Robinsonweb

Occasionally something on the web really makes an impression on me, this video did it today.
I'll let you watch and watch and feel it for yourself.

Visit here for more related videos

A couple of weeks ago the BlogEngine team announced the release of version 1.5 RC (Release Candidate).  This motivated me to do a number of things

1. Download and install run 1.5 RC locally to see what has changed.
2. Document the changes I have made to this site, extension installations, page modifications etc.
3. Install these modifications to 1.5 RC to check their compatability in preparation for a future upgrade to 1.5 when the final version is released.
4. Finally the main reason for playing with this newest release was to test the themes and extensions I have written that you have downloaded.  At the moment that is only the Greenway theme and Randomquote extension.

I am glad to report that RandomQuote version 1.2 still works fine and is compatible with 1.5 RC.  Hopefully nothing will change between the RC and Final versions to change that. 

Unfortunately there does seem to be a little bug, or should I call it a special feature, in the Greenway theme on some browsers.  The theme displays as expected in IE7

 
The calendar and RandomQuote extension are nicely positioned under the menu bar. 
Now compare that with how it looks in FireFox 3.0.9 

You can clearly see the difference in the position of the calendar and RandomQuote extension.  I don't believe this is a direct affect of version 1.5, this bug has probably always been there.  Due to its nature I am not going to urgently look into fixing it, sorry guys, personal commitments prevent me from spending the necessary time on it.  I know what you are thinking, you can spend time writing about it so why not spend some of that time fixing it.  Fair argument I suppose.  If any of you have found a way to resolve the issue feel free to get in touch.

For more information regarding 1.5 see the announcement on the official BlogEngine site

As usual you can get all the up to date downloads from the downloads page.

I love learning new stuff, which causes many hours of internet surfing when I should really be doing something else.  My mum used to call them 7 day wonders.

This weeks big thing for me is Silverlight 2.  I have been looking for tutorials on writing games using Silverlight and found some very interesting sites.  Here are a few that I found did focus on games.

The first one is Bluerosegames.com.  If you search for 'Silverlight game tutorial' on google you will currently find it at the no. 1 position.  There is a series of tutorials as listed below

• Getting Started
• Drawing a Sprite
• Creating a Game Loop Part 1
• Creating a Game Loop Part 2
• Game Helper Class Library (easy to use in your own games!)
• Keyboard Input
• Adding Thrust (Making sprites move)
• Generating Asteroids (Lists of sprites)
• An Improved Silverlight Sprite Class
• A Simple Silverlight Particle System

I have read through the bluerosegames tutorials and highly recommend them.  They are written in C# and focus on object oriented methods.  During the tutorials the author takes you through the beginnings of creating an asteriod game.  Excellent for getting you started.

dieAjax have a mini series on creating a shooter game.

For more general Silverlight  tutorials I recommend visiting Microsoft's own Silverlight.net. or searching google for pages of lists of tutorials.

Here is my #2 entry in the Theme 100 challenge on daredetectives.com.  I do not have a lot of time at the moment and I am trying to catch up a few weeks so I am just doing quick drawings at te moment. 

So for the Love theme I have drawn a cupid (just in case you were not sure).

The challenge is currently up to #5 so I have to catch up on

#3 Light
#4 Dark
#5 Seeking Solace

I know what I would like to draw for Light, but I am not sure I could interpret my ideas well enough on paper. 

On another note a book I ordered from Amazon arrived today, 'How To Cheat At Flash (Adobe CS3)'.  This is written by the owner of Keyframer.com.  If you look at his site it will give you some insight to what is in the book. Some of the topics in the book are available on his site as tutorials, some in video format.  Although the web is an amazing resource for tutorials I have always prefer to have a hard copy to read through and keep for reference, which is why I bought the book.

I was doing some digging around in some old folders in a corner of my hard drive I have not used for quite some time and came across these banners I had made some time ago.  

I created this one totally from scratch.

I created this one for a challenge being held on Keyframer.com.  Some of the assets were provided by them.

Creating these banners was really the first time I had used flash for animation.

I haven't done any sketching for a while, then I came across the new weekly challenge theme on daredetectives.com.  100 weeks 100 themes. The first theme is Introduction so I decided to give them a go.  The first theme is Introduction, I am easing into this gently so I just did some simple drawings.  For introduction I was thing circus ring master so this is what I did.

Hopefully by the time I get to the 100^th theme in the challenges I'll be somewhat bettter.  Not bad for a start.

It's been too long since my last post.  Unlike me, other people are continuing to keep their blogs and sites up to date.

The good people at Hawksmont are still creating brushes for GIMP and Photoshop.

Glow Brushes Part 1
Moon Brushes
Butterfly Brushes Part 1
Butterfly Brushes Part 2
Butterfly Brushes Part 3

 

As promised the RandomQuote extension to DNBE is complete and has been uploaded to this site.
The current version is RandomQuote 1.2.
I do not plan on any major changes or updates to the extension, that is unless someone finds a major bug.

There were a couple of bugs fixed, nothing big.  As usual you can get the updated files from my downloads page.
Thankyou all for taking the time to use this extension. 
If you have any comments or suggestions please get in touch, I would be very intrested to hear if you are using RandomQuote and what you think of it.

I have upgraded this site with the  DNBE 1.4 release.

The good news for those who have downloaded the Greenway theme from my downloads page is that, thankfully, it will work fine.
The not so good news is for those of you who have downloaded the RandomQuote extension is that there are a couple of bugs in it, mainly relating to null references.  I am currently working on these and hope to have an update out to you withing the next 24 hours or so.

As always, feel free to leave any comments or suggestions regarding these themes and extensions.

Specky Boy have created a list of free Vectors, Icons, Buttons, Banners, labels and Bubbles available on the internet.

Here is a sample of what they have found;

Click here to see the full list.

I was looking around again at web design tutorials and came across this tutorial on creating a site for drupal.  Drupal is an open source CMS. 

http://www.gomediazine.com/tutorials/create-a-killer-band-site-with-drupal-introduction/

I am not familiar with Drupal and will probably never use it, but the first couple of steps in the tutorial series can be applied generally to the design of any site using Illustrator.  I have listed them below for quick access.

Read Part 1 - Design it Illustrator
Read Part 2 - Slicing it Illustrator
Read Part 3 - XHTML

Those of you who frequent this site will notice the blog looking a bit of a mess recently.  Someone managed to hack into my site and change the style of the site and a few other settings which meant it looked a bit of a mess.  It's really disheartening when this happen, fortunately they were not totally malicious and did not totally destroy the site.  All the content was still here, just the presentation was changed.

Thankfully now everything is updated and back to normal.  Hopefully it won't happen again.

I have been doing a bit of looking around lately, trying to find some detailed tutorials on Graphic Design.  Simple enough for somone like me who is not naturally artistic.  I did come across a blog by David Airey where he lists what he considers the Top 50 Graphic Design Blogs.  It's gonna take some time to look at all 50 sites.

Following on from my last post about creating a CSS Layout from Scratch.  I did find a rather intersting series of posts titled 'The Highly Extensible CSS Interface'.  This is (quote) a four-part series of how-to’s and savvy conversation (end quote) where the author speaks extensively about markup — XHTML, CSS, and a little scripting.

The Highly Extensible CSS Interface - Introduction
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface I - The Foundation
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface II - CSS Selectors and JQuery
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface III - Adding Ajax Interactivity
The Highly Extensible CSS Interface IV - Testing for Extensibility

With each article links are provided for downloading code discussed in the article and to see a demo of what is presented in the article as in the image below,

 

It's now Bank Holiday Monday, you probably won't be surprised to hear I have eaten too many easter eggs and am quite sick of chocolate, until tomorrow. 

After modifying the Greenway CSS template for use as a DNBE theme, I really wanted to be able to create more themes.  But this time from scratch all by myself rather than taking something someone else had created and just modifying it.  I have a knowledge of CSS and have mainly used it for formatting and styles, but hadn't mastered the art of page layout with CSS.  A quick search on Google brought up a lot of results but one particular tutorial caught my attention on Subcide.  They have a step by step tutorial on creating a 3 column layout from scratch, just what I was looking for.  I like the fact that the author explains the Why and Wherefore of his methods.  IE quirks are even taken into consideration.  The finished product uses nothing but XHTML, CSS and a few images. 

The next blog theme or CSS template I create will be done while following this tutorial.  I recommend you read it, especially if you are starting out using web design or using CSS.

RandomQuote is now at version 1.1

I have done a minor update to the admin Quote.aspx page.  You can now edit a quote in the grid.  This saves you having to delete the quote and then add it again as a new entry.

I have achieved this by using a DataList control and storing in an the XML file as before.  The rest of the extension is unchanged.

The updated extension is available from the download page.

All you have to do to update any previous version is to overwrite the admin page ( Quote.aspx , Quote.aspx.cs).  Everything else is the same.