Defence Mechanism

Looking through my logfiles I note that a few people are looking for the Color Toy. The Color Toy is a flash based color palette generator. It’s also got a random function that produces some beautiful colors.

There are currently two versions.

• Old Color Toy
  This is the latest of the first generation of my Color Toy. Some people seem to prefer this one as it has sliders you can tweak.
  
• New Color Toy
  This is my first attempt at a redesigned Color Toy. It’s a bit simpler, no sliders, but it does generate a bigger palette.
  

I will, once I have time, be altering it again. Best of both worlds. Until then I’m sure you can get by!

I got fed up with comment spam on my old blog so I’ve gone and set up a WordPress blog running on Linux, PHP and mySQL.

At the moment I’m sticking with the default theme but when I’ve got time, i.e. when all the flat DIY is done, I’ll have a shot at designing a theme of my own.

I’ve been working on streamlining how I get content into my blog. Here’s the work flow.

• I type up the blog in plain text using VoodooPad Lite
• I then take that raw content into skEdit and then apply any HTML markup required. Links etc. I use the snippets feature to make that as easy as possible. e.g If I want to make an affiliate link to amazon.co.uk I select the copy I want to be the link then hit alt + apple + a and it wraps all my predefined copy around my selected copy and places the cursor at the bit in the HREF where I just need to paste in the ASIN code number. Pretty sweet. I’ve got snippets for making up regular links and for quickly formatting the copy.
• Paste the resulting code into my CMS.

That’s it. Using this simple 3 point plan I can, hopefully, avoid some of the of the nastier typos that I have published in the past.

I’ve set up a flickr account to help get my photos online. Check it out here.

Last night I set up del.icio.us. It’s been something I had been meaning to have a look at for a while and beacuse The Chronicles of Riddick was so bad I had time to look at it.

What is del.icoi.us? I’ll let them explain.

del.icio.us is a social bookmarks manager. It allows you to easily add sites you like to your personal collection of links, to categorize those sites with keywords, and to share your collection not only between your own browsers and machines, but also with others.

I’ve started weeding out my bookmarks at home and work and putting them into del.icio.us. Check them out here: del.icio.us/defmech

I’m still deciding what to do next with this site. I got bored with the old one and I’m trying a few new things.