The 30th of december, slowly coming out of my post movie depression tomorrow I’ll be celebrating the new year at a friend’s place so I probably wont have time to write a log tomorrow.

Today, lemme see. I have overclocked my CPU by 270mhz so that gives me a speed increase of about 540mhz (Dual Core), I’ve also slightly overclocked my GFX Card by about 100mhz on every slider.

Other then this I’ve been working on a website of a client, It took a bit of effort to make it work in IE7 and IE8 but it’s now working in both and in Firefox (Haven’t tested other browsers).

Other then that I played some Tap Tap Revenge 3 (About 3 rounds) online and well that’s about it. I’ll be watching a movie now, probably Gamer, and after that I’ll be going to bed.

After having this as my signature for a while I wanted something more glassy and spacey (To fit with my blog being mostly EvE related). So after spending a while in my Design Studio (or in other words Photoshop) I came up with the following:

I’m satisfied with the overall result but I want to somehow make it look more glassy and maybe add some animation to it. Now to finish this post I’d love to hear your comments, criticism and suggestions on this so leave a comment.

Design Changes

I had already in my mind that my current sidebar was way too big, a widget for pages, one for recent posts. I however never spent any time on it. Until I thought I need a new header.

So I started designing the new header with the idea of getting a new modern looking title, and implementing a recent posts list into it and my “Useful EVE Links” page. So I spent a while designing it and after a while I was satisfied with the result and started implementing it. And well you can see the result, the only things I didn’t manage to implement are a scrolling recent posts listing and also making that same listing have a fade-in and fade-out effect on the top and bottom of it.

Well I did manage to implement a scrolling recent posts listing but it used a lot of CPU power to move everything around (On my CPU it hit 50%) and that’s just not what I want (and probably als something you, my readers don’t want.). I’ll try to create it using flash in the future, but for now this is sufficient.

I’ve also added a new background containing what I think is a ship, and I’ve added the Minmatar logo and some starry background to the bottom of posts (The starry background is faded out a lot so it might be a little hard to see), I’ve also added a sort of logo to all blockquotes which you can see on for example my 13th Blog Banter post (the grey boxes).

With the Recent Posts and EVE Links pages implemented into the header I could remove the recent posts and pages widget from the sidebar, making it less tall and making room for future additions. One of these additions will be an about page because that’s one of the things most bloggers have but what my blog is lacking.

I hope some of you can take the time to comment on these new changes and tell me what you think about them, your feedback is greatly appreciated.

Twitter Lists

Recently (29 October 2009) Twitter implemented a new feature called “Twitter Lists”, this feature allows to create lists containing people that for example play the same game. Once created one could click on such a list and see the tweets of only the people in that group, so it’s ideal if you want to track groups of people separately.

After this change I already saw a few EVE Online lists pop-up, but these lists only had the people the creators had in their following list. So I decided I’d also create one of these groups and add every EVE Twitter user I could find (Well maybe not every but a  lot of  ‘em).

At the moment the list contains 146 people and I will add any EVE related folks I can find to it. if you want to be added just post a comment on this post or contact me on twitter. And ofcourse the last thing in this post, the list: @Xeross/eveonline

In my opinion the blog theme was a little too plain, Everything looked pretty much flat and just plain boring. So I’ve decided to make some changes to make it look better and less flat, These are the things I’ve changed.

• Added better looking and better readable comments (Example)
• Made blockquote borders rounded (Except in IE) (Example)
• Added shadows to bottom of blog posts and bottom of sidebar widgets
• Changed title bar look, Not much but it’s a slightly better looking style
• Added 3d look to navigation bar links and sidebar widget titles.
• Added submenus/dropdown menu’s to the navigation.

I still have more work to do to improve the blog, I think I’ll change the look of the post listings and single post view. I’ll update this posts when I’ve done that, For now leave some feedback on the changes.

Regards, Xeross

So I decided that my blog needs a proper logo, After browsing through some tutorials for an idea I found one that seemed cool to try out.

However after I finished the tutorial and added some twists for it to be unique it turned out it’s a bit too large to use as a logo So I decided to just post it on here as an image. So here it is (Click to enlarge):

Hope you’ll rate and comment on it.

Regards, Xeross

P.S: I just realized I could use it as the background for my twitter account, So I’m going to change it into a background.