I won't have time to update this blog until at least June 2010, so for now I'm calling it a day. I've de-personalised this blog (for personal reasons ) and I've archived all my original posts. It might seem strange to some that I've taken them down but I want to re-launch version 2 of this blog sometime in the future with a blank canvas.

Many thanks to everyone who's visited, commented on or contacted me through this site over the last 5 months (May to Septemer 2009).

I have a new project in mind and hopefully I'll be back to give it a mention here sometime next year.

Bye for now....

I don't have a massive amount of visits to this site as yet and my post frequency has been dropping rapidly over the past few weeks. I had a quick look at my Google Analytics stats last night and for the first time since I kicked off this site the traffic seems to have stopped growing.

photo credit: DavidErickson

I'm not overly surprised by this as I'm guessing that a lot of the visitors of this site to date are people that know me. If the frequency of my posts goes down then people check in less as they get used to seeing the same posts stuck at the top of my page for 3 or 4 days. I'm a bit dissappointed with myself that I've let this happen as I was pretty happy that the traffic here was growing exponentially week on week. I have been busy with other projects such as lucky.ie, look at the number of times I've posted on there since the 1st of August. Between myself and Sean we've cranked out 49 posts in 20 days.

I haven't really promoted my blog as much as I could and I have held back as I'm not 100% happy with it yet but it just go to show the difference between working on a site that you're lazy about or working on one that you're actively promoting. When I say promoting I mean the lucky.ie logo ad that you see in the top corner of this site and myself and Sean have both been blogging about the site on our own blogs so we're getting some from this. Apart from this we haven't done a whole lot else except set up a Twitter account, but the traffic growth for Lucky.ie has been very impressive for only being active for 18 days! Long may it continue.

I now need to readdress the balance and try to work on some sort of schedule where I can keep up the good work at lucky.ie but also allow this blog to continue to grow. It's either that or I post weekly on here only as I'm reluctant to step back from lucky.ie as it's a great site to be involved in!

I'm beginning teacher training on September and it's going to be a tough year so finding time to juggle all this is going to be hard work! Apparently the teaching course is ultra time consuming so this is a big challenge for me! In all honestly though, I'm actually thinking of creating another site dedicated to my year as a trainee teacher so other students can have a look and maybe learn something from my experience or teach me something about theirs. Let's see how the next few weeks go!

Eventually got round to downloading and installing the Google Chrome browser today. I'm working on my blog theme and wanted to have a look at it in Chrome to make sure everything was ok. Lucky I did as there was a few problems with the php, that I had to iron out. I normally just check in Firefox, IE and Netscape but Chrome is becomming more and more popular in the browser market and cannot be ignored. I have used Browser Shots to see how a website looks in multiple browsers before, but it nice/essential to just do a quick check with your own eyes when your editing your site layout (at least with the most popular browsers).

photo credit: Randy Zhang

First impressions are that it's almost too clean! That should be a good thing but it just seems a bit bare. I have to say though that I'd probably get used to that if I'm only surfing for fun. One thing I really like is, when you load the browser, screenshots of your most visited sites are displayed. Another is the integated search in the address bar. My default homepage when I use Firefox is normally set to Google.ie so it's great how you dont have to tab to another window and open up google. I know Firefox does this too (as do most browsers) but it just seems better within chrome due to the fact that it's a Google product, it feels more natural to search from the address bar. I also like how you can easily pop open new tabs at the top and each one opens up with your most visited page displayed.

That's just my initial thoughts on it. I haven't used it for more than an hour and I wondering will I start using it more often or stick with Firefox. Time will tell...

One thing you'll hear bloggers say is to start your own blog as opposed to spending time reading others. I'd agree with this but one thing I would say is to keep reading. If your reading other blogs your always learning from others. My blog is only 32 days old now but I'm been actively reading other blogs every day before and since I started.

photo credit: betta design

To date, I'll admit I don't actively comment on other blogs but I will do when I'm happy with the look of my blog (well happier anyway). I'll be pushing on in the next week or two to get version 0.01 of my theme design pushed on to this blog so that I can brand myself domain name a bit better. But after this I'll start actively commenting on other blogs (not a lot) but I'll make an effort to give people feedback on their work as I appreciate the effort they put in to their blog. I'm learning from these people every day and they are helping me generate ideas so I don't want to sit back and take all this for free. Everyone wants interaction, everyone wants traffic and if you regularly read someone's blog it's only fair to provide them with this. Not only is it fair, it's smart, you'll generate 'some' traffic back to your own site and you're continuous learning from what others are doing.

I've also opened up talks about a few potential partnerships that I may get involved in as a result of reading other blogs and inquiring about projects that the site owners are involved in. I'll not say what they are until (if ever) they go ahead but if I wasn't reading and looking about for new ideas then these possibilities don't open up.

So that's my thoughts for today, get your blog off the ground, get some content in there, but don't give up looking around you to see what's going on. If everyone else did this you'd have no traffic or no feedback either. Now it's time to practice what I preach and get this blog out there in the next month!

Yesterday, I had my first look at Photoshop and today I got round to a bit more practice. I decided to try and design a logo for this site as a practice exercise. Following on from yesterday's tutorial that I found on YouTube I wanted to experiment a bit more with text styles.

I had a few different designs but here's the one I was happiest with:

This one is an afterthought when i finished writing my post (same idea but with extra design for the dot com text):

These are very simple and only took 4 or 5 steps to complete, but I'm happy that in one hour of playing about with Photoshop I was able to produce this. There's nothing spectacular about it but I think it's a good start. I used a gradient on the background and added the text using the 'Bauhaus 93' font. I made the '.com' part of the text a bit smaller and changed the colour to yellow/orange. I then added an outer glow to the font using Layer >> Layer Style >> Outer Glow... and tweaked the settings until I was happy with the appearance.

I want to eventually add some graphics as part of my complete logo but I wouldn't be too surprised if I don't venture too far away from this style of text on my logo You never know though, as I get better at using Photoshop I might go in a whole new direction.