Userbag.co.uk

As a result of a holiday in Slovenia (obligatory photo to the right), being a little busier than normal at work and a hint of having nothing interesting to post it appears it’s actually been quite a while since I last updated my blog.

My solution as you may have noticed is this somewhat rambling posting purportedly providing interesting information and such.

Probably the most interesting update to the estimated two people that actually read this blog is the release of my latest version of JSnip. The new version includes with it an array of bug fixes and a brand new LightBox Snippet, along with a rather snazzy little zoom animation to go with it. As always you can get the full code on Github and check out the new features on the sample page.

Probably less interesting would be the fact I finally got a more or less functioning version of my portfolio page on-line (minus quite a few projects I lack pictures for). The best part of this being my site is now finally free from those pesky “coming soon” pages, and that I’ve also found somewhere to dump a little feed from my github.

Least interesting of all, but probably still quite a nice change for anyone who actually views these pages is that the blog should now be loading signifcantly faster thanks to the addition of WP Super Cache. (Previously page loads were taking a good ice age and a half which was kinda ridiculous)

P.S. Click the Holiday Image to the right to see the new JSnip Lightbox in action.

Well this site is still under construction, but has made quite a bit of progress since wordpress was first shoved under this domain. With a little luck what’s now an incomplete jumble of code will become both my portfolio site as well as my very own development Blog.

Since I’ve needed a portfolio site for a while, i finally decided to take action on it a day or two ago, making use of the userbag.co.uk domain name I’ve had laying around for almost a year now. I had originally registered the domain for another project, but in the end I didn’t get round to starting, never lone finishing it. Rather than start from scratch and build from the ground up, i decided going for WordPress as the blogging section was probably a better idea. The reasons for this were a combination of laziness and a want for the more advanced and robust spam blocking features a large blogging engine like WordPress can provide.

This oddly enough is also the first time ive ever install or used wordpress in my life, though getting to grips with it was far easier than id feared. The Templating engine, although an ugly jumble of php and html does provide all the nessary functionlty need, so allowed me to develop my sites design uninpinged by the constraints of the WP skinning engine. That said, my notable lack of skill as a front end designer was more than enough of a challenge for me, as you can likely see from the current state of the site.

To overcome my shortcomings on the design front, my main resort is to leach as much feedback on the design as i can from anyone willing to answer. By combineng the feedback and refineing my design accordinly i can eventaully get to quite a nice looking design (and hopefully will again in this case).

With a few more iterations of the general design and the eventual addition of a proper about, portfilo and contact page this site will be complete. Finally giving me somewhere to complain perfusely at the state of progammings im working on this blog, as well as having a nice looking portfilo i can tap on the end of my C.V

Hence with this Opening blog, i Launch this… Blog in to the open seas of the blogosphere 🙂