I had a little time this week, so I decided to rewrite my WordPress template. I liked the overall look of it, but I just customized somebody else’s work, and things were just a little off.

I’d never written a template for WordPress from scratch before, but it turns out to be pretty easy. I used the Blueprint CSS framework because I’ve really come to love using it, and I added a graphical logo to the header instead of plain text.

I also made changes to the categories.  I felt there were way to many, so I consolidated them into 5 areas.  After that, I think that it’s important to utilize tags instead of categories.  As a result, those of you who subscribe to my RSS feed probably saw a lot of old posts show up.  Sorry about that.  Wordpress automatically adds an edited post to the feed.

So, let me know what you think works, or doesn’t work.  If there’s a problem in a particular browser/OS, let me know that too.

I finally finished a personal development project that I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while now.  I made a Lifestream.  A lifestream is an aggregate of online activity.  I have accounts at Twitter, Delicious, Digg, YouTube, Last.fm, and Flickr.  These sites all track my activity for social networking purposes, and make them available via RSS.

What I’ve done is aggregate these sources into one stream of information…a lifestream.  I got the idea from Sean McGrath a few months ago, and he even gave me use of his code, although in the end, I decided to write my own and avoid the use of a database.

To write the site, I used CodeIgniter, Blueprint CSS, SimplePie, and Yahoo! Pipes. I think I had to write about 300 lines of code in total to get this to work.  I have a little polishing up to do, but then I’ll be able to release it under the GPL.

Even though I’ve been really busy with consulting work these last few months, I always seem to find time to start a new personal project.  It doesn’t seem to matter how busy I get actually.  There’s always so much to learn.  So many new technologies, methodologies, frameworks, platforms, you name it.  It never stops.

I think that the best way to learn these new things is by working on personal projects.  Especially, if you’re going to learn a few new things at once.  Otherwise, you may dig yourself into a hole that will take weeks to get out of.

So, my new project.  I’m writing a web-based bit-torrent interface for linux servers.  I haven’t quite decided which torrent client to wrap it around yet though.  It’s meant as a replacement for Torrentflux which I find a bit too cumbersom.  My vision is to build something more streamlined, both functionally and visually using PHP with CodeIgniter, Blueprint, and JQuery.

I’m sure this is going to take forever because I’m so busy, but it’s meant as a learning project as much as anything.  I’ll post updates as it progresses, and eventually the source code.

I’ve been playing around with CodeIgnitor this past week.  It’s a pretty slick MVC framework for PHP.  I’m seriously thinking of retiring my custom framework for this purely for the sake of rapid development.

Who can make money in web development if you spend so much time writing supporting code for your projects?  The folks at CodeIgnitor have already done most of the heavy lifting for you.

If I combine CodeIgnitor PHP framework with the JQuery javascript library, I can pump out some pretty impressive, functional sites in short order.

I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a web-based controller for a Bit Torrent engine to replace Torrentflux.  This might be the perfect testing ground for these two technologies.

Versions, a Subversion client for Mac has finally been released in beta form after a year of development. I’d completely forgotten about it, until they emailed me. In fact, I don’t even remember signing up for any development notices. Anyway, it’s free to download, but it expires on July 1st. I have to assume that means it won’t always be free.

I’ve only played with it briefly, but so far I like it. It feels like a solid Mac app, which is something that other Subversion clients on this platform have failed to accomplish. I haven’t put it through it’s paces yet, but I plan to use it at least until the beta expires.

There is one feature ZigVersion had that Versions doesn’t, and that’s the ability to import files by dragging them from Finder into the repository tree, and export them by dragging them out. It’s not a deal-breaker though, and I’m sure there will be other features that will make up for it.

If you’re just getting into Subversion, the Versions website directs you to a service I hadn’t heard of that offers free repositories (with some reasonable restrictions) in a super-simple and elegant web interface at Beanstalk.