Experimenting With Drupal

31st May, 2008

I have felt a little bit discontented with the way the Ocean Addict site has been going from an architectural point-of-view, particularly since adding the shop which is using the ancient system of OSCommerce and its flakey table-based layout and template system. The Ocean Addict site was always going to be an online store but initially started off as a related news and information blog with the view to expanding it. However my choice of using a blog as the core of the site (even one as expandable as WordPress), and knowing very little about what open source CMS‘s have to offer, is looking more and more limiting.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Gnome Quest

28th May, 2008

When I first acquired Half Life 2, Episode 2 I just had to see how many of the quests I could complete once I had got past the act of playing the storyline properly once through. And of course I attempted to complete the particularly aggravating Little Rocket Man quest, which essentially sees you carry an ornamental gnome (found hidden in a radio station at the very beginning) throughout the entire game all while doing the challenges you face normally.

Read the rest of this entry »

e-Commerce Buttons

23rd May, 2008

Here are some new buttons to replace the horrific GIF images that came with the clean install of oscommerce on Ocean Addict. In order, they are Accounts, Shopping Cart and Checkout.

Read the rest of this entry »

African Sundew Plants

18th May, 2008

I have experimentally planted some of my African Cape Sundew’s offspring (drosera capensis) down by our garden pond where they seem to have settled in quite nicely with the thousands of flies that hover about around there. I found a broken pot in which to plant them, that I partially buried on its side so that a bit of water would be pooled in it, but also begin draining off if the level gets too high.

Read the rest of this entry »

Personal Site Update

12th May, 2008

I have decided to start redeveloping my own website’s design again, this time finishing the things I wanted from it in the beginning but couldn’t quite achieve the first time around, from the design through to the administration.

While visually the difference will be pretty unnoticeable (still black, dark purple, light green and golden-white), underneath there is all change again as I shift everything from separate templated pages to an entirely WordPress-driven site, hopefully allowing me to quickly and easily update things when time becomes a much more valuable commodity in the final year. Of course, this has required some serious customisation but should hopefully make the site much more robust.

And then finally I might get around to producing some nice flash content to fill in that dynamic header section at the top of the pages!