I have chosen to just use text-ads, so there should be no huge Flash animations for dating sites showing up.

I know it looks horrendous, but I’ve always been curious to what kind of money one can get on 20-100 views a day. To find out, I will run the ads here for a month or a bit more and then I will decide to keep them or not.

I project and estimated monthly earning of around 1 dollar, so it’s not going to be worth it. But if I’m terribly wrong and get a bunch more money; I will keep them here.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Resolution statistics

About 25% have a 1024×768 resolution size. Seriously people? By contrast, this is what a 1024×768 window looks on my left screen.

Left screen resolution example

It never struck me that anyone could have a resolution that small, but to accommodate this I’ve made the design a bit smaller in width.

I hope it looks better for those 25% of you now. Please report in the comments if there are any more issues!

I also removed Hyphenator.js, as it made all the content “refresh”, causing a very annoying blinking-thing to happen every time you loaded a page. I hope the justified text will still look acceptable without it.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

But I did say that there was a story in my child-hood that I related too. It’s not a very special story, but as a kid I had one of these:

Mr 9999 Brick Game 9999 in 1

I remember playing with it for hours every day for months. It had 9999 games, but they were all small weird variations on basically 10 kinds of games, pretty f-ed up when I think about it. Anyhow, all I ever played on it was the regular Tetris. By the end, I really rocked at Tetris. I can still enjoy the occasional Tetris game and I consider myself pretty good at it.

So when I first thought of tetrisrockstar.com, I thought of myself as a kid, being a total Rockstar at Tetris.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Then began the arduous task of trying to find a new theme for the blog. I didn’t just want to switch the name and keep the theme, and I wanted a really good theme that preferably fit the name well. For about six months I regularly looked around for free or $20-$100 themes, but I never found anything that was really what I was looking for.

I then saw Matt Mullenwegs’ new blog and he had a fantastic huge graphic at the top of the blog. So big it obscured the rest of the blog, but I thought it was gorgeous. So I started looking for a designer that could give me something like that. I spend 3 months looking for a designer, I found a total of 4 designers that I thought could give me what I wanted and offered them each around $600 for a Photoshop file with a layout and some nice graphics. $600 is a pretty low amount, but it’s not like I was asking for multiple page-designs or any coding or anything like that, just one piece of graphic. I don’t think it was insultingly low, but 2 of the 4 designers didn’t answer once I said what I was willing to pay and the other half simply said the project was too small.

After realizing I would have to pay much more than I was comfortable with to get a nice design, I started working on one on my own. At least that would give me something personal. I wanted something a little retro/gaming-related for the tetris- part of the name and something a little grungy for the -rockstar part of the name. I found a theme on WooThemes that I thought was pretty OK, but needed quite a lot of tweaking to look like I wanted, so I started remaking it from the start and changed the things I wanted along the way.

First version of the blog

So this was the first draft that I came up with after a couple of hours in Photoshop. It had like, the elements that I wanted, the tetris-block, some more advanced graphics in the top and a grungy background. Unfortunately it looked like crap. I then tried some different approaches to this design.

Second version with top banner

Cleaned up version

The banner didn’t turn out as awesome and illustrative as I wanted, so I tried doing a really clean version, basically removing everything I wasn’t 100% satisfied with. But then obviously it needed something else.

I then found this awesome piece of graphic, the koi fish. Normally I hate koi fish, they’re a super-tired stereotype and I don’t even think they look that good graphically. But this one had something I really liked. I paid the designer £40 to use it on my blog and then I started incorporating it. In retrospect I should have paid once I was sure I was going to use it :P

Koi fish version

This I was actually pretty happy with, but the boxes on the right took up way too much attention and the whole design was very boxy. So I tried getting rid of the boxes in several different ways, spurring the following redesigns.

Removed boxes and added title "banners"

Removed right content entirely and made fish more prominent.

Changed titles and removed big boxes

Tried doing a different more clean top

A little more grunge, but still clean top

Following the same design but trying different things

I drew this tetris-block by hand

The second version I was very satisfied with

The reason I didn’t stop here was that I wasn’t entirely happy that I hadn’t gotten in all the links I wanted and there were still some.. problems with it, that I couldn’t really put my finger on. I also checked my statistics and it seems like a lot of you use the “Latest Comments” out on the side to see if there are new comments on the blog. So I wanted to get that back into the design.

I had a long stand-still here. Finally I found Spencer Frys’ blog and Max Voltars’ blog at the same time, and thought I could combine their best parts into one design that I would be happy with. This resulted in the following revisions.

New design with Web 2.0 top

Ultra-clean version

Finally I came to some sort of conclusion that I was happy with.

Medium-clean version with koi

I asked around a little among friends what I should do with this and the first suggestion was change the font. So I drew this up to see what I should choose from. Can you spot the one I chose? :P

Title fonts

Emma didn’t really like the koi fish, so I tried putting in the tetris block instead of that. I really couldn’t make that work though, I felt it ruined the flow of the design. Emanuel also had some good suggestions to change the top, the bottom and to add a little color by randomizing the divider tetrisblock.

The design with a clean tetris block

The design with my hand-drawn tetris block

Then I finally came up with a good version and make some minor tweak to get it as I really wanted.

Final design

Final design with final tweaks

So now I had a design. That approximately took three or four months to get to :P
I have now spent this entire weekend coding it up. The frames you can see in the pictures above are made entire in HTML and CSS3. That means it’s supported by the latest versions of Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera; but NOT by Microsofts Internet Explorer. Those of you using IE will unfortunately have to live with the old grey frames. It makes the design look much worse than it is, but I can’t get myself to only using 90′s technology because Microsoft refuses to update their browser.

Anyway, the frames were a problem in themselves to produce. I wanted frames on all the old pictures as well. Throughout the past I’ve used about 4-5 different ways to import pictures into blog posts. In the latest posts I’ve used something called wp-caption. Which is this grey frame with a caption underneath. In the past I’ve just imported the pictures straight in, but my frames needed to handle a bunch of different cases. Sometimes I have multiple pictures next to each other, sometimes they float left, sometimes they float left. And most of the times the picture should just be centered on a row by itself. For the frames to work at all, the picture needs to be surrounded by two div’s with classes frame and image. So to make everything work, I spent around 5-6 hours on writing the following script. Handling the insertion of these two divs in a proper way.

So finally. I have something that works for everyone but the people on IE, and I hope it looks acceptable for those people, even if it’s not as awesome as on Firefox/Chrome/Safari/Opera.

I have also changed the commenting system so you can now login using a range of different options, or of course continue commenting as guest as always! You can now like comments and reply directly to comments as well. I think the new commenting system is pretty nice. Use it to say what you think! I’ll leave a little poll here in the end to gather opinion as well. But of course, if you have anything to say, do so! For those of you using IE and want to see what this blog posts looks like on another browser, click this link.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Verktygen du kommer använda:

1. tumblr – för att blogga, lägga in enskilda bilder, filmer eller texter
2. flickr – för att massuppladda bilder

Registrera dig

1. Gå in på flickr.com och klicka på Create Your Account.
2. Gå igenom stegen och när du är klar är du klar för att ladda upp bilder.
3. Gratiskontot på flickr har en gräns på 200 (tror jag) bilder och visar inte bilder med jättehög upplösning.
4. Jag rekommenderar att betala $24 för uppgradering till pro (vilket jag själv betalar en gång om året). Jag tror man hittar betalningsalternativ under “Your Account” under “You” menyn.
5. Gå in på tumblr.com, på förstasidan visas ett registreringsformulär där du fyller i email-adress och lösenord samt vilken adress du vill ha [dinadress].tumblr.com.

Nu är du redo för att sätta igång

För att sätta igång ordentligt nu så går du in på flickr och loggar in dig, klickar på pilen bredvid “You” i menyn och sedan klickar på “Upload Photos and Videos”. Där kan du välja så många bilder du vill och bara sätta igång och ladda upp, när du laddat upp har du möjlighet att skriva titlar och undertexter på alla bilder.

Tumblr har en jättebra guide som tar dig igenom alla olika post-typerna på tumblr, men det allmänt väldigt straightforward. Klicka på den typ av post du vill posta (text, bild, video, ljud) och bara sätt igång och skriva.

På tumblr kan man välja bland färdiga themes, då klickar man på customize i menyn ute till höger på ens “Dashboard”. Om du (Nina) vill ha en snyggare design så finns det massor av gratisdesigner där ute som är snygga och enkla att lägga in. Dessutom är det jättelätt att lägga in en egen adress, så om du vill ha typ dittnamnstravels.com  eller whatever så kostar det bara 50kr.

Efter det är det upp till en själv att komma ihåg att ladda upp bilder och posta intressanta historier.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

エエマ の 日本

UPDATE: Adressen är numera eemmainjapan.com, länken ovan är fixad.

Checka den nu, lägg till den i RSS läsare, bookmarka eller vad du nu brukar göra för att komma ihåg sidor!

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Now reddit didn’t make this easy on me. First of all, their standard link in the xml is to their own page, which i kind of stupid, of course i want to link to the page that i liked, in case it’s a self reddit in which case i of course want to link to that.

But however, they do give a link in the description tag in the xml. So it was a matter of parsing the html given in the description to pick out the link.

I use KB Advanced RSS Widget with WordPress and it comes with some standard options for formatting the xml elements. I added the following to those options:

// finding a link from the reddit feed
$reddit = (is_numeric($reddit) && $reddit == "1") ? (int) $reddit : null;
if ($reddit == 1) {
 preg_match('/to(.*)href=\"(.*)\"\>\[link\]/', $text, $matches);
 $text = $matches[2];
 if(substr($text,0,4) != "http") {
  $text = "http://reddit.com".$text;
 }
}

So now i can use ^description[opts:reddit=1&bypasssecurity]$ do display the correct link from the reddit feed. Pretty nice actually. If you noted that i use the option bypasssecurity aswell i can tell you that, that is because otherwise, the widget will remove all html tags and i wrote my RegEx to be used with the tags. So if you use my little piece of the script you should use the bypasssecurity option aswell.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

På senare tid har jag fått i princip alla mina stiltips från kanYes’ blogg, jag tycker han är design och stil gud på internet faktiskt. Men sen är jag ju inte så bevandrad på design/stil bloggar heller, men han är cool som fan iaf, det räcker.

Han postade nyligen en bild på en kille som hade en to-die-for snygg outfit.

Sådär vill jag se ut!

Men jag har inte särskilt mycket pengar, och jag har varken grå kavaj eller väst. Jag har en svart kavaj dock, så jag tänkte göra det bästa av situationen. Jag skulle på middag och fest med företaget i lördags så det var det jag hade i sikte att klä upp mig för.

Jag gick ut och hittade en snygg slips och en grå tröja istället (för att ersätta kavajen). Köpte ett par svarta byxor så jag hade något som gick med den svarta kavajen och lyckades komma fram till detta:

Bildkvalitén suger men det var dåligt ljus och pallade inte försöka pilla fram någon annan kamera än mobilen. Men ni ser konceptet, ljusare skjorta, slips (som fadear mellan mörkblå, grå och brons, riktigt nice) och en grå tröja utanpå det. Sen svart kavaj och svarta byxor.

Tyckte det blev riktigt jävla stiligt faktiskt, även om det hade kunnat bli jävligt mycket bättre om man hade haft lika stora resurser som snubben i bilden ovanför.

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.

Jag pillade in en liten fix så jag tror det bör funka nu, men om du läser detta och använder IE så skall du nu direkt gå in på http://getfirefox.com och ladda ner firefox!

Firefox är den absolut bästa webbläsaren för alla plattformar. Chrome eller Safari kanske kan vara bättre ibland men Firefox fungerar på Linux, Mac och Windows lika bra och fungerar helt perfekt, är säker, snabb och enkel att använda.

Så om du fortfarande kör världens sämsta webbläsare – Internet Explorer från Microsoft – byt till Firefox NU!

EDIT: Funkar tydligen fortfarande inte, men nu är koden korrekt, så nu ligger allt fel i Internet Explorer, dvs byt…

Feel free to Flattr this post at flattr.com, if you like it.