graphic novel and my next confirmed project.

I knew the basic idea of the story and remembered that I had actually written something for it, but I honestly couldn’t remember what I had written. It’s not until today that I really realised just how much work I’ve completed over the years and just completely forgotten about. I’ve got flash trailers, sketches and pages upon pages of research and script already written. My life on the internet has seriously been one MASSIVE detour for my honest true passion, sequential storytelling.

So today marks the first day of the journey into getting published. I’m not going to hide it, I want to publish my book via Image Comics. I want the ‘I’ on my book. I know it sounds strange but while the older generation was into Marvel and DC comics I have always been a follower of creators. I guess that’s what’s I was raised on in the 90s. The pundits can say what they will about the 90s, it had a lot more creator owned books than what we have now. Oh sure a lot of it was pure garbage but at least it was the creator’s garbage and the stuff that was weak has and will never be seen again, I intend for “Aitus Moralis” to not fall down that stupid path. I want to own my book’s destiny, because honestly I wouldn’t allow for any other monkey to touch it. All monkey business will be under my control.

Lofty goals I’m sure but it’s a dream I’ve had since I was 13, so it’s about time I delivered and reached.

I will be peppering the site with sketches and designs and drawings from this series as the Kode starts to shift slowly but surely into that direction. Coco will be making his exit and I’ll be moving him over to Splash Panel as he will be the official mascot for Splash Panel. The logo might change slightly in the future to be honest to tie better with the new graphical direction which will be decidedly less vector and have a more painted feel to it.

Let me start off by saying that Inksmith is what I view as my biggest online failure, after a fashion and this is what this particular post is about. Whenever I announce a project or something I usually deliver, notice I said whenever I announce a project. I may be a blabber mouth an I do get excited about things and have the urge to talk about them, however I never announce until I’m 100% certain I’m going to follow through (seriously if I didn’t do that I’d be writing this sort of shit all the time).

I might take some time to bring it forward (usually I take a lot longer that I could possibly want) however the fact of the matter remains that I will see things through. It seems that ever since the ‘announcement’ of Habari a few moons ago, some have brought up Inksmith as a way to bring discredit to Habari (at least the negative connotations that Inksmith is presented in infers this). It’s as though the fact that nothing moving forward on Inksmith is telling of stuff that might not happen on Habari, which honestly is the single most preposterous idea I’ve ever heard. These are two very very different things and I find those that mention them as though they’re linked in the same way done so as an act of ignorance/stupidity/lack of understanding etc. Here’s why.

The first fact brought forward is to understand what the two things actually were. Inksmith simply was an idea to create a community for bloggers. No this wasn’t a rip off on 9rules. I wasn’t creating a blog network but rather an area for bloggers to get around and be themselves. Oh sure there wasn’t really a central theme for us to bandy around, but what I wanted was a nice buzzing community that helped each other out and was open for people to get to know each other re our love for blogging. It wasn’t ground breaking and it wasn’t anything crazy, but it would have been fun and loads of the guys where well up for it. The best part of it all was the pictures on the coming soon site. I really liked the fact that we were all pissed off in those photos. It delivered what Inksmith was all about, angry people on the internet venting :).

So where does the similarities lie you ask? As far as I can tell it’s the fact that some of the names attached to one project are now attached to another. So does this mean I’ve tarnished the credibility of the others on that list (since it was my idea)? Maybe and I guess they are the only ones I owe an apology to, because I didn’t deliver on my part of the bargain, so to everyone that was attached to the Inksmith project I apologise profusely. Let’s get something clear here, if I ask someone to be part of something I take their commitment seriously. I generally don’t like to waste ANYONE’S time as time for me is the most important commodity. So I genuinely feel bad about wasting those people’s time. We had some great discussions and it did prompt a lot of people on the internet to discuss the deal with being anonymous on the internet and using handles.

Why didn’t Inksmith take off? Because I didn’t have the energy to kick it off. 2006 was one of the toughest years on me from many many respects. In fact from May onwards I can definitely consider 2006 as one of the darkest times in my life from many angles. Which is actually reflected in my blog. What, you think that the dark motif was because I was joining in with the trend for darker sites at the time? No, Broken Kode is an extension of me and it reflects my mood in many cases. When my mood changes so to does the colours on my site, and the design itself in many respects.

So why didn’t I get Inksmith started? Honestly it came down to the amount of energy and enthusiasm I had to provide for the project, which after completing FOFR and Shuttle and 2 websites for clients and my on website and a bunch of illustrations I just didn’t have any more to give, until I was in Greece in October/November. At that point I had charged my batteries and I had decided that it was time for me to pull my finger out and build Inksmith all over again. For all the negative assholes that don’t believe me here’s the logo I created on the plane back to the UK:

So why did I stop that momentum? Simply put because the day I got back from the UK Chris had emailed me about Habari. In Habari I basically found another way to solve the problem that I wanted Inksmith to solve in the first place; the difference of course is that we’d have a central idea to gather around and that would be the software.

The community coming together around Habari is one I’m very proud to be a part of in the first instance. Final word to those that decide to put Inksmith in my face one more time, seriously try and do something constructive with your time, I know I am.

Forest was back in town for the weekend and we were catching up as I’ve not seen him since the summer. We’re shooting the shit and he asks me how my artwork and design work is going. Of which I had to answer with the truth, in reality it’s not. Oh yeah sure I’ve recently been playing around with Habari, but to be honest Habari is a hobby which I’m enjoying being a part of, but I wouldn’t say it’s stretching my artistic muscles. It’s definitely making me take a much more pragmatic approach to design and I’ve done this before but I know when my artistic muscles are being flexed and sadly I can’t really claim the last year to have provided me with any level of truly artistic expression and in talking with Forest I kind of inadvertently voiced the reason why.

I’ve heard in the past that there are two sides to the way the brain works (I could obviously be making this shit up so if you’ve got links whatever please do send them over) in that it’s operates and functions with practicality in mind, maths, engineering, science. And then there is the creative side of the brain. These two areas don’t cross over very often but when they do you get freaks of nature like myself who do engineering by day (so it’s all about calculations, making things work/fit) and by night I draw and I create, or at least that’s what I thought I could do easily.

The harsh reality of the situation however is that I’ve obviously FAILED in that respect (chalk another failure on my part, one of many in my life) What I’ve found to be the case however is that if I’m submerged in engineering, my other drawing energy and concentration seems to disappear. I guess much like many people I need to be in a particular frame of mind. The music that I’ll be listening to has to inspire me as well (I draw a lot better when I’ve actually got music I’m really into at that particular moment in time); my mind has to be a blank, and I have to have focus. Cutting my drawing based on pesky stuff like eating and sleeping is the bane of the entire exercise to be honest.

So what’s the solution you ask? Well now that I’ve ACTUALLY identified the problem (which I always knew but I’ve not properly voiced until now) it’s really up to me to MAKE the time for drawing and retrain myself to my current situation. Originally I thought I’d have trouble finding the time to do all these things. See it’s not a question of whether or not you have the time to do something (at least that’s how I see it), the harsh reality of a busy working life is that you’ll never find the time. It’s up to you to seriously make the time and it’s up to you to train your mind and schedule your time in such a way so as to accommodate those things that you want to do. My problem it would see is my psychological status and my willingness to tackle the creative avenue in front of me.

So it’s time to be pragmatic about things one more time and really put in the hours of building and creating once again. Hopefully that’ll manifest itself in several unfinished projects that have been laying around the place in the attempt of making them a reality again.

It’s been a truly exciting time for Habari on the design front (not that it’s not been exciting on the code front, but I can only really properly comment on all things design to be honest). Since the last time we talked, Michael has been a busy boy with absolutely everything under the sun. All these ideas have been filtering through the designs as we build towards a unified look for the administration panel.

Remember these mockups are just that mockups, we’re still meandering trying to sort things out, this is an open design process so things are going to change. Don’t think that what you see here is gospel and how it’s going to be, don’t be quoting me fekking Jakob in my face about usability and whatnot. These are the formation months, trust me we’re going through MANY MANY loops and discussions. So with that in mind let’s begin shall we.

The Installer

Stage One:

Final Stage:

We’re still playing around with loads of things here. The header and footer are still up for discussion but the main ideas are there. We’re definitely going for the easiest installer award with this release.

Create Page

Michael’s been pretty busy and he’s got his ideas regarding the media browser on ‘paper’. Once we’ve ironed out all the kinks and how it’s going to work I think it’ll be the most special media browser on any blogging platform.

We did have a great deal of interation of ideas between us on the logo. Work is still ongoing in this area and probably will be for a little while longer as we try and find ourselves the best fit for what the logo means to the community and how people will view us effectively.

Remember nothing is set, everything’s up for discussion. As always Spread the news!

Well Chris broke the news about, Habari, a new open source blogging CMS platform. While he didn’t want feel it correct to mention in the post who was involved, I’m going to step forward and put my hand up as the designated pixel pushing monkey of this motley crew.

What I find amusing is that as this news was released by Chris, I read this post about how any new blogging software would not stand a chance because of WordPress. Man I love a fucking challenge. I mean reading that post you’d think we’d be fools to even consider making a WordPress alternative. I guess all I can say to that is: Colour us DAMN foolish.

History Lesson

Back in November Chris approached a few of us to see who would be up for helping design for the new project he was working on. His timing couldn't have been better to be honest with you. See I had a MASSIVE itch that just needed to be scratched. I had definitely not said everything that needed to be said about blogging administration panels, especially since the last one I was actively involved with didn't exactly go exactly the way it should have.

I felt pretty burnt the last time round to be honest, so much so that I really thought it was best for me to steer well clear of any open source involvement in the future. However like I said in that post the most important thing that I got out of the online experience was the collaboration with the guys. If it was anyone else asking me to do something apart from Michael, Joen and Chris I’d have probably declined there and then. I didn’t join the team because I didn’t have anything better to do (as it will become clear in the coming months), but alas because I really want to create something that I can be proud to have been involved with and that I will find a joy to use. Something that I can contribute towards and that others can contribute towards as well in an open fashion.

So when Chris came forward I was all too happy to say yes. Considering that I had actually contacted another developer (I’m not going to mention him by name but needless to say he was also having a similar itch which says a lot about how things stand in the current open source blogging world) about starting our own blogging CMS, it was interesting that others around me felt the need for an alternative as well.

Shuttle vs Habari

The great thing about the Habari project is the fact that it's a clean slate. Imagine starting on the ground floor. There were no presidencies, no set stringent codebase that couldn't be altered, no existing userbase that might be confused and the list goes on. This is a decidedly different beast than Shuttle.

Those who don’t learn from the past end up repeating the mistakes again and again. So my approach to the graphical development of Habari is slightly different. Simply put, I’m going to be as transparent about the design process as you can imagine. I’ve seen several times in the past couple of months on the project, that through being open about the design I’ve been able to seriously move it forward in ways that I very well might not have considered. Ideas are what will make things move forward. At the same time it’s important that one person takes the bull by the horns and really goes to town on the design. Others should jump in with as many suggestions as possible, all the time because that’s how the innovation will continue and the project will not stagnate.

The Design

I will be going into a lot more detail in future posts regarding all the design decisions and what everything does and how it all fits together, so be patient, it'll all pay off in the long run I promise. As we've only recently kind of decided about colours (although knowing me I will probably tweak them, but I'm trying to be very good about this and sticking with this colour scheme), posting this will give people a feel of the quality of final product we're going for (and I'm not going to even talk about the code, the others are more than capable of that).

The following jpg is but a mockup, however Chris has implemented a fair chunk of this believe it or not (with probably like a 2 week old mock up), I’m telling you the man is a machine that will not be stopped. His dedication has forced me to make sure that I bring my very best to the table. It’s a bit of pressure that I’m actually relishing. Keeps me honest about things.

Final Thoughts

It’s late. What’s definitely becoming endemic of my life in general (being late with projects), Broken Kode | Season One is roughly 8 months late. This book was meant to have been completed and at the printers end of February so that I could put it forward for the Blooker prize. Wasn’t for the prize to be honest, but so that I could at least adhere to a deadline and get the book finished. I remember pressuring Michael to sort out the introduction and then I subsequently missed the deadline (sorry Mike); who knows maybe I’ll put it forward for this year’s Blooker prize (although I seriously doubt it would stand much of a chance).

The first paper copy of the book sat on my desk (next to my mouse) for the past 6 months and hadn’t moved. It just sat there as a constant reminder to me that I had invest hundreds of hours in compiling and putting together that it wasn’t complete. I took it with me to America and completed reading it and annotating it on the plane there but couldn’t find the energy to sit down and correct everything.

If I get nothing else out of this vacation (which I actually have) I’ll know that I completed this book.

I'm happy to report that the copy has been sent to Lulu and is ready to be ordered.

The standard version is in glorious black and white, however I’ve included a colour version of the book as well for myself and to see what the colour printing of Lulu is like, as I intend to compile a design and illustration book in the not too distant future (yeah I know, but thankfully that’ll only be illustrations and a little commentary here and there). For all intents and purposes that’s all the tweaking I’ll be doing. I’ve gone through the original book soo many times, I’ve still got that feeling that I’ve missed something; maybe that’s because I’m soo close to this book that I feel as though I’m never going to really finish the book and that there’s always something to do.

The original book came in at over 285 pages long. After sitting down and thinking about it, I felt that a lot of the posts really didn’t deserve a whole page dedicated to them. So part of the exercise was to cut down the number of pages. The current page count is a more manageable 195 pages.

I’ll be providing a decent page for the book and sorting out my Lulu store front as well, until then the dead tree version provides a little bang for your buck, as it’s got the following goodies:

1. Introduction by Michael Heilemann
2. 12 Illustrations (created during that year) which form the month covers
3. Commentary for most of the posts
4. Sketchbook material
5. Afterword

As this is one big experiment, I’m going to write down some of my reasoning behind the layout and design of the book itself and other things I’ve learnt about the Lulu process. Hopefully these might enlighten those brave souls that are considering jumping into the book based on blog field.

One post equals one page

So here’s a layout of the pages themselves (click on the image for an expanded view). Now I’ve decided to put one blog post on every page. This allows you enough room to actually include a number of things, including the categories, the dates and other good stuff like commentary for the actual posts themselves.

All Posts?

Comments or no comments?

Extras?

Summary

For my latest redesign (and on the other sites and programmes I’m working on) I’ve structured the CSS file somewhat differently. Rather than having what has become CSS convention of having every element of each class, id or whatever on a separate line:

[css]h1{ padding: 0 0 35px 0; margin: 0 0 25px 0; font-size: 2.0em}[/css]

I’ve instead decided to put everything onto one line: [css]h1{ padding: 0; margin: 0 0 25px 0; font-size: 2.0em}[/css]

What does this do you ask? The single most important thing in a CSS file, it makes it manageable. It makes it easy for me to actually edit the damn thing a few months down the line, in a quick and easy way. Rather than scrolling down 500 lines of code, I’m scrolling down 150 lines. The main structure for me is done in programmes like Bluefish or CSSed, however a lot of the editing and tweaking is done within Firefox, so I need to have the easy for scrolling down quickly.

The added bonus of this method is that it reduces the size of my file at the same time. I honestly started thinking why the hell I didn’t do this earlier as it just makes oh so much more sense to condense the file.

Standards Reboot. In a way it was inevitable, following these pretty shocking results. Seems we do actually have a way to go before the majority of sites are standards compliant.

I’m currently in Greece for a full 2 weeks. I’ve been looking forward to this break for well over a month now, hell I’ve been looking forward to this break for at least 3 months. I didn’t go anywhere during the summer period, which was probably the worst thing to do for my psyche to be honest. The summer was a very dark time for me with very little bright spots which was clearly reflected in my mood and how I dealt with those around me. Being a traditionally pretty patient person, I noticed myself getting more irate with things and situations that I would normally brush off, or at least see the funny side. Hasn’t been the case for at least 3 months now.

I guess I can attribute this to the situation in Lebanon which seriously hit me very hard. I can probably attribute it to work which has been very far from enjoyable these last few months, or I can attribute it to unfinished business from several areas that kept me down (my list of unfinished projects is pretty extensive). Needless to say, I need a break and a break I shall have. However I’m never happy until I’ve got things off my plate and I’ve been very good at not putting anything new on my plate but actually finishing those projects that I had opened/started/committed to first, after all I’m a finisher, not just an instigator.

Since it’s good to have a list I think I’ll make this list to remind myself what I have to look forward to in getting these monkeys off my back:

Finish the Splash Panel Redesign.

Stathi's and Priya's Websites.

Broken Kode Season One

Broken Kode Prints

Chameleon Theme

Also on a completely different note, I really need to get myself a laptop (any recommendations for small dinky laptops, like the Fujitsu Lifebook or a Vaio would be welcome) as I’m currently using my dad’s windowz install using an ADSL connection that might be a little difficult to sort out on Ubuntu and it’s seriously painful to get anything done (which isn’t helped by the fact that it’s a shitty CRT screen that’s got a tinge of purple going through,…nice), the ‘Kode has never looked this bad.

In constructing a building the foundations are the first things that go in. Much in that vein, I’ve decided to approach (and name), every iteration of Broken Kode after the construction of a building. These are then followed on by the superstructure (the stuff that sits above the ground level), and once everything is there, the cladding and services (ventilation, electricity, water) come in.

Back in May when I updated the site, I called it Foundations. I eluded at the time that the reasons behind this name was because I was effectively taking a step back and start taking things in a simple manner. Build the site up at my own pace. No real rush in getting anywhere, just proper steps into crafting a site that I would be happy with. In order to do that I had to make sure that the foundations (see, there was a reason for that name) I lay were rock solid, thus making my life in updating the site less of a chore that it traditionally is.

Inspiration is a funny thing, in that you don’t know when and where it’s going to come down. Arguably the worst period for me in the past year was when this itch decided it had to be scratched. I actually started the mockups on this site before I even switched over to Ubuntu, as I had begun the mockup design in Photoshop. When I moved over to Ubuntu, I started using Inkscape as my first method of tackling layout and design for websites and have found it an utter joy to use.

Structure

The first and most significant change that can be seen in this design is the rigid grid layout that I’ve adopted. Effectively the only page that’s had a proper makeover is the index page. The post page also got a very slight change (but that was implementing ideas that I had for the previous incarnation of the site but was too lazy to get on and implement it all).

One of the many criticisms I get from friends regarding the old incarnations of the site is the fact that there is far too much text on the page. Not enough explanation. I guess the designs really didn’t provide all the information required. I can definitely vouch for the fact that a lot of what I’ve done/have been involved with is hidden under the wayside and I felt it was pretty important to get those elements on the page and shown in a proper light. It’s been very varied, but I will say that a great deal of inspiration was derived from the Guardian newspaper I have been reading this newspaper on and off since it got it’s face lift earlier this year. It’s got a crisp clean design which is what I was intending to get in there as well.

Where to next Mr.Jones?

Seriously IE is a lame animal, and the quicker someone puts it out of it’s misery the better we’ll all be. It’s the only humaine thing to do to be honest. It’s a waste of my time (of which I don’t have all that much at the moment to give to clean it up).

The site looks manageable after a fashion and I’ll be sure to clean it up to pick up the minor elements that are still showing up. I do need to sort out the additional pages (as I only really concentrated on the main pages) but that’ll no doubt get sorted out once the dust settles in the next couple of weeks.

So what’s next you ask? I’ve got another 3 website that I’ll be sorting out over the next month or so, and then I’m taking a complete step AWAY from web designing, for anyone, in any capacity. I will finish off my obligations however once that’s done you won’t even be able to afford my services in that department, because they won’t be for sale. I’m going to be concentrating on my artwork fully and my writing. I think it’s time I buckled down and did what I first set out to do with this site.

Flickr Cards. What makes this strange is that I only sorted out my flickr account yesterday (yeah I’ve been resisting this for a while now). I love print as well.

I’ve been trying to find ways to increase my productivity and effectively take my life back by the horns, which for the past couple of months has spiralled out of control.

Gmail is a staple in my life. I use it and don’t think about it. I’ve not gotten to the stage where I really use the folders as I can, however that might be about to change. So I’ve been looking into other online solutions that might be able to reach that status. Traditionally I’ve tried my very best to shy away from online services except those that are backed by one of the major players, mainly because they’re not going to be charging me cash to provide a task that while isn’t necessary to have online is nice to have. You could say it’s a bit of an antithesis to Web 2.0, and in a way it actually is. You’d also expect someone like me to jump for this sort of thing, however I don’t move into this arena without a little bit of caution, simply because I don’t like to be dependant on others that can pull the plug on me at any time or worse, decide to change the terms and conditions.

NewsGator

Ma.gnolia

Google Calander

I think I’m becoming a life hacker, hopefully the next couple of weeks will see a bit of this hectic lifestyle that I’ve been living cool down a little bit and I can actually get back to finishing off some of these projects that have been on my plate for months, some even a year.

When it comes to doing things in WordPress, any idea I come up with has usually been implemented several times over, however I think (and I really hope someone has actually done this and I simply can’t find it) but the idea for this plugin came about after talking with several of my friends who ‘read’ the site. A number of them have actually complained that whenever they come to my site, they don’t understand what the hell it is I’m talking about. For example I’d say half of them are completely lost by mentioning WordPress.

Basically it’s a very simple idea, which makes me wonder that I can’t possibly be the first to voice my thoughts about it, and to be honest I can’t see the reason why it can’t be implemented by persons more talented at this than I am. Basically the idea is that you let the user take control of what he views or subscribes from your site. So the person comes to your site goes to a “user preference section” where they choose which categories they would like to subscribe to and then the front page shows posts only from those particular categories (latest being shown on top of course).

That way the user takes control of what they want to read.

Customise the RSS Feeds

It’s all about making sure the type of information you are interested in gets delivered to you in the correct way. It’s an extension of the RSS feed. It’s no longer acceptable to just provide me with an RSS feed. I want to choose the categories I’d like to hear from you, or allow you to choose what you view when you visit my site. That way you’re guaranteed to read things that actually are of some interest to you.

Anyone up for writing a plugin for me? I’ll send you white chocolate.

It’s been one of the longest summers that I can remember, which definitely followed one of the longest winter’s I can remember in a really long time. As I looked around me I saw more and more of my blogging friends slowly start to blog less. It’s not that we have less to talk about it’s just that blogging is bloody hard work. Oftentimes I do feel as though running Broken Kode is a full time job.

The past month has definitely felt the pangs of blogger burn. I’ve got less energy to blog about things that I feel passionate about. For some reason I seemed to have lost a bit of the way regarding what it is that made me blog in the first place. I started blogging to get all the floating ideas and thoughts in my head, out of there to free the clutter. It’s my therapy. Sadly I’ve not been using it as much as I wanted to, which can be attributed to a number of reasons.

1. My style of writing has changed in recent years and the latest tweak for my site will reflect that change in style significantly.

<li>I've been currently designing not one, not two but 5 websites. All in various stages of development, I should have two out in the next couple of weeks.</li>
<li>

Work has been seriously wearing me down slowly but surely. I hate going into work. Not because of the place, not because of the company, but because of the projects and the external people I have to interact with every single day. Some I find great to work with, others I find myself finding some SERIOUS contempt towards. Their entire existence at this moment in times seems to be only to make my life a living misery. I have started taking certain steps to distance myself, sadly some of these won’t come to bear fruit for many months to come, which obviously isn’t doing my psyche much good to be honest.

So hopefully with these few elements getting crossed off my list I should be back to blogging with a vengeance in the near future. July and August accounted for the single worst months for blogging since I started blogging in January 2004, hopefully I can pull the rest of this god forsaken year from the doldrums and finish it off with a bit of a bang, after all I am a natural born optimist.

Sorting Myself Out

Another element of my life that I have seriously neglected were my expenses. It’s not that I’m short of cash or anything, it’s just that I’ve really not been making my money work for me in the right way. I hadn’t sorted out my expenses for the past year or so and the list goes on. It’s another fantastic thing to have ticked off the list of things to do, which allows me to continue doing things that I really actually enjoy doing.

Once I’ve removed the clutter in my life I should be able to reclaim my life back and sort myself out.

I definitely noticed spamming coming through, which left me scratching my head (50 in like a few hours). I guess those spammers are seriously getting their ass kicked by Akismet, easily the only ESSENTIAL plugin you want to have as a blogger of any description. Damn, was it really that bad before this plugin? The answer I guess, it was worse, because there was no solution.

The last week has seen some movement on a couple of the open source projects I’ve been involved with in the past couple of years. I’ve already spoken about the first one but now I’m going to talk about the other project that I had such high hopes for which have been washed away and effectively thrown back into the faces of those that actually devoted their time into producing the goods, I am of course talking about Shuttle.

For those in the dark I’ll give a brief history of the WordPress Shuttle project. The idea first came to me after I had just finished my work on the Manji theme. I had so much fun collaborating with people online and producing something that could be used by other people (and thus giving back to the software that runs my site), that I really wanted to get back into the game straight away. I talked to Joshua and the Chris, both of whom I have the greatest amount of respect for, both of which were completely up for the project. By sheer luck Michael was having thoughts about this of his own as well. He was more than happy to join the team and in doing so brought Matt’s (Lead WordPress developer and Automattic head honcho) attention. The endeavour was now considered more than just hot air. In a very shrewd move Michael brought in Joen and thus the initial Shuttle team began work. Because a picture paints a thousand words, this is the screen shot of what we had to work with when we first started:

If you’re interested to see more, you can have a look at a Carthik’s screenshots for WordPress version 1.5.

We started work in earnest and the emails began flying between us. We were talking about everything and anything that came to our minds. We did research of all the existing blogging software tools (and the time those that hadn’t been released yet). We talked about usability, advanced users, novice users how things should work, how things should not work, what areas we should concentrate on. Seeing as we’re all bloggers we decided to give the call out to people to find out what they thought as well:

1. http://www.brokenkode.com/archives/shuttle-development/
2. http://binarybonsai.com/archives/2005/02/01/wordpress-shuttle/
3. http://www.brokenkode.com/archives/shuttle-workshop-01-dashboard/
4. http://www.chrisjdavis.org/2005/01/31/the-cat-she-is-out-of-the-bag/

My initial thinking was heading towards something completely radical to what we had. Just strip the walls down and start implementing things in a completely different way. I don’t know if I can find the very initial mockups I started flirting with but you can check out the image set to show a lot of the initial design development. This is where working in a team is paramount. I remember Joen distinctly pointing out that the fundamental structure of WordPress was fine and that we shouldn’t be rocking the boat for the sake of it but rather finding what works and what doesn’t. Making things simple for the user. I’m completely paraphrasing probably a couple of weeks worth emails beings fired between the ENTIRE design team, which of course included Matt at every step of the way (we didn’t have a mailing list until Matt set one up for us). It was agreed that we wouldn’t move to anything radical unless we felt it served a specific purpose.

I should have seen the writing on the wall to be honest. As the design went forward Matt seemed to implement things he liked and not bother with things he didn’t. So the blue hues made it into the design, as did the pods on the side, but little else. To be fair to him at this stage we really hadn’t moved every single aspect forward as you see it in the final mock ups.

The days went by and action on Shuttle was sporadic at best. We’d go through these massive bursts of creativity and energy and information sharing. Every once in a while one of us would prod the team to get it’s finger out and continue with this project. You might think it should be easy but people have lives and many things to do get in the way and it’s not like any of us didn’t have other projects on at the time.

Lets make one thing clear here. I am a finisher. I complete the projects I’ve actively put my name down for. I’m not in the business of making a claim for something and not going through with it. I’ve proven this time and time again. Even when things get tough, even when it seems like it’s not even worth it, I will continue to plough forward even if it’s only me, with the hopes that those around me will feel good enough for them to contribute as and when they seem fit. Contributing to Open Source should never feel like a chore. It should be fun, it should be something you actually want to contribute towards.

So in a last attempt before I completely gave up on the project I dived into the designs. For two weeks straight I would come in from work and spend 4-5 hours implementing the designs. I tried hard to keep with EVERYTHING we’d discussed in the past. The dos and dont. I tried to find solutions to design aspects we hadn’t really covered. I’ve not had that massive creative burst of energy in years (and this was done on the back end of creating the FOFRedux redesigned UI). I tried taking into consideration things that although I didn’t agree with I had to make concessions to allow for.

A prime example is the dashboard. We were told not to go too far with this because lots of discussions were going on in the hackers mailing list and it would probably be the one place that we didn’t have much say in. This is all well and good, so I tried to come up with a solution I could at least stomach. It’s easily my least favourite page of the entire design.

Once the mock ups had been completed I left them with the rest of the team for comments to be put on the table for them to change whatever everyone felt worked and didn’t work. We then proceeded to discuss how we were going to implement the designs. Matt was NEVER truly forthcoming about how this was all going to be implemented. We discussed the issue further, but once again he was as elusive as ever. When a response finally came back I didn’t know how to react. Thankfully other members of the team did. The designs were not some chicken to pick and choose at what you like and what you don’t like. They present a certain level of uniformity across the pages. They follow a specific design thought, and a great deal of thought and attention to detail has gone into them.

After we talked about it a bit more, and we were promised by Matt that things would get incorporated into the WordPress core, however it would take some time and it was mainly to make sure that people didn’t get jarred with the changes in one go, this was a solution I could honestly live with. The design wouldn’t be hacked but implemented gradually. So I went forward and released the mockups because they were the culmination of our active involvement in the project as things would now begin to get integrated into the core code. Of course things would change or be tweaked as the design was implemented but by and large it would remain the same.

Any which way you cut it that’s why Shuttle never made it into the design of WordPress. It has nothing to do with us being lazy or that we couldn’t be bothered to do anything but the photoshop files. Joshua had begun implementing the design on his own machine, we were discussing the logistics of how this project would be implemented into the code. However as it turns out there doesn’t seem like there was/is any commitment from the WordPress Dev team to incorporate these designs. If there was a commitment it would take 3 guys 4 weeks TOPS to deal with it all. There are well over 100,000 WordPress users, many of which are pretty capable with both CSS/PHP/JS. Hell there are people out there that are already implementing this off their own backs.

It doesn’t seem like the WordPress development team (and by definition Automattic team) are keeping to their word because the latest addition to the Automattic team is now going back to square one to start over, asking people the same questions we did when we first started the project.

Bryan joined the shuttle team late in the game and in some ways I think he didn’t feel as comfortable jumping into the design. He’s a fine addition to the Automattic team, and more importantly I like the guy, so none of this is aimed at him. He has been given new directions by the powers that be. Strip it down, build it up again from the ground if we have to. Why is it called Shuttle:Atlantis? Maybe because Matt didn’t like the first one? That’s what it boils down to to be honest. The alarm bells started going off when I read the first things to come from Bryan over of the WordPress.com blog.

... see that Shuttle finally makes its debut in whatever form we as a team see fit.

So I’d like to address those that didn’t like the Shuttle mockups. You (the collective you) got 5 people (plus 1) devoting a massive amount of their time to make your blogging experience more enjoyable; more usable; more fun. We didn’t ask for compensation and we didn’t ask for anything in return. We didn’t rush into this and we certainly didn’t hack through the designs. We did this because we believed in the sotfware. We believed in the people behind it and the people using it. None of us on the team are new to open source contribution. Michael’s contribution doesn’t need much introduction (Kubrick and K2), similarly with Chris (whose contributions extend far into the past of WordPress, Persian, plugins galore, K2), Joen does this for a living and has contributed for the admin panel on Zenphoto (including the default theme) and his wordpress theme Fauna. I have given the open source world Manji & Rin and contributed in the redesign of the FOFRedux UI. Joshua has answered enough support questions to make my head dizzy. Bryan has contributed to the world ChaoticSoul.

Open source is great because you can contribute to the source in a positive way, otherwise none of us would be actively giving to it so freely. That however is not the universal truth. At least that doesn’t seem to be the case in the WordPress world. This is a shame because part of WordPress’s success is the people involved with the world it surrounds. I have said many times before that is one of the things that elevates it above other open source initiatives.

It’s a shame really. Has WordPress really gotten so big that those in charge of implementing it no longer care for those that devote their time? As long as you’re creating a theme or a plugin that’s great, just don’t even bother thinking about contributing to the final product in any way. That kind of contribution is obviously not welcomed. There was a time when the Shuttle mockups, created exclusively for making WordPress prettier, would have been taken in with grateful arms. It seems that time for WordPress has passed.

Compare the current admin panel with those presented in the Shuttle mockups. Once you’ve done that go back to the top and compare it with Version 1.5.

Do you see something different. One was designed and thought through. The other is an ad hoc implementation of core ideas. I could go on at length to discuss the design decisions to be honest with you however I tend to allow the work speak for itself.

Ultimately I’m extremely proud of the work we did in TRYING to make the WordPress admin a better looking more usable place. The online friendships I’ve forged with the Shuttle team are thanks enough, even though the work we did was ultimately not appreciated. This is probably the very last time that I talk about Shuttle, unless of course someone implements the design aspects of the work we created as a plugin or in another way.

This is what I’ve been reading my feeds from for the past couple of days :).

I promised the guys on the dev team I’d keep it quiet until we had more kinks ironed out, but I’ve got to say that I’m so excited and over the moon that the new FOFRedux UI is now a part of the trunk code and looking SUPREME, that I had to share that bit of news with everyone. If you’re asking yourself what FOFRedux actually is, then I suggest you go over to the project page to find out a bit more about it all.

If you’re interested in actually trying it then I suggest you DOWNLOAD the latest snapshot. Remember this is NOT the latest STABLE version. This is STILL in development, so things can still go wrong. There are still loads more work to be done, but it’s still better than 50% of the other feed readers out there. Give it a few more versions and it’ll the best feed reader on the net.

One thing that I’ve definitely noticed is that after using it for a couple of days it’s made reading my feeds that much more enjoyable, which to my mind was/is the whole point of the redesign. Make the programme more fun and more intuative to actually use. I feel extremely proud to be a part of this team and supremely overjoyed with the overall results. In my mind this is a fantastic example of how great things can be achieved in an open source project and I’d really like to thank the team for accepting me into the group and allowing me to contribute to the project.

Reason I’ve not been able to write anything these past days is because I’ve been feeling numb. Every time I sit down to type anything I feel ill and the words don’t go anywhere. I start thinking about the situation currently going on in Lebanon and I feel this sorrow and it takes over my entire body. I’ve been avoiding many of my friends because I don’t want to depress them. They can’t help the situation and the problem for me is that at the moment, neither can I.

All I can do, like the millions of Lebanese around the world is see my country brought down to it’s knees and it’s landscapes razed to the ground. I’ve been feeling numb but that feeling is slowly subsiding because like the Lebanese people, my resolve is strong. My faith in my people and my country is even stronger. We shall walk proud again and the country shall be rebuilt once more, of that I have no doubt.

However in order for the country to be rebuilt it will need work and it will need help. I’m currently going to begin work on various ways in which I can personally help Lebanon get back on it’s feet. I’m not going to say bringing it back to how it was, I’m going to say better than how it was. I’m beginning to feel anger and with that feeling comes a flurry of ideas. Some of these ideas will either take shape and bear fruit or will be lost and forgotten in the caverns of my mind. However I will see Lebanon free and beautiful once again. You see the bastards (I’m not going to specify which ones, because in this situation they are LEGION) seem to forget that the sun always rises after the night and that…

a phoenix NEVER dies.

I’ve been pretty quiet this last week and there’s actually two main reasons for that. The first one is due to the fact that I’ve been extremely busy at work. Every summer it happens to me and this one is no different. I’ve been landed with far too much work to handle in an exceptionally small amount of time. I’ve had it bad before which is why I’m actually completely calm because I’m also a lot more confident with my abilities to handle said work and present it to the usual anal retentive standards that I demand. That I guess is part of my problem. I actually tried to deal with issues in a more relaxed manner and have found that the problem with this approach is that things come back and bite you squarely in the ass.

The other major problem on my plate is my current computer setup. I’ve talked about my thoughts on moving over to Linux once and for all. In fact I actually installed Linux Suse Enterprise Edition earlier this week. However I have no idea what I’m doing and this has reflected in me fucking up my hardisk royally. So what’s a man to do, when there’s trouble in the neighbourhood? He calls on Franchesco (the PC doctor) to sort the mess I created like a 4 year old in the kitchen. I should hopefully be running SUSE and Ubuntu and a small section for me to migrate all my files over from Windows sometime tomorrow. I’ll definitely be talking about my thoughts on the entire system and how it can be improved and how it’s better than Windows and where it falters.

My deadlines at work should come to a close sometime around Thursday, where life on the net will resume back to normal and I can start hammering all those pesky little project that I’ve got in mid development that just need that final push to complete. I’ll list through them for completeness sake:

Broken Kode v5.1

Splash Panel v1

When people come to Splash Panel I want them to be ready with their credit card in hand to go and plonk some money down for the book I’ve just reviewed. You see I don’t intend any bad reviews of books to be posted on the site. Life’s far too short for that and there are far too many great graphic novels to read that deserve my (and your) attention more.

Broken Kode : Season One

Anyone mind helping translate this site post for me? I’ve been getting some a serious referal spike from it, but I have no idea what it’s saying?

To avoid any confusion and answer some questions that have been raised I’ve created this small FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) to dispell any rumours and set the record as straight as I possibly can. If you’ve got any questions put them underneath and I’ll update the post accordingly.

Why isn't there a plugin to download?

However after much back and forth it was decided that this design would be better implemented as part of the core WP install. In many ways it was also impossible to implement this design in any way apart from altering the core code, so a plugin was not an option.

If Matt needs any help or wants some clarity on how certain parts of the design should work the Shuttle team is ready and waiting.

What if I can make this into a plugin?

So you've created the code and Matt's going to drop it into the main code right?

So do you expect the final thing to look like the mockups?

So what exactly did you launch?

Before you read this I suggest you go and have a look at the 20 mockups showing the future of WordPress.

The idea of redesigning the WordPress administration panel began believe it or not in December 2004. For over a year and a half myself, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Chris J Davis, Joshua Sigar (later joined by Bryan Veloso) exchanged countless emails and mockups and links and ideas regarding what we thought the WordPress administration panel should be. The project was called the Shuttle Project. I now have the pleasure of presenting what we came up with and explaining the future of the project.

The Shuttle project was without a doubt the single hardest thing I’ve ever been involved with. The only thing that made it easy for me was the fine and exceptional gentlemen on the Shuttle team itself. What made it so difficult is the fact that we were thinking of the thousands of WordPress users all over the world. We were thinking of usability, we were thinking of asthetics, we were thinking of the power user and the novice user. How do you get three headstrong (and passionate) designers to play nice with each other? I swear I have no idea but somehow it all actually worked out in the end. I owe Michael and Joen a great deal of thanks for helping me improve how I think about design.

However the greatest thing that I could have gotten from this project is the sense of collaboration that I felt throughout the project. We were all working towards making something we use on a daily basis that much better, it makes Open Source that much more enjoyable. Although it was tough going through this design process, I think we’ll all instantly forget everything once it’s part of the official install.

When's it coming out?

I can’t wait for the Shuttle designs to be incorporated into the WordPress install, as I do believe that once it’s done there will be only one choice in which platform you should be using.

WordPress Identity | The Colour Blue

So the first major change we made was give WordPress a colour and it’s own distinct identity. We had to make sure that it didn’t mimic any of the other blogging tools out there, so we did a bit of research first. Textpattern has orange, Symphony is green, Moveable Type is grey/green, Expresion Engine is purple. We decided to go for blue. What does blue signify you ask? An easy link (and direct from Wikipedia) is that the colour blue:

...is considered a calming, soothing colour, perhaps related to its association with water and to the sky.

That was what I was hoping we’d get. The colour palette provides an atmosphere that is familiar and not harsh on the eyes. Seeing as a lot of people spend a great deal of time looking at the actual backend of WordPress a great deal throughout the day, it was very important to keep the visual impact of the administration panel to a minimum.

After a great deal of back and forth and loads of mockups and discussion the number of hues of blue was kept to a total of 3. These same blues would be used to distinguish links within the panel itself, as consistency is a major factor in keeping the user comfortable.

System Messages | The Importance of Colour

Join me next time as I talk a bit about usability (or at least try and talk about the subject).

Just wanted to thank the guys and gals over at Web Creme, CSS Vault, CSS Remix, Adam (of CSSReboot fame) and Olav, for featuring the ‘kode in their galleries and lists, much appreciated. If you’re new to the Kode, please have a look around the site is constantly changing as I’m still trying to pull it all together.

The real reason why I decided to reboot to something more simple this time round hopefully is becoming more obvious with the latest change in the background on the front page. As the section implies the background (which occupies the most real estate on the site) will be used to throw the spotlight on specific projects and completed artwork. Version 4 isn’t all that different (at least in structure) to what I have now, however it’s been adapted in such a way to allow me to play around more freely.

This week I’m throwing the spotlight on a little open source project I got involved with a couple of months ago. It’s an online feed aggregator and it’s allowed me to actually get up to speed and READ all the various sites that I’ve subscribed to. Traditionally most of my feeds were read from the Sage extension for Firefox, however I needed something a little bit more powerful FOFRedux provided me with what I was looking for.

The FOFR dev team is a great bunch of people. It’s a tight nit community of devs and users as the programme itself isn’t as widely used as it really deserves to be, however we’re hoping to change that with a number of great additions to the software. The major element being a complete overhaul of the UI admin section as you can see from the project page.

Anywho if you’re looking for an online open source aggregator that sits on your server, then you don’t have to look further. It’s still early days (version 0.3 was released a couple of weeks ago) but I have very high hopes for the software. Final word, I’m planning on spending a lot more time cleaning up my projects area over the coming weeks as I’ve got a great number of announcements to be making. Sometime over the weekend I should have some pretty exciting news about Shuttle to share with everyone and a page that mimics the FOFRedux page (it’s a lot bigger because I’ve got to upload over 29 images).

A very strange thing happened during the design of this particular iteration of the ‘kode. Usually speaking I’ll be thinking about if for months, then I’ll see something on the internet and get depressed because I can never get that good and then I’ll begrudgingly try and plow through coding I really have no right playing around with in the first place, simply because if I can, I will be making a dog’s dinner out of it.

The Fairground So when I first jumped into the redesign something like 20 odd days ago I had it in my head that I was planning on making the most insane, loudest fucking thing on the internet (ok a bit of hyperbole there but that’s what was going through my head). The louder (and I mean in terms of colour and typography) the better. I was going to have loads of links everywhere. I was going to draw every single section of the damn thing, to hell with how long it was going to take people to load the site, that’s why you’ve got broadband I tried convincing myself.

As I plowed through the design, spending hours simply staring at what I had in front of me, in an attempt to make it more coherent, make it more explosive, make it more loud, I let it rest for a few hours and went and played basketball. When I got back it was as if I understood that I was going down the completely wrong road for this design. For some reason simplicity and ease of upgrading and actually understanding all the code that I was slapping down became far more important to me. It didn’t matter that I wasn’t even 40% finished with this design, it didn’t matter that I’d spent days on the design either, what matters was the Euerka moment that I felt there and then.

The Showcase It dawned upon me (yeah I know it took a fucking long while, after 8 months) that what people associated and liked about the previous site wasn’t the design or the typography, the thing that made it stand out was my artwork. Sadly because I’m too busy not happy completely with my site I don’t get the chance to draw more. This redesign is aimed at that idea, getting to draw more. I will say that the turning point was the showcase idea. Here I could use the entire page as my canvas. I could highlight everything I wanted to highlight right on the front page with the minimum amount of effort. I just change a jpg and edit a single file if I’m feeling inclined to add more information about the artwork behind.

The design The design itself is not a million miles away from most blog website out there. The real difference here is that I’m playing the grid as precicely as I can. All I could think about was maintaining a grid throughout the entire design, luckily for me it was a super simple design so there wasn’t much to worry about, but it’s all in the details.

I’ve kept my philosophy for the archives as well. Keep it simple. I completely understand all the code that is behind the functions found here and can easily manipulate them to do with as I please; which is once again a supremely inviting reason to have a super simple website. Traditionally in the past I would have been running out of steam by the time I got around to dealing with the archives, so this was a breathe of fresh air to actually want to make something of the archives both visually and from a usability point of view. I’ve not completed the work there, as I’ve still got the tags page and the categories pages to deal with as well (however those shouldn’t be too far behind).

Updating I’m intrinsically lazy when it comes to up updating the site with tweaks here and there. The reason behind once again is the messy code. The code that at the time I thought was pretty tight was in fact a bit of a mess. The design depended on plugins far too much and I can’t say that it was adding that much to the usability of the site itself. With that thought in mind, I attacked this design by stripping everything. Anything that was getting in the way was gone. Simple was the way forward. So on the front page all you get are the posts, the titles and how many comments have been made to each post. If you want any other information you’re going to have to jump back into the individual page and get that information. The entire idea behind this design is to add a bit of class to the site, which I believe although had some good intentions was lacking a coherent structure, and the attention to detail was sadly lacking. This design aims to address this problems by making the maintenance slightly more manageable.

WordPress on Fire I’ve been using WordPress for a good long while now and I’ve got to say with the sheer amount of work that’s been done out there by 1000s of people, there is nothing that you can think of that someone hasn’t thought of before (unless you’re Michael, don’t know where he mines his ideas from). What’s also great is that the resources out there to help you sift through everything is astounding. It’s actually my favourite toy at the moment because it really delivers everything I want and in the way I want it with the minimum amount of fuss. So I bow down to Matt and the entire WordPress dev team and especially to the 1000s of people that make up the WordPress Community, you guys rock.

No CoCo? Don’t be silly, he’ll be back and pretty soon, once we get this CSS Reboot malarkey over and done with then we can move on to concentrating on sketches and whatnot. I’ve got some pretty exciting stuff coming up for CoCo, so don’t you worry, he’ll be back.

Special shout out Usually when I start a redesign I pick up Manji or Rin and start hacking away. Certain things are ready for me, however looking at the code found in there, I’ve got to say that a lot of work is really needed to bring that theme up to speed with the rest of the themes out there, except I know if I jump back into that field it will really take a long time/ Thankfully there’s Fauna. Fauna by Joen IMHO should become the WordPress default. Why? Because it’s supremely easy to understand and Joen has seriously made it clever. The most time consuming part of making a theme for WordPress I found was sorting out the single post pages, with all the comments and the comment forms and the implemenation for the trackbacks etc. It just gets a bit ridiculous. So Joen’s efforts have been supremely amazing to have and while the last time round he helped me out with the code, this time he did one better and gave me his site :).

I want to also give a shout out to all the fine folks at 9rules who will always help out whenever they can which is brilliant and for the loads of inspiration they give me each and every month and to everyone who helped me whether they knew it or not, so people like Phu, Joen, Shawn, Michael, Kyle, Podz and the list goes on to be honest.

Final Word Is the site complete? No, it never is. Ask anyone out there when they think they’re site is 100% complete or if it’s perfect and I doubt they’ll say it ever is. Just because there’s always something you can do. I’ve learnt to understand that point (once again it’s taken a bit of time) but it’s all part of learning and at least now I can say I’ve laid down some decent Foundations (which also is the name of this particular design).

Do excuse the mess I'm still tidying up. That goes for my code and my site and links, shouldn't be too long though.

Sorry to all the Rin and Manji board users for the spamming that’s going on. I think I’ve rectified the situation and now I’m going back and sifting through the sheer amount of spam comments. Punbb isn’t as easy to moderate comments as WordPress is so it’s taking some time and is a little bit more time consuming. Are people still interested in having the forum, do you guys find it as a useful resource? I know loads of questions have been answered (not by me James has got a lot of thanks going his way for his contribution) however I don’t visit there often enough as I’m slightly swamped with other things right now.

To be honest I’ve had nothing but trouble whenever I have a forum (has been hacked into several times), caused me to loose data another time. If you find it useful please do tell me because I’ve seriously got a mind to just bring it down, unless someone can tell me of a decent alternative that’s relatively secure, easy to update, manage and skin.

So I’ve decided to take up podcasting. I’ve got to admit that it’s in many ways inspired by Michael sorting his one out and me twigging to the benefits or at least the potential of this alternate medium. I’ve been listening to podcasts for a little under a year now, but I never thought I’d jump into this field.

What made me see things slightly differently to be honest was the attention to detail that Michael has brought to his podcast. Maybe I just don’t listen to that many podcasts (which is just as well really) but I had never seen the images, links and chapters being used in a podcast before. It made things look a great deal more better thought out and the whole experience was so much more whole. At least that’s how I felt about it all.

So I ordered my Samson microphone (which cost me an arm and a leg) but that’s cool, I was definitely not disappointed when I saw it. It’s fucking huge and really heavy. In the case of microphones, I’m sorry but SIZE DOES MATTER :). Anyway the real reason for this post is to ask a bit more of a technical question. Now I got some information as Scrivs has asked the same question not too long ago, however I’m going to take it one step further.

What programmes should I be using to edit the final stream of speach I’ve created? I have no idea how to sort out the chapter breaks and add different images at different times for each chapter etc. Is this something I can only do if I’m on a mac? I’ll buy a microphone not change my operating system of choice for an experiment.

With regards to creating the podcast RSS feed and whatnot via WordPress, I’ve downloaded PodPress and think it’s got a lot of potential, are there any other WordPress plugins/goodies I should be looking into?

A small part of creating the BK Logo was to have something to put on my business cards. As you’d imagine these things are not going to be your run of the mill cards, as I wanted to have some fun with them. So the mammoth task came down on me to actually do a bit of research on the net to see what is available and if they’re worthy of being my designated printers. I’m only half joking about the last part, I want them a certain way and am probably willing to pay the price to get them that way, so I expect to get quality for my cash.

Bearing in mind that I’ll be starting off with business cards now, the list of printed items will be ever increasing for sure. So in order to aid everyone and let you all benefit from the research that I’ve conducted into the matter, here’s a quick rundown of the various online printing services that I’ve uncovered, and how I rate them. At the end I’ve attached a pdf that you can download for your own reference (this being the first that I publish on the Kode, but hopefully not the last.) If you know of a better service that I should really check out, then by all means send the link to me and I’ll add it to the list. I am trying to make this as a bit of a resource page for all those looking for something similar, you might as well let some other smuck (ie me) do the hard work for you.

1. Print 100 So far I'm impressed by what Print 100 has offered. This firm is based in Hong Kong, so you have to go to the global site. What's nice about this website is the information that they have on offer. That's something I find pretty lacking in most places I've visited. It's like most of these printers don't really want to tell you the whole story, or they're lazy and so try and get away with cheap things like 'Contact us for a quote'. If you go over to the downloads section, there's a massive collection of templates in Illustrator, Photoshop, CorelDraw and Freehand versions. Any printers that accepts Freehand files is OK by me. They've also included a really nice section that's clear regarding how to format your files.

   In terms of the kind of cards that they can produce, it seems the cards themselves have got a base rate, which is as far as I can tell the cheapest on the market, ($30 for 300 double sided, full colour cards), but they also provide additional enhancements such as die cutting, UV Spot coating, rounded corners and hot stamping. The cost for these enhancements does not provide any problems whatsoever regarding price either. So you won’t break the bank if you want UV spot coating (which I actually do).

   My only complaint is that I think the final thickness of the card will be too thin. 230gsm or 250gsm doesn’t seem thick enough for me. I want at least 300 dammit :). They have a sample pack which came thorough before my cards came through. To be fair, at that price I was going to be doing ordering from them for sure. They arrived a couple of days ago and I’ve got to say that it’s just good to finally have them in my hands. When I contacted them regarding getting a different cardstock, this is what they replied with:

   At the stage, we ONLY can provide 2 type of papers which is 230gsm stock paper with matt lamination OR 250gsm super white card. We cannot provide a thicker paper at this time. Sorry about that.

   The only other qualm is effectively with the website which has some stupid popup system going on if you want to enter your account area, rather than keeping it within the site itself, which I found slightly odd and dated. Additionally even though they have a referer’s program, the fact that it isn’t as simple as putting in a link on my site that is distinctly my link (like say for Dreamhost) it becomes fiddly and I doubt I’ll be gaining much benefit from it, so they should really sort that out. But in the meantime if I’ve introduced you to this website, do a brother a favour and put me as your referrer (brokenkode is the username).

2. Face Media Group I actually was going to go with this company before I had the bright idea to actually do a little bit of research and see what the alternatives on offer where. I am very glad I didn't jump into these things without looking around first. Face Media Group is a company is based in the UK which has a direct impact on it's associated costs.

   The website is very slick and easy to navigate. It’s neither ugly or overbearing and does actually scream of a subdued quality. I’ve already received the sample pack and I can vouch for the quality, however the price point for this company is not exactly inviting. The price page is very simple to understand, £125 will get you 250 300gsm cards with UV spot coating. One additional disappointment is the fact that they don’t seem to offer die-cutting or foil stamping.

3. Ezdzns I'm pointing this website out because of the fact that they offer design services as well. They seem a tab bit pricey however if you're not all that great at doing your own designs (then your first contact should be me), failing that then give them a shot, although I'm not sure what the design entails, and how many iterations/changes you're allowed.
4. Pecal Media These guys do a range of stuff, including plastic cards, posters, flyers. They also provide design services and you can get a sample pack sent to you as well. It's a pretty rounded website, relatively intuative.
5. Graphic Disorder I thought these guys were interesting since they offer 1000 cards for $99 (you can keep the dollar). Included in the price is the design, the cards with spot UV and shipping to the continental US. That's not a bad deal. Not as great as Print100 but it's closer than the rest of the printers on this list.
6. Overnight Prints The only way I can describe this is the Kinko of online printers. Ironic since Kinko is a printer but what I'm trying to say here is that they're the sort of store that would look like Kinko if they opened in a store down the road. It SCREAMS generic but at least they seem to be fast and affordable.
7. Advansys These guys seem slightly corporate and generic as well, but if you're looking for that style and don't want the extra bells and whistles that are included in the rest of the packages, just something white with the information and a logo then these guys might be what you're looking for. Clean site, information is all there for you to get on with it.

Again, this isn’t the list to end all lists, this is just what I found on my search. I’d be seriously interested in knowning about different online printers that provide for business cards, postcards, flyers and just about any other printed media. So if you’ve got a good one up your sleeve, share and I’ll be sure to include it into the pdf. Which reminds me. This is a first pass at the pdf. I will be editing it, just slapped this together quickly because it’s a good tool I think to have the comparisons in front of you. Even though you don’t need to buy 1000 cards as a minimum, I’ve done that it’s possible to compare the prices correctly. A few of these places offer 1000 as a minimum.

I’m having a little bit of a problem finding the sneaky php script that is making me clock some serious CPU minutes (yeah like I know what those are, or give two shits about them). Dreamhost have been pretty good not bugging me about this too often, so you might experience a bit of weirdness on the kode, for one I’ll be switching to a normal theme (as my current one needs something like 30 plugins to work and I’m deactivating everything and putting a clean install onto here). So bear with me while I sort my house out.

Ok, let's hope things are ok now. I need to wait for my next log report to be sure but hopefully sorting out Mint should have done the trick

Guess what I received in the post this morning?

Needless to say I couldn't actually get much work done for a little bit until I calmed down my giddiness and concentrated to finish off this day. So here's some initial thoughts:

1. The internal paper stock is top notch. Lulu scores loads of points with me in terms of the quality of the paper in there. It's thick, it's absorbed the ink very nicely. In effect they've done a completely pro job here.
2. The cover as you can see is of the shiney variety. It's got a good feel to it (which is very important) and the edges come across very nicely. I'd have liked to be able to choose a different kind of cover stock (maybe a matt finish) but what they've got here is done very well indeed so no concerns here. The colours have also come out very well indeed.
3. The binding however is what worries me. Looking at the binding it seems to conform with the normal quality however there are airholes between the cover and the rest of the actual pages. Now I'm not sure if it's just the copy that I got, but that's one of the things I'll be investigating in the coming couple of days.
4. Even though I followed instructions to the t, I still feel that the inside borders should be beefed up a bit for larger books. This is something that should be conveyed to Lulu so that they can have a look at in more detail. I don't mind it now as this is effectively why I've got a draft copy to completely tear apart and make sure I'm happy with every single aspect of it before making it all live.

How you ask? Basically I'm going to test the books rigidity by breaking the spine (something I consider sacrilige to any book, but it's important that I test this). What I don't want is for the book to break down straight away because I will choose another printers. Make no mistake, I'm not bound to Lulu in any way. There are many other print on demand services on the internet. Some have actually been doing it longer than Lulu. So far I'm generally impressed with what I've got and yes it's because I've finally got something in my hands that I've spent so damn long on.

Well I did actually like the whole documenting what was on the table to be completed during any particular month it did actually keep my mind focused on the task at hand.

So recapping January I didn't complete everything I had on that list of things to do, the main one was Shuttle. My intentions were very good however I got sucked into sorting out my book and that honestly did take a great deal longer than I originally anticipated. I did however sort out a couple of things that have been lingering over my head for a very good long while, mainly my logo and the associated business cards which I've also sorted (more about the business cards and online printers in an upcoming mammoth post).

So looking forward into February I forsee a great deal of Photoshop action ahead of me.

1. Operation: Borg - I've got the pages I need to mockup for this clear in my head. I had a massive moment of inspiration on Wednesday last week regarding the future of this project, and needless to say I am absolutely buzzing about the possiblities that this will no doubt provide. I'm glad that Snookie is feeling the excitement again, but at this stage it's really up to me to provide him with the goods, so to speak.
2. Shuttle - We're so close I can actually smell it. Last month we had some very good progress in general and after something stupid like 20 mockups we're all happy with what the login page will look like. The Dashboard is getting there although that is one of those pages that might not end up exactly like we want it but then again that's cool, graphically it will be the part whatever stays or leaves. Time to concentrate on the rest of the aspects of the programme. I do actually intend to finish this off this month. I don't have anything as time consuming as putting a 300 page book together so I should be able to keep my word.
3. Broken Kode Version 5 - I've actually started mocking this up. Most things are starting to fall into place, however I am actually stuck as to how I'm going to do a couple of things. Not so much stuck, because I'm sure that they can be done, it's just the fact that I don't know how to do them myself. Soo if I know you and you're a 'presser of much programming-fu-knowledge, you're going to definitely get an email from me, consider yourself warned :).
4. Inksmith - I've got a couple of things to get sorted for Inksmith this month. It's not a lot but it will get the ball rolling on this little project that will expand in due course I am convinced. So hopefully we should have an announcement of some description by the end of the month.
5. MA - I've promised Stathis that I'd complete the design for his website very soon. Going through his archives it's amazing to realise that he's been blogging for 6 months now and doesn't show any signs of stopping anytime soon, which is great. I'm a big fan of his work, although I don't generally read it online since I feel that his work has to be read on dead tree. So hopefully sometime this year we can sort that out for him. Regarding the style of his site, I've got a very clear view in my mind of what it's going to eventually look like, which is completely different to anything I've done before. Of course it will have drawings in it, but not what you'd expect.
6. Priya - Again another site that I promised I'd sort out. This is for a fashion designer friend of mine. It's going to be very ethnic and I can't wait to get on with it since this has been on the table for a good long while. I just need to get a slew of photos from her and I should be away.

So it seems there's a good deal of photoshop going on this month and lots of coding towards the end of the month. I can live with that.

I said I wasn’t going to talk about the book itself until I had a url, but after tonight I’m pretty sure that ANYONE living outside the US will definitely not be interested in that URL even if I did give it to them. The reason is very simple, the shipping costs basically kill any and all thoughts of buying a book from Lulu if you’re located outside the US. Basically the cost of sending this 285 page book is $19.31. That’s just the god damn shipping. FUCK THAT. Seriously. That’s far too much to ask of anyone to pay for shipping on a single book.

The only saving grace is that I will be providing the book for sale via Amazon which means that the shipping costs will be considerably smaller. It’s a double edged sword however as the actual price of the book will be greater, due to including all the Amazon royalties and shipping costs. It’s a seriously cutthroat industry this publishing business, but I’m betting that even with the 25% markup by Amazon the final book price will be much more manageable. Still shocked me like you wouldn’t believe when I ordered my draft copy today.

I’ve got a lot of great things to say about the Lulu experience, which I’ll be posting soon enough, with LOADS of tips and watchits that I’ve encountered along the way, however their shipping calculator needs to be taken around the back and shot…several times…point blank.

This is the last time I talk about the book until I post the link(s) where it can be bought from. I’ll be writing some stuff about my Lulu experience when I finally get the book and hopefully provide some helpful insight and tips for people crazy enough to undertake a project such as this. I’ve finished formatting the book and I’m about to upload to Lulu and see what manner of trouble I’ll get into there.

In the meantime here’s the cover. This cover was actually my third attempt as the more work I did the more important this cover became to tie the package with a bowtie.

If you want to have a look at the cover on a grander scale, click here.

Michael god bless him has been trying very hard for years now to develop ideas (he’s really good at ideas, which is an unbelievable quality); his ideas (and he’s said this on several occasions) is to try and push people to go to his archives. He’s helped with developing the livesearch, or at least brought it to my attention. He did stuff to get the live Archives working, and then on his site he’s got a fantastic implementation for you to look at all his archives without actually leaving the cosy front page. Unfortunately the more I think about this the more I realise that he’s actually fighting a loosing battle.

What am I talking about? Put simply I read a great deal of stuff online. How much, well I’ve got over 200 sites in my OPML file at the moment, and it gets bigger every day. It’s honestly getting to the stage where I can’t keep up with all the sites. Lately I’ve been worse than usual, but that’s more to do with the fact that I’ve been STUPIDLY busy, mainly trying to sort this book out. I can’t actually keep up with everything and sometimes I’d rather read something a little while later.

Now the way I read blogs and I’m assuming that’s also how many people read them as well (might be making a big mistake but this is what I think), we read the freshest stuff. If we’ve missed a couple of posts it’s not the end of the world really, we might check it out. Now what happens when we come into a site that’s being published for over a year now. We’ve missed a lot of stuff. Does it matter? Maybe not, probably not. However for me there are certain sites that I wouldn’t mind reading and getting to know what the deal is really. I wouldn’t mind checking out the first season of Binary Bonsai or Chris J Davis or Avalonstar or Ifelse or Noscope or…and the list goes on. And that’s where this book comes in.

It’s a different kind of book. I guess what started off as something for me and maybe my parents and a couple of friends, is now part of an experiment. Is anyone actually interested in this stuff as a keepsake? My initial reaction is no, not really. So what happens if I actually make it into a professionally put together product. What happens if I enhance the book in several ways, not cut corners and provide it at a completely affordable price. Would that make a difference? I guess time will tell and I’m always interested in new ideas.

The unexpected thing was that this little experiment of mine has actually planted a seed in my head. A seed which is growing into something I didn’t really expect or can’t understand why it didn’t come to me before. So while this book is effectively the first one to come out under the Broken Kode banner, it won’t be the last. What’s more is that I won’t be the only writer that gets things published under the Broken Kode banner.

Well I guess it’s time to start breaking out the champagne as I’ve got a load of posts to start writing. Part of the reason I’ve been so quiet over on BK is simply because I’ve actually dedicated every conceivable waking hour over completing Broken Kode | Season One. What’s that you ask? Well I originally mentioned the thought way back in August. Those that have been reading BK for a while now know that I generally have a good deal on my plate, however you should be aware that I complete everything I start, no matter how long it takes me. I won’t release it until I’m 100% happy with it and that is where the problem lies. Being a perfectionist in my personal work means that things take time to get sorted out.

I’m going to be writing a slew of posts about this topic as it really does merit the attention. Season One is the title of my first book, based on the first year of posts at Broken Kode. The reason behind the book came about for a couple of reasons. The first was the fact that I can’t be sure that I will be blogging forever. As much as I’d like to believe that I’ll be blogging to the day that I die, well that’s not a really realistic statement. No one knows what the future holds and so I’d like to capture these years of words that I have spent the time and effort to formulate into something that’s solid and tangible. Something I can look at in 20 years time and smile at. So collecting all my posts into a book sounded like a damn good idea to me. This was going to be a 1 week job where I would simply download everything and then just format the posts ever so slightly so that I’ve got them in one location.

After I began playing around, my design and curious nature took over. I started thinking about cool formats, cool layouts to play around with ideas just kept popping into my head, and I instinctively reacted to them. What I hadn’t actually factored into the equation the sheer task that I was actually proposing on doing. See after I started playing with the layout, putting the posts in and just having the title in there, just wasn’t enough. I started adding more information to the entire package. This included what category the post was under, how many comments and the final cherry on top, commentary for every single post. As all this material was being compiled part of the fun was going through the motions and trials of getting something put together ready to get published.

The ironic thing is that the blog was to be used as a method to catalog my journey to get published, only for those posts to be used as the first book I get published. That is what then made me stop and consider what it was I was doing. This was my first book. Any which way I cut it, that’s the first thing I get published, that will be on Amazon, ready for anyone to go out and buy. It’s a book with my name on the spine. It had to be perfect. It had to be something that was worth while. Something I wouldn’t mind slapping down some cash and reading through it.

Now I’m going to be honest, the first 6 months of the book are very hit and miss. There are some great posts in there, and there are some sheer garbage. I don’t mind saying that. No one starts off at the top. People build their style, build their voices. This book shows the progression in no small way.

So how could I enhance this book so it’s something someone wouldn’t feel cheated into buying and actually enjoying? Why would anyone want to buy it in the first place, it’s all found online in my archives? Well I’ll tell you all about that in the next post.

When I’m not talking much on the Kode, it usually means I’m up to something. This has been a pretty long weekend for me. I didn’t go to work on Friday because I was pretty determind to finish off several of my projects. You’d be amazed at the amount of progress someone can get done if he’s under a self imposed deadline.

Of the things that was on the top of the list was to finally create myself a logo. This task is a lot simpler to say than actually accomplish because the honest truth of the situation is that I’ve been trying unsuccessfully to get myself sorted with a logo for like over a year now. I couldn’t for the life of me decide what I wanted the logo to convey. I couldn’t for the life of me sit down and come up with an idea and run with it.

Honestly I tried everything. I tried sketching, hoping that devine inspiration would strike me and I’d be off, however I’ve come to realise and accept that unfortunately my mind simply doesn’t operate that way. Sometimes I can force the issue and will eventually submitt. This could be because of time constraints, it could be because of lack of energy to continue kicking the point into submission. However Broken Kode is different. Broken Kode is in many ways a reflection of myself and as such I don’t care how long things take, as long as they’re done properly.

Sitting on something for a long time however is not good. Taking your time and taking a year and a half to think of a logo is silly. Now I don’t know if it’s because I sat down and I thought things through, or if the pressure got to me but Saturday evening it hit me. I knew exactly what I wanted my logo to convey. I knew what I want to say with it, and I had a clear image in my head.

I’m not sure how most designers go about getting ideas to create things, but due to my background in weilding a pencil and ink brush, I visualise the entire thing in my head before I’ve even begun. I can ‘see’ everything clearly in my head. The final result might differ in the details, but the overall outcome is pretty close to what I envisioned at the start.

The one thing that really annoyed me was getting something to work as 16px x 16px for the new favicon. After going down to like 50px x 50px there seriously was no point to the whole thing. So you’ll notice the favicon is a bit different to the real logo, but the essence is there. I’m not going to base my logo on the basis that it’s got to fit into a 16px x 16px square, anyway the logo is going to be getting a lot of use in the physical world, so that takes a bit of presidence. For all those IE users that can’t see the favicon (first of all switch to Firefox) here’s an image,

This element only occupied 1/6 of my weekend. I’ll hopefully be announcing the other stuff later on during the week.

One idea I’m going to try and do this year (and who knows if I’ll actually continue with it, but it seems like a good idea now) is to write down what I want to accomplish by the end of this month. Baby steps, month by month.

RWebsDesigns Code cleanup I’ve got to clean up the code for Mark’s site as it’s a bit messy right now and not all that easy for the man to change and update certain elements that if I give them a few hours I should be cooking on gas. This is my first priority when I get back as it’s really important to close the book on projects in a nice big bow tie.

Shuttle We’ve got a lot of work to do and January has been agreed to be the time that we do it. I’m completely dedicated to doing this properly so I’ll be examining EVERY single element of the design and making sure it’s there for a reason. This is the second most important element of work this month.

Broken Kode | Season One Blook The design of the book is complete. The posts have been formatted and included. My running commentary has been typed out. I’ve got 4 illustrations complete. This leaves me to complete the cover design and 8 more illustrations. The deadline is tight however I will have the entire package done by the 15th of January, ready to be printed as a draft to check for any mistakes and get it sent to Lulu.

Codename: Borg I’ve got several things to get cracking on this one, as Snook is building up momentum. There’s going to be a lot of sketching going on in the next couple of weeks but I really love the graphical direction we’re going with this, so working on this will be a bit of a break.

Broken Kode Remix I’ve had a little time to sit back and reflect on the year that passed. Not as much as I would have liked to be honest but things are slightly more clear now. One of the things that’s actually come from ‘sitting with myself’ is the fact that Broken Kode in it’s current structural form is actually restricting me creatively. The problem with this design is that it doesn’t hold the flexibility that I want.

In addition my needs and focus has changed slightly since it was launched over 4 months ago. In that time the changes to the site have been pretty minimal, so it’s about time I got itchy fingers again. However I’m actually hoping that the new version will address a lot of the points structurally that I’ve had currently to provide the level of information in the way I want to present it. Thing is the aesthetics are goingto remain very similar to what I’ve got here. Things will be rearranged slightly but hopefully you’ll understand the reason behind the remix and reshuffle. When I say it’s a Remix, the graphics will get used again but not in the same way. It’s a natural progression, however what started off as a slight tweak soon became a complete redesign. My problem was how I was going to incorporate the current image while at the same time build for the future as well.

This isn’t on the highest list of priorities but I feel that in doing this final tweak I can actually forget about the general design of Broken Kode for an entire year! That’s what I’m trying to build towards to be honest. Have the site I’ve always wanted that can be enhanced but does not need to be changed drastically. Roll on Version 5 | Remix.

In a way it’s really important for me right now at this particular time in my life to seriously take a step back, reflect and look at what’s gone before. It’s posts like this that actually make my blog an extremely important part of my life. The sheer amount of information and experience one goes through in a year is amazing. Since I generally can’t remember what I ate yesterday it’s even more important for people like me.

I’m going to warn you however that this is the single longest post I’ve ever done in 2 YEARS of blogging now. I’m generally a verbose person anyway. You’ve been warned.

Broken Kode and Design

Manji and Rin Manji was released at the tail end of 2004, for Rin was released in March. I do want to thank two great personalities on the Broken Kode forums. James and Steph you guys are absolute gems and I thank you for all the help you’ve given to people throughout the year.

Alex King Theme Design Competition Coming second place in the Alex King WordPress Theme design competition was a great little boost for my thirst for creating better designed websites. I’ve still got a great deal to learn, however I’m a lot more confident than I was a whole year ago before the Manji and Rin. I’m only happy when I’m constantly learning and fighting to understand things, and these two themes gave me the necessary building foundations for the future.

Broken Kode Designs Which kind of leads to the fact that I designed this site 3 times this year. To me that implies that I seriously didn’t have much of a clue as to what I wanted, which isn’t completely true. It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride for this site as my needs and the reader’s needs has shifted. I had the idea for version 4 that I really wanted to implement. It’s been a very successful design and one that I’m very proud of and very humbled by all the nice comments people say about it.

Human? Based on a review of a book I did, I was invited to contribute to the book, which should get published sometime next year. I’ve included a double page spread and one of the playing cards. However due to my hard-drive crash, I actually lost that information, so I’ll get it like everyone else on the DVD that’s included with the book.

CoCo I introduced CoCo, which is actually not the first mascott I’ve ever created but definitely my favourite. All future BK designs will have the little guy in one form or another.

Emmortel I launched another website, Emmortel to coincide with May1st Reboot. I enjoyed doing it and I’m generally happy with the design, unfortunately I didn’t update it are regularly as I wanted to. This was also because I realised that I really should be putting all my efforts into Broken Kode, and that my portfolio section could be included into this site. That aspect of the site is still giving me some serious grief but it’s good that it’s on the main site as it motivates me even more to do something about it.

Broken Kode Originals A couple of weeks ago I introduced my first Broken Kode Original. One of many to come in the near future. I’ve got around 5 on my plate at the moment. I’d like to get to the stage where I’m commissioned for at least one of these a month. I think I could probably increase it to two a month but no more than that to be honest.

Broken Kode Shop This was something fun to do. I got a massive buzz getting those prints printed off. I didn’t do it for the money because if I did then I was going about it the wrong way that’s for sure. I’m just immensely grateful to all those people who have supported me in this whimsical idea of mine.

The second item to be offered from the shop is nearly completed and that’s my first blook. I’ve got some serious work to do before the 15th of January, however I’m excited about this package as it’ll be the first book I put on my shelf that has my name on the spine which alone gives me Goosebumps just thinking about it.

Introduction of Splash Panel I’m actually appalled at myself for taking this long to actually get this particular show on the road. I guess I was scared of the amount of time and dedication a site such as this would take. My ambitions for this site are very big. The plan is for Splash Panel to be the first destination people go to for news and reviews and information about the latest graphic novels. Fortunately for me (unfortunate for the industry) most comic book types are still in the dark ages with respect to the internet, as they honestly don’t know how to design a website or present the information for their sites. That’s an article I’ll be writing at some point to flesh things out more.

I believe the site will get a huge amount of momentum once I’ve done the design for it and had a couple of interviews under my belt.

Internet Projects

Codename: Borg Borg has moved forward than just an idea and will hopefully be something I can be proud of in the near future. I don’t want to talk much about it just yet as we’ve still got a long road before we’re in Beta, but it’s going to be a really fun road I can tell you that much. Snook is a code-master. The guy’s sooo blasé about coding it’s unreal. Stuff that would make my head hurt he just shrugs it off and calls it easy, that bastard, lol.

9rules Network In July I was accepted into the 9rules network. While the added exposure has been great, honestly that’s the least important perk of being in the network. For me having gained several friends is worth more than 2 million hits a day. That’s what makes the network special, the people.

Inksmith In May I started thinking aloud. Seems I wasn’t alone in my line of thought. Others felt the same way. The project and idea lay dormant until I could actually give it the proper time it required and so Inksmith was born. The team behind the idea is top notch and is always and constantly expanding. We should be announcing something in the not to distant future regarding this little idea. I find it amazing how just the idea has sparked off loads of conversations but that’s a good sign as people have opinions, and once we’ve actually gotten the framework sorted out, people will appreciate what we’re doing that much more.

Internet Friendships One aspect of this year that I only really was able to put my finger on as I thought about this list more was the number of internet friendships I was able to build and nourish over the past year. It’s gotten to the stage where I don’t think too much about these things anymore but thinking back a year ago this wasn’t the case. I consider Phu Ly, Michael Heilemann, Joen Asmussen, Jon Snook, Bryan Veloso, Chris J Davis , Podz, Matt Mullenweg, Erik Sagen and all those crazy cats over at inksmith and 9rules as friends.

December also brought about the very first London WordPress meetup. I hope to repeat this in the near future as there are a couple of people that live in London that I would like to meet (yeah I’m looking at you Phu).

Life

However this event spurred me into going back to Lebanon after 2 years. I was able to vote for the first time in my life. It was a bit of an anti-climax, although it was extremely important that I do that.

Basketball With the exception of the Corporate Games in Manchester, my basketball life this year was pretty weak. To substitute for my lack of basketball action I did take up running which I’ve been pretty lax on in recent months, however that’s more to do with work than anything else. The funny thing is I got a couple of nasty emails due to those posts.

London Attacks Went through a pretty tough time for the city of London during the month of July. Stathis of course went through worse, however I’m glad those around me got through this unscathed.

Reviews

1. Billy Corgan
2. Thirteen Sense
3. Foo Fighters

Top Movies I actually watched loads of movies, however I didn’t review half as many as I would have liked to. I might make a more concerted effort next year.

1. 25th Hour
2. Kiki's Delivery Service
3. Batman Begins
4. Leon: Special Edition
5. Howl's Moving Castle
6. Serenity
7. Sky Blue

Top Books I didn’t read as many books as I would have liked to, but the few that I did I must say I enjoyed greatly.

1. Tales of the Otori
2. The Helsinki Roccamatios
3. After the Empire
4. Leo the African

Top Graphic Novels To be honest I’ve written a massive post about this over at Splash Panel where this sort of thing is meant to be.

Time for reflection on the year that’s passed us by. This isn’t my end of the year analysis, (that’s still being typed out). It’s been pretty tough at work and that has propagated into my overall anxiety in general. Not really as calm and collected as I’d like to be. I simply flip very quickly and have less patience than I usually would give something. I’m not the only one that seems to be reflecting about things, Chris has hinted at this before, so it will be interesting to see how he follows through with this promise to himself.

One of the things that I don’t like is loose ends. I don’t like unfinished projects. I have understood something very clearly about myself. I’ve got a lot of enthusiasm for different projects and ideas and I will see them through no matter what. The only problem is that these things tend to take a lot longer than I actually want them to. I’ve come to live with that, however I’ve also found out that I have to set myself a deadline and work towards that deadline. In the end while it might seem hard at first to get into the rythem the final outcome when you look back so long as there is consistency little by little Rome is built.

So looking back and looking forward at what I want from the next year and what I plan on doing. This is a long one, so be warned.

Broken Kode

I’m going to be retweaking my gallery section because to be honest I’m not terribly happy with it. I’ve got some ideas but I need to incorporate them into the v4.5 design. This leads into my next major item.

Weekly Illustration

Broken Kode Blook

Broken Kode Tees

Shuttle

Inksmith

Splash Panel

Borg

Sharq

Art & Poetry

As I announced this a while back I think it’s important to finish what I started. When I first started writing this post it was actually to say that I wasn’t going to go through with the whole t-shirt thing and that I wasn’t going to be able to produce the designs that I wanted in the way that I wanted to do them, and then highlight the reasons. Strange thing is as I was writing this I realised that I actually still DO want to get this off the ground, so I’ll put my thoughts/ideas/experience on the table and ask for YOUR input, what should I do and where should I go.

Just to record my experience with the guys at StreetShirts. I exchanged around 20 emails or so with the guys over there trying to get to grips with what I’d need and how I could go about getting my designs printed off as t-shirts. My main issue with the t-shirts was the final price that I would attach to them, over

I spent yesterday chilling out with Naoto and his family (that Scottish bastard Gordon tagged along as well). While we’re there we decided to do a few google searches (as you do) came up with this fantastic artist’s work, Naoto Hattori

You might have noticed that I’ve been pretty quiet lately, which is attributed to the fact that I’ve recently been commissioned to redesign an esteemed gentleman’s website. For those who have their ear to the ground know who I’m talking about, but that’s not what I wanted to talk about at right now, I’ll save that post for when the site goes live (sometime next week, I hope). No what I want to talk about is methodology in designing websites.

The Scenario The current client was effectively my dream client. After I sent in my personalised questionnaire which gives me a better idea of what they like and don’t like and what they want and don’t want, I was off. They only got to see the eventual product once I’d finished it. Was it a risk on their part to just give me all this trust? Maybe, but they did come to me rather than any number of the thousands of ‘web designers’ out there and that is what got me thinking about all this in the first place.

The Issue We’re told at a very early stage in life that the client is always right. They have every say in changing stuff around and realigning and asking for tweaks etc, after all they’re footing the bill right? See this is where I don’t agree completely. Yeah loaded statement I know but here’s where I’m coming from before you jump up and down my throat.

In this particular case when looking for getting a website designed you effectively have an incredible amount of choice in front of you to select whom you’d like to get the job done for you. You hunt around and find a designer whose style you like. You decide upon that particular designer because you like what they’ve done. Choosing the designer is effectively the biggest choice you’re going to make. The creative decisions are not yours.

The Play This is where things become interesting; when you were asked to do a design the client put a certain amount of trust in you. I approach each design as if it’s one of my drawings. A lot of effort and time is put into every element on the page. I’ve been doing this for a while now and have a better knowledge of what works and what doesn’t. I’ve spent hours looking and learning from design magazines, books, movies, comics. All the while gaining experience and knowledge from all over the place. I see things differently. The ‘client’ hasn’t spent that time, or doesn’t have that spark to do it, which is why they’ve come to me. They know what they like.

The Spark Different people tackle this area in different ways. I’ve mentioned that I am now calling any website I design as a Broken Kode Original. I find that a lot of people offering web designing services lack that original spark. It’s like that additional element that elevates their work from the rest just doesn’t exist. ‘Web designers’ like that really annoy me. Show me some creativity dammit and stop using the word design as a crutch!

So effectively what I’m saying is that if you ask me to design a website for you, expect to give me a lot of input into what you like and don’t like right at the beginning and then see NOTHING until I’m done. Think of it as a painting, I never show a work in progress because you can’t see what’s in my head until I’ve got it on paper. If you asked me to do it for you, you obviously like what you see and therefore should have enough trust in me to provide you with a quality design.

I would love to get more website design commissions as they’ve not been coming in very often lately. Obviously I’m doing something wrong and not promoting that aspect of my work enough. However at least now I know how I want to approach designing websites that keeps me interested and vibrant. (Aside: Broken Kode will get realigned in the not too distant future)

Well I can definitely tell you it’s not about the money. I don’t need it, my hosting is pretty cheapo-tastic provided by Dreamhost. I haven’t really been able to take advantage of their referral scheme to be honest, someone did use me as their referee and I thank that person greatly for that, but that’s hopefully going to change in the months to come as I start pushing out a couple of Broken Kode Originals (what I’m calling original website designs by yours truely). My day job pays the bills with a little to spare (no I’m not filthy rich, just don’t have any bill headaches at this time in my life).

As far as I can tell no one’s gotten rich completely from subscribing to Adsense. The more and more I read from people claiming that it really wasn’t worth their time etc. So what the hell is the point? In this particular case it’s an experiment. I really want to see how much I can make in a 6 month period. I’ll eventually provide everyone with the results of the experiment as if I was back in Physics class back in school.

Sure I’m making ‘the man’ richer, but I’m getting a small piece of the pie so it’s slightly amicable to my weird sensibilities. It’s funny but not long ago I wrote on the designateonline forum that I refused to put Adsense on the site, and keep it cleaner. I guess never say never, but unless it actually is worth my while I don’t think I’ll be keeping the ads on here.

So I guess we’ll talk further in 6 months time. Hopefully we’ll have some hit numbers on here as well.

Right I’ve Google Adsense on the site (only in one location and far away from the main page, it’s just below the posts in the individual posts pages), just as a test. The problem is the damn thing’s not showing up. Quick question to everyone that uses this service, does it take a while before the ads start popping up? Do I need to confirm my bank account before these things start coming through? I’ll write more elaborately about this later on but I just wanted to know why the script’s not doing anything.

The title of the post says it all, lots of little things I’ve got on mind I’d like to get out.

» We’ve upped the InkSmith founding contributors to a total of 10. The latest additions are the impeccable Jennifer and the sublime Becca. You all know who I’m talking about.

» Thank god this week is over. Just handed in a scheme report design for an Embassy building. I’s been a mad rush to get it sorted, what should ideally take us roughly 5 weeks or so was condensed to around 1 week. So, long hours in the office have been the order of the day. Mental note, I will only accept to do projects if I like the mechanical engineer. If they’re a dick streer the fuck away from it. Luckily I’ve been very lucky in this regard generally. The reason is simple, on long office nights that’s who you’ll be spending the most time with.

» I did one of those cool 5 Question interviews for Dave Kellam. I really love what he’s done hacking the site to fit in. Very cool stuff, going that extra step. Also pretty cool being the first of the “blue and orange” interviews.

»I’ve started wearing my scarf, just in case people where wondering when I’d give the OK to accessorize properly. Now is the time people.

Finally got the information regarding how to format your comments sorted out. This has been on my to-do lists since I launched version 4, which is a sad state of affairs to be sure. Special thanks to Joen; well for actually giving me a way that doesn’t look crap, keeping everything nice and clean.

My computer is both one of my favourite tools, link to the outside world, online friends, but at the same time it’s my worst enemy. I actually had to leave the house and go down to one of the two local Starfucks in order to GET AWAY from my computer. In the past I’ve actually turned off the internet (or at least disconnected my computer from the net) in order to get on with other more pressing matters. I’m too weak now to do that, as I listen to music off the internet (via itunes), chit chat and reply to emails inbetween other things.

See the problem is I can actually find a milion and one things to do while I’m on the computer. Continue sorting out my blook, play around with a bit of code, chat to a couple of people about this project or the other. The list goes on. So I’m starting to think about the real reason why I’m not going to get my first graphic novel done any time soon. I’ve actually gotten a way bit through it going via the Collen Doran approach. The way she goes about it is actually drawing multiple pages at any one time. This makes it less of a slog and more interesting not knowning which page she’s going to work on in that particular day. At least that’s my understanding of her approach when producing the excellent ORBITER graphic novel with Warren Ellis.

The main problem that I’m facing right now however is the fact that in order to complete these various projects, seeing my friends has actually taken a hit. You can’t possibly get anything done if you keep going out, but at the same time if you don’t go out then your inspiration will be for nothing. However the fact of the matter is unless you sit your ass down and get on with the work then you’ll never get anywhere.

There are a number of getting things done websites all over the blogosphere. Some of the advise presented in these sites is very sound, however I find that I completely forget the advise and get back to my rubbish habits that don’t squeeze every waking second with some productivity. That’s actually when I start getting headaches. Nearly four years ago I suffered some serious headaches for a prolongued period of time, roughly 2 months solid, due in part to the physcological pressure that I decided to put myself under to try and get things done NOW. Also I’ve yet to find a proper PIM(Personnal Information Manager) that I can actually use, but I’ll be talking about that in the near future in much more detail.

The comic landscape wil change in the years to come. Historically when a comic book fan had an idea and wanted to do a comic they would set about doing it sometimes putting the actual things together, photocopying A4 pages and stapling them together themselves. These things would be called minicomics Quality varied considerably and usually wasn’t all that great. Truth be told I’ve never bought a mini-comic. My problem is the actual lack of quality involved in these things.

When I first started this blog, part of it was to chronicle my journey into getting my graphic novel published, of course I’ve not actually finished said graphic novel but it’s getting there. Now when I originally decided to set across this path, there were no alternatives save self publishing or going to various publishers to try and get them to pick up my book.

A few months afterwards Cafepress decided to roll out their book publishing division. This was to my knowledge one of the first ventures into print on demand models over the internet. I was extremely excited about the prospect of having my book published no matter what. Distribution would have to be relegated over the internet, however this wasn’t something that I was completely unimpressed by.

Now there are so many different ways of publshing opening up all over the place. Lulu seems to be the one to beat since they’ve decided to expand their reach to just the internet. There are of course restrictions to what can and can’t be distributed (which is oddly based on the type of book being printed i.e B&W versus colour), however the doors are open for anyone to grab a hold of this model and run with it.

Comic book ditribution is a niche affair. If you want something specific you need to go via a comic book retailer. While I like my comic book retailer they don’t stock everything. They never offer me a discount on ANYTHING, and the store seriously isn’t a welcome place like it was in Greece, where the comic book store was effectively a home away from home, so I don’t really care if I buy the books from them or not.

What the comic book store does provide however is a means to browse and let something JUMP AT YOU. It’s a very important part of buying books. Something will catch your eye. It could be the design, it could be the cover artist, it could be the title that grabs you. The flip through test is the second most important part of the process. Most books fail in this respect and are returned back to the shelf. A more virtual method of browsing is no doubt going to be developed in due time that makes browsing titles a little more intuative with normal practice. Stubbling onto something by mistake should be easier. The consisness of the search feature can be a bad thing at times.

Now the online distribution method is one that’s still in it’s infantile stage. The professional comic book creators have yet to jump onto this model. At least I’ve heard sweet fuck all about this being something very successful in the comic book industry. Since I can only see from my back yard I’ll say that seeing as I’ve not yet bought an online graphic novel this model hasn’t taken off, since I’m ALWAYS on the hunt for good books. I would love to find a gem here or there, however the ones I’ve been looking at online are not of the quality that I’d expect from a comic I’d pay for under normal circumstances. I know that’s being seriously harsh, however I will say that I’m also one of the easiest person to get to buy a well produced graphic novel.

There are ways of making it work (an article for another time) and I believe those people who are the early adopters maybe haven’t tapped into that way just yet.

After hammering this a couple of times (and in the process getting an even better understanding of exactly what makes PHP tick), I’ve formatted the snippets to be part of the main posts. This is mainly to give these random ideas of mine a home, that don’t necessarily require a full post, but also shouldn’t be relegated to the bottom of the page. This’ll hopefully mean more random geekiness from me in the future, or at least that’s the plan Batman.

Think of this as a complete and UTTER bargain. This is your chance to own Broken Kode. Hell I’ll even throw in the hosting for the rest of the year. According to Central Scrutinize if you extrapolate all those crazy numbers that have been thrown around the internet after the AOL buy-out of Weblogs Inc, then this little url is the most expensive url in the 9rules network. So much like Phu, I’m calling in my chips, calling it a night, and putting the site up for sale. Even though it’s priced at $2M plus, I’m feeling happy this evening, so $1M should be ok. Anyone interested can just send me a check.

Most of those links are coming from Rin and Manji users. I’ve talked about this extensively before so once again, all those who have kept the link in there, thank you kindly. All those who have linked back to BK just because, again thanks guys. Which reminds me I’ve got to sort out my blogroll. It’s on my list of things to do, once I’ve got my complicator up and running again.

What’s really funny is I don’t even want to imagine what Binary Bonsai or Photomatt would go for. Yes they’re both linked like CRAZY.

I hate ‘getting’ back into drawing. The reason is very simple as it takes me a good couple of tries before I remember how to hold the fucking pencil up straight. Yesterday was a very important day as it marked the FIRST day that I started drawing Sublime. I have eluded to this book for a good long while now. A version of the script has been lying on my floor for a good 4 months and to be honest I’ve been pretty chicken to pick it up and run with it.

I kept saying that I’d get around to it at one point or another once I’d finished the script completely. Needless to say that wasn’t the case. No I need to make a start now. If, or rather when I come back to modify pages, at least I’ll have made a step forward in the book itself. Sure it’s not going to be a masterpiece, then again, my first website wasn’t a masterpiece and neither has any other one after that been what I’d call perfect. Not even close. What I can say however and what makes it easier for me is the fact that there is an improvement every single time I get into the creator’s seat, and I suppose that’s what I’m hoping for with my comic book work.

A gradual progression of skill that will evolve hopefully from page to page. It’ll help me cut my teeth before I jump into the story that I’ve been putting off for the past 3 years.

The problem is that I’m the photoshop generation. Traditionally comic books are greated in the following way:

1. The writer produces the script from which
2. The artist draws, which then gets given to
3. The inker, who comes along and does his thing.
4. Then the colourist comes into the fold and tries their best to enhance the artwork.
5. The letterer comes in and does his magic

When I start drawing a page I start imagining various things, I can see the page clearly in my head while the page is blank. Usually speaking the final page is reasonably close to my intended vision. When it’s not I blame it on my lack of skill. It does happen that your imagination is a few steps infront of your skill. The thing I’ve been noticing more and more is that now I won’t draw absolutely everything because I know it would take me very long to do manually, and wouldn’t be as perfect of clever as if I did it in photoshop.

One thing that my little experience with Emmortel has proven to me is that if I’ve got a deadline I will do everything that I have to to meet that deadline. I will not cut too many corners, just be professional enough to achive a specific level that is acceptable to me. I’m a complete anal perfectionist and so NOTHING is ever good enough. Nothing achives it’s potential. Everything can be done better.

However in order to get anywhere you have to try, try and try again; and you must have a deadline. A self imposed deadline, a set deadline, whatever. Something that makes you work harder and longer, and faster and with more passion and conviction than if it was left to the wind to see when it gets done it gets done.

With Emmortel “complete” I can turn my eyes onto a few projects that have been abandonded these past couple of weeks/month. So that it can be official (when I mean official, actually documented somewhere and that would be right here because I can run away from this post but it will always be there staring at me, haunting me) I think I’m going to give myself 20 days to finish off the first draft of my script ‘Sublime’. Twenty days because I fly to Lebanon on the 21st of May.

I’ve thought about this story for close to a year solid now. I’ve written countless (actually more like 6) drafts of the plot, I’m 30 pages into the current script, let the fun begin.

I’ve decided to go for a more dynamic approach to v3 of this site. There are a number of reasons, but mainly it’s because I’ve been sitting on this design for a while now, and I really wanted to start using some of the features I’d set up for it, mainly my snippets column. I plan on updating that part of the site pretty regularly.

The actual redesign was spawned from the need to showcase certain things and to actually highlight others. I knew that I wanted to showcase Manji and Rin a bit more on the front page, and subsequent themes I am actively involved in developing.

There are loads of tweaks I’ve got to get around to and complete a number of static pages, some of which are hinted at the top of this page, but I’m in no rush right now. If I build this content in such a way I’ll be able to reuse it later on down the line for future updates. I wonder how long I’ll stay with this design?

Themes Tangent: What I’ve found really amazing, is just the sheer number of themes that are now available for the WordPress community. We’re talking well over 100 themes and counting.

The trick now is to try and seperate the good from bad, from the ugly. Some I’ve got to say are exceptional themes. Blix is one theme I think is brilliant. It’s subtle colours and clean lines really do appeal to me. Another one is Green Marinee which I think is another slick addition to the great WordPress theme arsenal. K2 is lurking on the horizon, and Persian has always been around kicking ass and taking names.

Having a good looking site in WordPress is now not an option, it’s a given.

I’ve literally wasted 2 evening on trying to sort out my bloody update to the site. I was only intending it to be a slight tweak. Spent yesterday trying to work out how to make navigation bars in CSS lists,…the way I wanted. See that’s the crux of it. I have a navigation list but the way I’ve got it in my mind, it shouldn’t have been too difficult to implement. Unfortunately you factor in the difference between IE and Firefox and you’ve got a whole world of pain.

What’s worse is that after I finally got it to work, I remembered a fundamental flaw in the design, which has effectively scuppered all the work this evening, with the exception of those lists. Dammit I’m not even updating anything major here, just the index page. Guess I must be having an off couple of days right now. Not really in the mood, even though it’s been snowing in London and I’ve had a great productive weekend.

I guess at times like these it’s best to step away from the computer and come back to it in a couple of days when I’ve got my head sorted.

Right after University I spent a few months learning how to draw faces. I spent the better part of 3 months drawing portraits of my friends to understand exactly what the structure of a face is. From this little exercise I even got one of these drawing up in the Hype Gallery last year which was both one of the best experiences and worst experiences of my life. I’ve learnt a few things since then, 3 1/2 years. This is the first in a new series of portraits.

Okay as far as I can tell the migration from Dreamhost is nearly over. It’s been one of those mornings. What I thought was a database error in actual fact a new crazy feature of the latest ‘unstable’ iteration of wordpress. Oh well, live and learn I guess. There’s a post missing, and a few comments. I’ll add the comments after this post here, as far as I can tell the rest of the site is running smoothly, so now I can say I’m proudly hosted by Dreamhost.

I’ve not had time to really take in the actual admin panel yet, but it seems very intuative. Right need to go sort my self out, 2 days in bed obviously had it’s toll on me, from a boredom point of view.

So I decided to go by Warren’s website, to see what he’s up to. For the uninitiated, Warren Ellis is a comic book writer. He’s really hot and cold with me to be honest. Sometimes he writes something that I think is absolutely stunning in quality and then he goes and writes some psycho thriller with prostitutes and rapid monkeys, or based on whatever bbc thing he was fascinated by at the time.

He used to run a blog called Die Puny Humans, but that’s been meshed into his current warrenellis.com site. The good news is he’s running it on Wordpress, hurray, the bad news it seems he’s lost his designated web monkey, or she bailed on him, or she’s decided to sleep at the wheel. Warren usually has nice looking sites (except for the aforementioned DPH which was an ugly thing and ran on Moveable Type (notice my blog system elitism in the tone people, in the tone, it’s worse than a mac user).

The current incarnation of his site is just aweful. I mean you’d find it pretty difficult to understand what it is the man actually does. It’s a complete mess, he can do oh so much better than that., and reason I know he can is because he’s done so in the past. Think of the children you bastard, think of the childern (Bastard btw is Warren’s most used word in the english language).

Just thought I’d highlight a couple of new pages added to the site. I will say this, it takes a lot of time and effort to make a site whole. Makes me really appreciate other sites a lot more that I know the guys and gals have put soo much effort into them. I will also say that the wordpress static page feature is a very welcome addition. I guess a lot of these pages will evolve as time goes by and I edit them and tweak them, but just so you know they exist:

• About Page
• Shuttle Page
• Manji FAQ

This is a long one (roughly 1600 words), so I guess grab a coffee and chill.

Broken Kode was updated 3 times in 2004, but I consider this to be version 2.0. The reason is the first version was using Moveable Type, when they decided to screw everyone over I moved elsewhere that same night. I didn’t wait a single day, I didn’t contemplate keeping my blog and then finding something more suitable, even though I’d spent soo long trying to understand their structure and code, that same night I left, and I’ve never regretted that decision. That design was scuppered, and I did the design that was online till December, when I used the default Manji template for a month. But that really wasn’t for any other reason except to get people familiar with the design. Which reminds me to make a live preview going.

So here we are BK v2.

Initial Though Process. I started designing Manji on the 1st of October. I knew that I would eventually have my own version of the template, but to be honest until I released Version 1.0 of Manji, I hadn’t actually given Broken Kode any thought…nothing. So with the release I finally could sit back and have a look and take note.

I did over 7 mock ups for the design. Each time I varied the colour scheme. I’m serious I’ve been through quiet a lot of colour schemes that I could probably do another 5 decent variations of the Manji theme. I’ve already mentioned Lava, well that’s not even on this list.

Sadly none of them clicked. Don’t ask me why. It was just a gut feeling I had that they just weren’t fun enough. Aha, so that’s the type of site I was looking for now, something more fun to look at. With that germ of an idea I let it ferment in my head.

While in Greece, I went and joined Stathi at work. He’s part-timing in a bar till he gets an engineering job. We went a bit earlier to chill out and talk. He said it wasn’t going to be busy but that he would have to sort things out for half an hour or something. I wasn’t prepared to sit on my ass an do nothing so I took a pad and a pen. From there I started sketching. I’d always wanted to have a mascot for the site, however I was too preoccupied with a bunch of other things to really do anything about it. For some reason that night something clicked, and when I looked up from the bar, there was this bottle staring at me, yeah you guessed it with the words CoCo on them, perfect.

It’s been a while since I’ve created a character like that but it was pretty awesome because the inspiration kept flowing and by the next day I’d done this sketch.

I had to wait a total of 5 days before I could scan it in and ‘redraw’ it in Flash and Freehand. It was torture I can tell you that much. I had the inspiration but I couldn’t finish it all off.

Colour Schemes

I’ve got to thank my housemate Laurent who’s been really good to chat to about the colour and overall design aspects. As it turned out CoCo dictated the actual final colour scheme. Once I’d gotten the aqua/green/blue and red everything else kind of fell into place, hell even I was surprised by the pink, but for some reason it works very well. I guess if you struggle with colour schemes, you could either use one of the following methods to help you out:

• Colour schemer
• Colour Match Remix
• ColourWhore
• Colour Blender

or alternatively you could simply be inspired by one of your favourite drawings at the time.

Ok so I’ve got my colour scheme. Thank god. With that in hand I was able to see what was what and how everything worked in Manji. Sure I know the code, but I wasn’t sure how easy and intuitive it was to actually skinning it. I’d tried to sort it out in as much of a user friendly way as possible. It was pretty simple actually. What I loved the most about the experience was the fact that I didn’t have to reinvent the wheel. The structure and 80% of the code was there, all I had to do was take it away from there. The hardest part was the first to be honest, but once I got into the groove I was away.

Plugins Galore I’ll be making a proper page for the plugins I use because to be honest these guys and gals have done an unbelievable job in implementing some fantastic functionality into a wordpress powered blog. There are currently about 14 plugins and about 3 hacks being used to get Broken Kode the way it is. That’s an immense amount of hours spent by each and every person involved in implementing this code, and I think they really should get a proper mention. What’s funny is that as I was implementing these plugins and hacks I remembered how much I’ve improved in the 7 months I’ve been using Wordpress. I remember spending roughly 2 weeks trying to sort out the preview plugin alone. Posting on several blogs and message boards trying to sort it out. It was a strange experience but in a way I kind of saw what I was doing. Actually understood that doing this would screw the pooch. Oh sure I’m still a complete spaz when it comes to php code, but I’m actually starting to understand it. In fact there was only one feature that I really wanted to implement into the design that I didn’t get a chance to do yet, and that’s the separate trackbacks/pings and comments. Hopefully that will get resolved sometime this week (not that I get many trackbacks mind, however I’d like to have that option available, you know just in case).

Debugging Now unlike some people (yeah you Chris), I can’t do a bloody redesign in 2.5 hours. It took me (just coding) about 2 days to get everything to work nicely. Once I’d sorted it out in Firefox, the problem was that it looked a complete mess in IE. You can’t not take IE into account because 50% of the people that come to BK are IE users (shame on you all, download Firefox today ^_^) . So I must have spent 4 hours debugging.

Design aspects Manji in many ways is a derivative of the original BK design. When I say derivative I’m talking about the design aspect of course, since that’s what I was in charge of. So the search bar is right at the bottom since it just makes more sense there for me, it’s single column since the content should be what it’s all about. The page that I changed the most was the comments page. I’ve been thinking about this a lot actually and I think that comments pages are really important because they bring the blogging community that much closer together. I’ve met a number of fantastic people online through forums and blogs and I think it’s these comments and allowing each other to add their voice that really adds and enhances the blogging experience.

So why so different from the original Manji? Loads of features that I love in a blog can only be achieved through the use of plugins. So when doing the design for Manji I made a conscious effort to make sure that I didn’t actually make it hard for anyone to have it up and running. Sure it’s not ideal but I remember back when I was a newbie and hacking anything but the css was just too much for me, and even then I wasn’t exactly confident in what I was doing. I streamlined everything a little bit. For my design I wanted to implement all those ideas the way I would have liked to send out the template in the first place. I’m glad at least that the comment buttons don’t need a plugin because I would have been pretty bummed.

Originally I was going to have the title bar etc in the middle but CoCo took over and I had to find some sort of balance, which is why you’ve got the title in big on the right hand side, which all the title block etc aligns to the left. Balance was something I did think a great deal about, and that top header took me several tries to get it that way.

By sheer luck I didn’t need to change the colour of the comment icons as they actually work well with the chosen colour scheme.

One of my favourite features is the navigate via category. That’s definitely something I’ll be using a lot. I’ll be using a lot? Surely you mean the user will be using a lot? Well no. See there’s been a lot of talk on the net about blogging and what a personal webpage should be about. I didn’t start of Broken Kode so that I could cater to anyone save myself. It’s a method of expression for me, it’s my therapy and I honestly couldn’t live without it right now. When I was going the redesign I was think how it would be for me to use. What would I enjoy when I scroll back through the posts. I’ll talk a lot more about the reasons for this blog in my about page once I get that sorted out.

Final note really, what’s with the actual font I’ve chosen for the header? Well it’s all because I don’t work as fast as I’d like to. That being said I’ve actually done the initial design for an original font for the site. I’ll eventually get around to updating it, however I thought as a homage to my favourite band in the world (the smashing pumpkins) I’d use one of their last ever fonts used for their final album that wasn’t released in the shops. It’s an internet only album free to download, and that was one of the fonts used in this release. Friends and Enemies of Machine. Rock on.

I’ll be posting a much more indepth post about the thought processes and ideas and what was used to make Broken Kode Version 2.0 a reality and what still needs to be done. I guess this is like my ‘beta’ version. I’ve still got validation and clean-up code, but I really want to see it go live as I’ve been thinking about this redesign for about 1 month and I really couldn’t wait to get it up and out there.

BTW CoCo is my new site maskot.

Now I think some serious sleep is in order.

For the past 2 years, essentially the amount of time I’ve been living in London, I’ve not actually drawn any comic books pages. Sure I’ve done sketches, and I’ve learnt how to use a number of programs to digitally illustrate since then, however the point is I’ve not actually fully drawn a single A3 page since coming back to the UK. At the time I blamed the lack of a drawing table, and then it was the fact that I didn’t have a script and then it was that I was learning other things, all very true, all excuses.

While I was in Greece I opened my folder with previous art, and I sat there looking at paintings I did nearly 3 years ago just after I finished University. What I saw was raw to say the least but I could see where I was going. I could see the passion I’d instilled into those pages. To be honest it depressed the shit out of me.

After 2 years I’ve begun hand drawing again. Pencil, paper, ruler, compasses. Black India Ink. Windsor & Newton equipment. The thing I missed the most out of it, is that excitement of trying to finish the piece. Knowing exactly what the final things is going to look like and having it slowly appear in front of you.

What I’ve missed even more than that is the fact that while you’re drawing the next image pops into your head, and you’ve got that rush to finish so that you can get stuck into the other piece.

What’s also nice is that this has well and truely invigorated my passion for my story. I just needed a graphical angle that made it interesting visually at least. There was something missing in the original piece I did that showed this. You can have a look at what is was tentatively called in this post here. It’s changed. The angle I needed? Alphonse Mucha. Art Nouveau master.

The pieces I’m working on now are going to be great promotional pieces, that I will hopefully make into prints. I’ve just got to find the correct printers and the correct kind of paper for them. It’s an exciting time at Casa Brokenkode.

Oh yeah and I’ve begun development on Iliosnare (although nothing to show on the site yet, I’ll put a more funky holder in the next few days).

Every once in a while I get a cool idea that I can’t help but get excited about. The current one is my logo. I’ve been inspired by google in how I’m going to approach this little thing. I’ll be playing around with the logo and keep adding and deleting bits and pieces to it as time goes. The thing that will stay the same is the crimson glass sphere. From this post right here I’ve completed two bits that I really did want to get sorted. The first being the logo and then the little graphic around the insert comment.

Man the more you get into this wordpress stuff the more you find out just how much stuff people have done for you, and all you need to know is how to make things sing a bit, needless to say I’m enjoying these minor tweaks here and there.

The control panel hasn’t exactly been what I envisioned for it simply because I didn’t know what I could do with it and actually make it useful. So hopefully this should give people a bit of a kick in terms of what is possible if you set your mind to it. Like the post says it’s version 0.1, which means once I can actually be bothered to give the CSS a bit of a creative punch future versions will materialise with more features and better graphic content. Go on click right here, to check it out.

I think with that I’ve cleaned up my index stuff, leaving the css file to clean up and finally start updating the nexus section of this site, which to be honest will be harder that I should think. I don’t want to hand code that, so I’m going to try and find a hack for wordpress that does what I want it to do.

Funny thing is I already have an alternative, it’s just not exactly what I’d like to do, so I’m going to hold back on this little thing till I’m absolutely certain there is no other way.

With this blog completed, I’ve decided upon and began my next project. It’s time really to buckle down hard and actually try and try and finish my script. The plan is to complete the script by the end of the year. In addition the sketches for the characters, and my general skills should be ready to handle the art side of the book next year sometime. The plan is I write no more than 1 page a day, unless of course I’ve got some really devine inspiration, although for well crafted pages I’d need to give them a day.

Once that page has been completed then I can start doing a few sketches until I finally get a decent amount of work underneath me. Things will have to be put on hold, much like I did when I was actually trying hard to complete this blog project.

For all those that are looking to try and write scripts I’ve got two places you should drop by and have a look at. The first place is this little section at the BBC website, writersroom, which should have all your template needs for word, which is brilliant to be honest, been looking for something like this for a while, so I’m glad it’s all set up for, and I just modify it slightly.

The second is scryptic studios, again a wealth of information and script samples.

I’ve been involved with graphic design and computers and software and programming for the better part of nearly three years now. I think in that time I’ve learnt a hell of a lot, and really expanded my skills in a great number of areas, which ultimately helped me no end at work as well. Having said that I’ve neglected a certain part of my creativity in my attempt to do other things. I’ve neglected my hand drawn art. The stuff that isn’t computer manipulated and drawning using freehand or expression or whatever, the bare basics of me, a sheet of white paper and a pencil. Simple equipment that given time and patience can produce magic in my ideas.

So I think I’m going to have to put a lot of the designing aspects on the backburner, maybe 2 hours a day on design maximum, and then spend the rest of the time on the business of artwork. I miss that feeling of a completed page that I can add in my pile like you wouldn’t believe, and I think it’s time I got that feeling back again.

This is the last thing I actually drew, some parts I’m proud of, others I do actually cringe at; I guess that’s what it means to be hypercritical of your own work really, and not accepting anything as the best, but rather always seeing room for improvement. The title will most definitely change, but for now, it’ll do just fine really.

Also this marks my 100th post for the year.

Still playing around with the overall design of the site right now. It’s getting there, here’s a list of things I still need to try and sort out:

1. Fix up that control panel, with all the bells and whistles Update: Sorted version 1.0 of the user control panel. It’s a start really although there are a number of issues that need to be addressed first, but again with time that will get sorted out no doubt.

2. Sort out a more indepth search facility to include for searching through specific criteria

3. Make the links in the post more distinct, probably with the use of some sort of image, but this means some serious restructuring of the css file and the index file, and is very time consuming, and prone to some serious phuck ups but at least it will be seriously distinct that this is in fact a link. Update: I’ve already sorted this part out, although if you’re using a rubbish browser, like Internet Explorer you won’t be able to see the link addition in all it’s glory, much like when I eventually get round to the favicon, again you won’t be able to see it in action either. This is the price you pay for supporting IE, go download Firefox and set your browsing free.

4. Sort out the additional static pages, that aren’t really static at all, except they just show what is going on in general.

5. Some downloadable wallpaper, and maybe even a mascott for the place.

6. Wordpress hacks to make my life easier in adding images because currently it’s not all that great an option. Update: Sorted out the addition of images, so now it’s got an integral ftp system within wordpress. To do this I call upon you to go to this link here, Asymptomatic WordPress Hacks

7. Sort out the preview section of the comments side as well. Update: This section has also been updated as well. I’ll be posting on the wordpress message boards how this is all done really, and all the problems I had to get to this stage. Hey at least that strikes yet another issue that needs to be dealt with; cool.

8. Paginate the posts Update:Sorted this out for the control panel, still thinking about whether or not I need this little feature for each and every single post as well. I guess I’ll update this as time goes by really.

9. Add bbedit buttons to the comments area as well. Not the end of the word if it doesn’t happen.

10. Control Panel version 1.1 This should include sorting out the font size in the page, either large or regular.