i'm a web designer

So in my last post I mentioned something about a lot of coursework. Well since then much of it has been completed, aside from the large project which is due in next week. Fingers crossed everything will be fine.

Anyway. I handed in a piece of coursework. It was my currency converter. Although the code is pretty scrappy it works exactly as intended. At some point though I will give the code a re-work, make it cleaner and to reduce the amount that I repeat elements. For that I need to get a better grasp on PHP Functions. I am trying, I swear. I will also add a nice pretty front end to it, so that you don’t have to edit the URL and look at XML. This will have to wait though. You can view the currency converter from my portfolio page.

On a slightly happier note, I am going to USA soon (10 days in fact). Looking forward to that, be glad to get out the country for a while.

Despite this I have to take my laptop with me, no getting away from work that easy. Good times.

Oh, and something for waaaay into the future. The site will be getting a re-design (and re-code). So much stuff on here that I am not happy about. Especially those cheesy headings and sub-headings in the top-right. What WAS I thinking…?

I am currently in the midst of a massive pile of uni work. This is not entirely fun. Most of it has to be in, in a couple weeks. It is big coursework, and some of it doesn’t look like it will be finished on time.

This is not as bad as it sounds though. Once piece does not require it to be finished as per my spec, which is good. It is not that I have been lazy, it is just that it is very hard and I have had troubles with it.

Still, as I go along pieces are being handed in / completed, why only today did I do a presentation. Not bad, for the first time in my life I had a presentation with too much information. It lasted half an hour, with questions too. Which is pretty epic. Would like to thank one Lewis Malpas for that. He did a wonderful job with this work.

Lots more to come though, lets see how i do. Hopefully I can do more than I think I will. Fingers crossed eh?

Not entirely sure why I left it so long. I’m gonna try and update more often from now on.

I am currently so busy with Uni work it is unreal. Working on making a shop, heavy on the JavaScript. Should be cool, though I haven’t managed to get very far with it. If you want to have a look you can go here. I am a link.

It is built in codeigniter, which I might add is awesome. Still it is a rather large learning curve.

In the time that I have been away quite a lot has changed. I have moved house, still in Bristol though. Not only this I managed to get a web design job for a month and a half, that was cool. It funded me to buy a new MacBook. This was necessary because my old Sony Vaio packed up and I wanted something decent. New phone too, the iPhone of course (all designers need one, it’s a trademark) and I am in my third year of Uni, which is my last year. Scary…big wide world.

Going to the USA soon, Easter holidays. That will be cool. Will try to post some pictures and things. Woo, I’m quite excited for that, especially as it is going to be warm (screw you English weather).

So this is my newest update. Will promise to add more when the time comes.

It has been a while since I posted in my blog. Been far too busy with exams and other work. Sad times.

Exams. Fun things really aren’t they…yeah, right. I’ve had two already, one writing essays on HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and Web Programming (Mostly about XML, couldn’t do the OOP PHP). Another 3 exams to come and a presentation to do too, then school’s out for summer.

In other news I’ve been working on a few sites, two of them not so major. A wordpress site where I just enter most of articles and order the backend around, throw in some style editing and it is pretty much done. Have two more smaller sites to crack on with, but those can wait as I have a major project to work on; a Joomla site with social networking interactivity. Granted a lot of the stuff is in the form of add-ons for Joomla, but I have to get it to work the way the client wants. Can’t really say much more about it right now, they want it kept quite until it’s mostly finished.

Once this is done I have a few site improvements/fixes to do on this site, not least fixing the blog page. If you haven’t already noticed it’s slightly different to the rest of the site. Pain in my arse.

Any way thats about it for now, catch you on the flip side y’all

How exciting.

It has been a while in the making, but this new site layout is around 99% complete. Little tweaks here and there need to be done and it is finished. =]

Any recommendations or improvements are welcome as well as suggestions for my random tagline that I will be creating at some point

This is all about the lovely little Twitter app known as Blu. It’s created by an unknown (well I’ve never heard of them) company called thirteen23. You can download Blu from their site here.

Ok. So you’re at their website and it says ‘Vista Twitter client’. Well if you are on Windows XP you may turn away at this point. DO NOT. It works for you. Now rejoice. So download it, ignore what it says about correct software installed on your comp. Thats all rubbish.

Oh, quick note, you will need Windows .NET 3.5 before you can run this little app.

read more…

You probably haven’t noticed, but over the past few days my site has had a couple of new upgrades and fixes.

The most noticeable will be of course, the new fading featured content slider on the homepage and on the services page.

Some small other improvements have gone on too, with aligning objects properly to make the site look a teensy bit better, though you won’t notice.

Another new addition to my site, is tutorials. I will be doing a few tutorials every now and then and I hope they prove to be useful to some

We will be making the smash desktop background featured on my art page. To get started open up Adobe Photoshop

Start with your document, I started with 1440×900 pixel size, but you can do any. Fill it with a dark grey. Mine was #0a0a0a.

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Around this time last year is when i finally decided i should buy myself a domain name and some hosting. I started off with a simple design, and didnt really follow through with it. Despite this i uploaded the site anyway.

Since I first uploaded my first website, I have swapped and changed it a lot, always iterating the design, the layout and the content to what you see around you today. No doubt there are more designs on the way, but thats not for a while as I’ve finally found a layout that I like and works for me

Below you get to see the designs that evolved over the past year, excited yet?

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Due to recent appearance on Skins, everyone on my course decided it would be rather funny to milk it for as much as they could. It has now been over a week. I have an #alexfromskins twitter account, and a Facebook group entitled ‘The Alex From Skins Appreciation Society’.

It’s all very childish, but I can see that it’s not going away despite how annoying it is. So I’ve decided to join in and laugh along with them instead of getting annoyed.

Oh by the way, the Facebook group is continuing to grow in size by the hour, at the time of writing this post it has 39 members, and another 180 waiting to accept invites. This is quite interesting.