I previously posted my thoughts on who to follow on Twitter and came up with the following rules:

Here's my rules for who to follow:
1. I'm gonna follow anyone that follows me and if I don't like what they are saying I'll drop them like a bad habit in a new year's resolution.
2. Anyone that even has a hint of pushing advertising or marketing material in my face that I don't like they're gone too!
3. Anyone who doesn't share common interests with me or is in anyway abusive in their tweets, see ya later!

DId they work? In a word, No! I suppose it's my own fault for not really watching my Twitter account closely enough and not using Twitter enough. To be perfectly honest I'm not sure I really get it! I suppose for marketing campaigns it's a way of potentially getting a message out to your followers, but are people really following you? I know there's lots of people who are very active on Twitter and probably get lots out of it. It's a handy medium for keeping in touch with short, sharp messages but so is instant messaging! I'm not giving up on Twitter and infact I'm probably gonna get set up so I watch it more closely! I've recently installed TweetDeck to do this. When looking at my activity in Tweet Deck I was trying to see what benefits I get from Twitter and I don't see a whole lot (yet). I normally Tweet every time I post a new blog entry but the traffic from Twitter to this blog is minimal.

photo credit: mangee

Anyway, it's not all bad, I'm just trying to understand how to use it better! I've taken the following actions to clean up my account and had a rethink about using Twitter from now on:

Anyway, that's just some of the decisions I've made and stuff I did to make my account more manageable. I'm now only following 56 people as opposed to 125 and I'm even thinking of cutting this further. I'm not sure if I'm that interested in seeing the same people saying good morning every day and telling me what they're having for dinner (maybe if I knew them personally it wouldn't bother me as much). I'm much more interested in using Twitter to track people who are doing stuff that I'm really interested in and I'm not sure it's possible to follow 1000's of people anyway and get any value out of it! Maybe I'm wrong and I just don't get Twitter but these are the revised tactics I'm using on Twitter going ahead.

I just uploaded my new blog theme. Everything seems to be working fine for now so hopefully I don't find too many problems along the way It's based on the default WordPress wide theme that I had been using previously and I've customised the header image, sidebar and added some links to my social networking profiles. There's now links to my Twitter and Facebook accounts and others in the nav bar... expect more stuff here soon!

Last week I added the countdown timer to pressurise myself into getting this done and I'm launching a few hours ahead of schedule. Although there's a bit more I'd like to have done, putting the countdown timer there made sure the theme got uploaded today and saves me tweaking for weeks on end trying to make everything 100% perfect and putting off the launch date again and again. I'll definitely be using this method again to get things done!

This is only version 0.1 of my customised wordpress theme and I have lots of changes still in mind for it.

Things I'm happy about:
I'm pretty happy with the general look and feel of the design. It's now a more personalised site which I thought it should be, as after all it's my online cv and I'm the man responsible for getting things done on this site and on other projects I'm working on. I had always intended to create a caricature of myself on the site and tried to give it a 3d like look by leaning over the navigation bar into my site to let readers know who's behind it. I think I've achieved this by gripping my hand over the nav bar. In general, I think the style and layout of the header looks good.

photo credit: Netream

Things I'm not happy about:
As I mentioned above this is only version 0.1 of my updated WordPress theme and there's lots more still to do. I think the cartoon that I created of myself needs some more work and I'd like to brighten it up a bit. I'll be styling the sidebar on the right hand side of the site to fit in a bit more with the look and feel of the rest of the site. I'll also be changing the style of the post titles and maybe the font used in the posts themselves. There's lots of other stuff too that I want to update pretty soon. One thing that is really annoying me is the way that the images for the site load up. It doesn't look good at the minute but I'll get this fixed by changing the background colours etc. to match a bit more. There's also some colour mismatch at the top of the page but these are simple fixes and I'll get them all sorted. The size of the images I'm using can also probably be reduced and I'll look in to doing this too.

So along with the update to version 2.8 of WordPress, my first major site update seems to have went smoothly enough. Here's a look back to what my site looked like at the very beginning. And I'll add a screenshot below here to to show how the site looks at the time of writing this on the 28th of June 2009. I like doing this as it tracks progress on how this blog is evolving:

You can see the comparison in the screenshot above on how the blog looked original and how it looks after my first major update. I think it's come a long way! I'm coming up to my 50th post and hopefully this and the theme update proves my commitment to developing my online presence with even more projects. I've talked before about potential partnerships. I'm hoping this level of commitment and the design of the theme itself gives others an idea of what I'm capable off. I'll be meeting face to face with a potential partner on Tuesday this week regarding multiple projects. As soon as we get things sorted officially, I'll be updating the new ads section on this site with details of these new projects that I'll be involved in!

So things are moving on for me and my online ventures. I was reluctant to push too hard and try to begin new visitors to this site until I had customised the theme, but there's no stopping me now and I'll be trying to boost traffic to this blog now that it gives more of an idea of who's behind iliveontheweb.com. This is version 0.1 and I wont be leaving things like this! Expect version 1 proper... maybe not today.. maybe not tomorrow... but it'll be here!

As I mentioned in my previous poat, I added links to social bookmarking sites and said I'd also be joining them. So I'm just posting the code here to complete my claim for my blog on Technorati. Here's my Technorati Profile. Claimed!

photo credit: Nikita Kashner