One big site
I’ve always had a dream, to have only one site, one url for everything I host. A site to contain:
- My company
- My hosting company division
- My blog
- My new script (Stat Monster)
- My ‘hub‘
- My CSS gallery
I believe that’s it currently. I would just love to have them all under one site, one directory, one design. Of course, that would be really stupid. But from an organization point of view, one site with other sites based as subdirectories is best right? Having one header file, one footer file, one design to manage, one site for people to visit. Yeah it would have benefits but would it be better than multiple domains like the current set up?
the now
Currently on the web most people who have multiple sites or types of content to host, use multiple domains/designs/sites. I have it too, as shown above. The closest site I can think of to what I want is google. They have everything or almost everything under one general design and one main domain. Yeah, they have a billion domains but they all redirect to directories or subdomains of google.com. I can see that from many point of view’s, this is a much much better way of organizing data. As for everyone else, people seem to choose one of two routes: having a ‘hub’ with all their sites branching off that site. Or, simply having multiple sites. For some reason this set up just annoys me.
What d’ya think?
Simple Monster
Before a thousand design changes ago, I had this design. A simple clean, thin, one column design with a small grey box in the middle for content. Well, now I have it released to the public, as a wordpress theme. It’s very simple and I wasn’t going to release it but after being asked a few times I have done.
The art of the icon
So recently I’ve been upping my photoshop skills. Inspired by a discussion on Mint Pages I have decided to have a go at icon creation. Why not? I’ve never really considered making icons before, not because I didn’t want to but because I’m lazy and just use the same set everyone does. With some idea as to how to go about making icons and a nice little helper, I plodded on an popped open the ol’ photoshop.
creating ‘blobs’
So I made my first icon, a little man. Well, a man zoomed in 1000 times. At scale of 1, a blob. Making icons viewable (especially at such a small size at 16px*16px) is close to impossible. Normally in photoshop I never fill the canvas, I like a little space to the side of my work, a little ‘relaxation’ space. You can’t do that with icons, your pixel by pixel creation has to touch as much side of the canvas as possible, or it’ll be a blob.
I think that these days, with so many great icon artists around, designers and normal internet users just take them for granted. We just assume that these icons are made with no effort and it’s as simple as that. You’re wrong, I was wrong, we all were wrong. Each and every icon requires at least half an hour to get right (well it does for me – and mine aren’t perfect). Each and every icon also requires great care and skill to complete (which is why mine are rubbish).
the result
My attempts (can you guess what each is?):
A beautiful sight…
Normally I don’t post recycled stuff from Digg, but this time I had to. It’s always a wonderful thing to see your most hated company taking ideas from your favourite:
New Server
Well after many days of decision making and planning, me and Matt have got ourselves some servers (well one for now). We plan to start the Brain Hub Network on these servers (the Brain Hub Network is our new hosting company). Hence the new domain (actually, it will be back to the old one once I figure out the problem with the nameservers, very annoying that all my domains EXCEPT politicalmonster.org transfer successfully). Thats just a quick news update for ya, more info coming later when we get the site up and smooth out all the errors and issues that come from moving everything. Stand by…
