This post is as messy as a plate of scrambled eggs. I hope you don’t mind!
The new kid in town
Don’t take it literally. This is my 800th published article (posts and pages are all counted). Nothing much to celebrate actually – I just realised it when I looked at my brand-new, sleek, elegant and sexy Wordpress 2.5 dashboard! And yes, speaking of which, the stable release of Wordpress 2.5 is a blast! There’s most probably a million blog posts out there talking about the same stuff, so I guess after dumping a few tasty, yummylicious screenshots I should move on :)
Note: you might not find some of the tabs / links in the screenshot in your default WP2.5 installation – I’ve got a couple of plugins installed.
Check out how popular is Wordpress 2.5 now.
I actually have a new Wordpress theme (and you’ll say, What? I thought you’ve just changed a blog theme 3 months back) in mind, and well it’ll be teddY-risatioN™ Delta. And I’m not planning to extensively modify the current one but to use another Wordpress sandbox theme for modification. It’s still tentative though – although being a big perfectionist, I’m still quite satisfied with the current teddY-risatioN™ Gamma and have no plans of replacing it for at least another 3 months. Maybe I shall make a new one when it’s my blog’s 4th birthday.
New Favicon
In case you didn’t notice, I’ve uploaded a new favicon for my blog a few days back. Adam is the first one to notice, heheh. Here’s a high resolution version of the favicon. The design of the favicon is actually inspired from the one found on Id’s blog, Notbrainwashersafe.com. I never realised that Photoshop’s gradient tool can come in so handy! Thanks Id for the inspiration. I guess that favicon will also be my blog logo when I design my new blog theme in the near future.
If you’ve realised, the style of the new favicon resembles that of the new Adobe icon series. It was initially not welcomed by the Adobe user community because the older and somewhat “nicer” icons were deprecated. Read it up for more information if you’re interested.
Here are some of the featurees, explained:
- Glossy appearance – I actually just used the Pen tool to create a smooth curve, then set the opacity to a very low value plus a faint drop-shadow effect.
- Background with gradient – I’m not sure whether should I be writing about the details of the gradient customisation part (tell me if you want to know), but basically I’ve used the radiate style with a bright white point in the center. Slightly shifted to the right so to make it appear as if there’s a glowing point of light in the alphabet “r”.
- Like the Adobe icons, the name of the icon is abbreviated to just two simple alphabets. Since this blog goes by the name teddY-risatioN™, “tr” is not a bad choice either…
- The actual name of the blog appears at the bottom of the favicon, with the first alphabets underlined.
And yes I’ve recently addded this Wordpress plugin called Twitter Tools. It integrates your Twitter updates alongside with your blog! Anyway I’ve made some huge CSS changes to the code, so if you need help with it, check the CSS code first… and if you still need help, feel free to ask me :) now you can follow me on Twitter (hello stalkers! haha). There’s a Twitter feed integrated at the footer, be sure to check it out!
I guess that’s all!
I shouldn’t be typing on and on since you’ll most probably get bored with my ramblings! Have a great week ahead!
Hey Teddy!!! I got back and read your comment in my blog- thanks so much for your kind offer but helping me would have turned into a punishment that you didn’t deserve- my code had so many twists and turns that it would have been too confusing and it would have been too embarrassing to show my (lack of) php knowledge :oops: .
I see that you have made a couple of changes since I last visted- the new favicon looks very professional. The latest release of wp looks great. I had doubts about it but I’m glad I installed it also. From your screenshots it looks like I’ve got a lot of experiementing to do to find all the plugins and stuff.
Check out Nel’s last blog post: All done :)
Hey you’re welcome! Anyway when I make an offer, I am prepared to do it :) so no worries, and it’s always my pleasure to help. I’m pretty bad at php too, I guess I really need to read up on it more. Currently I’m quite good with XHTML and CSS… so if you need any help, feel free to contact me.
Yea the favicon is designed ground up, with a little bit of knowledge in making icons look ‘glossy’ in appearance. I wanted to use a plain background until I saw Id’s favicon which got me inspired. Oh and the latest release of Wordpress is worth a try, you’ll definitely love it! However it does causes some older themes to break and plugins to fail, so be sure to check the compatibility list before upgrading… or you can just go ahead with the installation and fix the problems later. Usually the most commonly used plugins have already upgraded into WP2.5 compatible versions, and guess what, you can automatically update your plugins with just a click!
So that’s the thought process behind your favicon! It sure beats the amount of “thought” that I had with mine, which was literally just adding a gradient that matched the colours of my layout, slapped a letter “N” on it, and uploaded the tiny thing as my favicon. However, yours is really large. Are favicons, by right, supposed to be that big? Coz mine is just, 16px by 16px, methinks. =P
Actually I like the colourwheel icons by Adobe, but I think it’s more suitable if you have the entire Creative Suite, that way the colour wheel concept actually serves its purpose. They apparently have a new Photoshop icon in the works, which kinda looks like a thought bubble in the shape of a letter “P” with a hole in it. With the new development, I still prefer the one with the feathers and light gradients of the CS-1-2 series, any day!
And thanks for reminding me to upgrade to 2.5! I’ll do that when I return to Singapore, though. =P
Check out Id’s last blog post: Twice Horizontal.
I didn’t do a lot of brainstorming at first :razz: the idea just came across me as I remebered reading about Adobe’s move in rebranding its icons a few months back. Well same here, I did a rough gradient (edited it a few times to get my personal favourite hues), slapped on ‘tr’ and tada, I’m done for good. Oh and I did change the blending options of the ‘tr’ into Overlay, if you’re wondering. I did it in a high resolution image because I’m thinking of using it as a blog logo for my next Wordpress theme (teddY-risatioN Delta). It’s now in the working, I hope it can be done in a few weeks!
Same here. I actually miss the old icons a lot – the shell, the feather and etc, they’re very specific to the programmes and are kind of like an identity to them where users can relate to. It’s a shame that Adobe has decided to ditch the old icon styles, but the new ones are truly minimalistic and Web2.0 like. Heh.
About the upgrade to WP2.5, don’t forget to check the compatibility list (for themes and plugins). Most plugins will be broken, but now Wp2.5 also comes with automatic plugin upgrade with just a click (but you’ll need to provide ftp credentials to let WP do all the crunching). But beware! If the plugin fails to get installed, there is no rollback available because WP2.5 actually deletes the old plugin before fetching the new one.
Hey teddY, i like your new favicon!!
I never know that we can actually make that kind of 3D image to put as icon.
Actually i can’t recognized what your last favicon was? I though it was a teddy bear or something :D
I wonder if you’ll open “a class of tutorial” like you used to do?
I’ll be the first to “sign up” :)
PS : Good luck with your theme change!!
hey, thanks for mentioning my name in the post, teddY. I really appreciate it. It’s a big surprise that you will change your blog theme! Hurry, hurry, hurry, I can’t wait to see it!! :!:
Finally it’s here, =p I had been on a hiatus, so didn’t realize this until I read this post, HAHA, it had been 5 days! :oops: I might upgrade for the sake of security issue, don’t have much time to tweak the whole thing until I finish my June exams, :sad:
By the way, nice Favicon, I am not a fan of favicon but I might do something similar, nice idea. :cool: Talking about the new PS icon, initially I think it’s quite lame for a top company like Adobe, but I think they did a pretty good job, I can pick out the blue icon instantly, =p I prefer something like Adobe Acrobat and Flash’s tho, they looks so cool. =p Maybe Adobe should come out with a unique “Ps” word for photoshop element too, =p
Check out ingSiang’s last blog post: 29.03.08 – A New Project
[...] modified from the Wordpress Sandbox Theme, and the idea of making it struck me when I designed my new blog favicon (thanks Id for the inspiration, do you know that one favicon of yours motivated me to create a [...]