Bloglingua, and relaunching the Log Blog
work Monday 10th of November, 2008
It's been a while since I updated. I always knew this would happen — stuff like this is the first thing to go when life gets busy. To be honest, I thought it would happen about now, although for much worse reasons — mainly the glut of incredibly high quality games that have been/are being released right about now. But I haven't even had time to play any of those recently, with a whole bunch of work on my plate (both during the day and as a freelancer in the evenings) and a mildly traumatic move from my house in Stony.
Anyway, I thought it would be nice to show what I had been doing during this period of enforced absence, and we recently launched a couple of sites at work which I'm pretty happy with. The first is Bloglingua, a completely new weblog that the company is using to share slightly more offbeat language-related articles that might not fit on the main site. My boss Rich wanted to put together and launch this site quite quickly, and suggested that we use Wordpress with a custom template. I'd not used Wordpress before, having made all our previous web material (as well as this site) from scratch. I was really pleased with how easy it was to put something together from scratch — starting with Elliot Jay Stocks' handy Starkers theme to strip out all the default styling and any invalid code, I put Bloglingua together in a couple of days. I'm quite pleased with how it came out — quite simple, but with a few nice touches to keep it interesting.
Following on from this, we decided to redesign our existing site the Log Blog. I originally built this site about a year ago, and it was the first CMS that I designed from scratch. It worked really well (especially for a first attempt) but swapping over to Wordpress has the advantage of making it a lot more easily extensible for the guys once I move up north, as well as keeping it consistent with Bloglingua. And it was as good an excuse as any for a new look! The Log Blog is used to keep visitors up-to-date with our 50,000 tree project, which aims to make the company (and all employees) completely carbon neutral in the very near future. As you've probably noticed, I decided to go with a pretty overt motif on this one. I used the same method to create the new design as I had for Bloglingua, and I can't recommend starting with Starkers highly enough — it's a massive time saver, considering the turnaround for this was again just a few days from the original sketch. It was a pretty productive week, which is always a nice feeling...
Outside of this, I've had a few freelance projects on the go, which I'm sure I'll talk about at some point in the future. Hopefully there's going to be a bit of a breathing period over the next couple of weeks, to let me tackle that vast pile of games that's just been stacking up recently. Particularly looking forward to getting back to post-apocalyptic Washington DC. It's been too long!
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