I sound delicious!

flavors.me/irishstu/, originally uploaded by irishstu.

I’m really impressed with flavors.me/irishstu/ – it’s kind of the way I wanted to go with stewartcurry.ie/ where every section has it’s own panel – so great inspiration there!

Stuniverse, originally uploaded by irishstu.

I’ve updated stewartcurry.ie so now, rather than listing my various links, it pulls in the latest files from Flickr, Pix.ie, Delicious, Last.fm, Twitter, this blog, and work tweets, blog posts and images. Still loads more to do, I’ll probably make a panel for each one and have a smooth-scrolling menu to view them all.

It’s all put together using a combination of site-specific javascript (e.g. for flickr and pix.ie), some jQuery plugins (e.g. for the tweets and last.fm) and Google Feed API. The hardest part was stripping the cruft from the various plugins – it would be great if there was a “do not load CSS” option for the APIS. The Last.fm plugin has a fantastic option where you define your markup first – plugin makers take note!

Irishstu.com Redesign, originally uploaded by irishstu.

A redesign of my blog, with a more typographical theme. There’s no graphics used in the design of the site. Only external images are loaded in. Why? because I like to make life hard for myself.

Huh? No Images?

Yup, no images. The logo? that’s a type star and the equivalent to symbol. The rounded corners? CSS3. The fade around the images in the footer? CSS3. The circles around the dates? CSS3 with a really big corner radius. (I saw the date marks on Cynosura and wondered if I could duplicate the effect using only CSS3). The little speech bubble on the quotes? It’s a circular background with a comma that’s been scaled and rotated using – CSS3!

Neat tricks

There’s a few cool things I’ve tried out with CSS3, but you’ll need a decent browser to see them. For example, check out the gravatars in the comments if you’re using Safari 4.

What’s left to do?

Browser test. Pretty sure this looks awful in IE6. But meh. Tidy up the plugins Share this should look neater. More type refinements. I need to define code styles for example.

WPTouch Plugin, originally uploaded by irishstu.

Added the WPTouch plugin to my blog to make it easier to read on an iPhone – via @donncha

Milestone, originally uploaded by irishstu.

I upgraded Mint, one of my webstats packages tonight. I also use statcounter, which has excellent ISP tracking and Google Analytics which has pretty charts. Anyway I noticed this little milestone had snuck by me recently – I know 300k visitors isn’t a lot over that long a period, but it made me happy!

The terms and conditions are basically that

• You can’t use it for commercial reasons (email me if you’re unsure)
• You let other people copy it from you if you amend it (and please do!)
• You give me a little credit -a link back to http://www.stewartcurry.ie/ either on the page or in the source code would be nice

And if you do use it, please let me know! I’d love to see it. I’m bound to be fiddling with it over the next few weeks so please don’t email me if it’s broken!

Edit: It took about 7 minutes!

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What do you think? Is this even necessary?

This little tool shows you how your twiter friends are connected. I choose McCabe as he’s one of the biggest twits I know… just kidding!