This reminded me that I really need to start publishing again and re-do the old design of the website. But I’m currently with my research so this will have to wait a bit till I have my normal life back, so to say. Anyway, I’ve not abandoned Paintbits at all, but like my last post said, the will to write it’s a bit off due to recent events (I lost my mother).

Next year’s resolution will be to redo Paintbits and become active on it again.

Anyway, a nice Christmas for all and a new year’s eve.

Cya soon.

Nuno.

Cya soon!

I’ve been running a sidebar community news on Paintbits for quite awhile now. I’m in the process of redoing Painbits for version 3 and some changes will be done. This theme doesn’t have the flexibility I would like, from the time I done it till now I’ve learned a lot of PHP and WordPress so I can do a lot more with it. One of the changes I had in mind was to end Sidebits – Community News, but I decided to anticipated that.

Sidebits was a good idea, but the addon I used to achieve it attracted too much spamming. Even though a lot of legit and relevant news were submitted, a lot more spam and advertising ones pass through. So in the end the only option is to end this part of the website. Maybe in the future it might return but in a different approach.

Sorry for disapointing whoever used this feature.

Apparently I had some weird problems with my cache and Paintbits was down since I’ve updated to WordPress 3.0. Hopefully it’s fixed. Thanks to Reis for reporting the problem, I was seing everything ok because I had the website in cache. For know I’ll remove the Cache Addon.

Paintbits and WebHS have joint venture to bring you a Wallpaper Contest with a 1st Place Reward.

WebHS

WebHS has been the Webhosting of Paintbits since day one, allowing me to build my project without any hosting worries. If you’ve been a usual visitor to my website you know that it’s been up and running for 99.99% uptime since the last 2 years when I launched Paintbits, this is possible due to WebHS, thanks you guys!

The Contest

To celebrate our partnership for the last 2 years we are creating a small contest here on Paintbits. Since Paintbits is website aimed at digital compositions but mostly desktop customizations, more specifically Wallpapers it made sense to make the contest about this subject.

To enter the contest you need to submit a Wallpaper with the minimum resolution of 1280×960 featuring the WebHS Logo. The theme of the wallpaper is your choice, it can be anything, be creative! If you need inspiration you have a lot to choose from.

I have made two really quick examples. This is not what you should aim, this is just to show you 2 simple and distinct examples of something you could do. My examples are very simple and took me little time, I would expect something a lot more artistic!

Example 1: Something Futuristic.

You can see a more Traditional example here.

The Rules

You need to:

1. Submit a Wallpaper with a minimum resolution of 1280×960px, An Android Mobile Resolution of 640×480 and an Iphone Resolution of 320×480. You can submit more than 1 work.

2. The Wallpaper need to feature the WebHS Logo, that you can get here. The Theme of the wallpaper can be anything expect any obscene theme.

3. After you submit your work you grant its rights to WebHS.

4. You need to submit your work to greven@paintbits.com till the 31 of May.

The Prize

Other than the best 3 works being exposed on Paintbits and linked to your website the first place will also win an Year of Hosting on the WebHS Servers. If you’re thinking of doing a new project, putting a CV online or simply building your first Website, this is a great opportunity. The Hosting planned offered is the HS G2 with a worthy price of 130€ (165$)! The decision will be voted between me and 2 representatives of WebHS.

Deadline

The wallpaper submissions deadline will be the 31 of May 2010.

Portuguese Translation

I’m Portuguese, WebHS is Portuguese and since we would like for Portuguese people to participate in this contest as well, I’m going to do a quick translation of the Text in order for those that don’t speak/read English fluently.

Concurso Paintbits – WebHS

O Paintbits juntou-se à WebHS para comemorar os nossos dois anos de parceria a nível de hosting para trazer à comunidade do Paintbits um pequeno concurso com um prémio para o primeiro lugar. Envia um Wallpaper fazendo alusão ao Logo da WebHS com um tema escolhido por ti e envia para greven@paintbits.com até 31 de Maio de 2010. Podes participar com mais que um trabalho.

Os 3 primeiros classificados irão ser expostos no Paintbits e devidamente linkados para os sites dos respectivos autores. O primeiro lugar irá ganhar 1 ANO de Hosting na WebHS, um óptimo prémio para se começar um projecto novo, por o Curriculum Online ou simplesmente aventurar-se na sua primeira página.

Os direitos das imagens submetidas são cedidas à WebHS para possíveis efeitos de promoção.

Boa sorte!

So, what are you waiting for?

EDIT – Due to low participation we postponed the Contest for a future time. :)

RSS Feed Count is something that I usually pay attention to. I’m not writing on this blog to/for the numbers, I’m not getting rich, I’m not getting famous or anything like that, I write because I enjoy it. I write about subjects I’m genuinely interested in. But despite all that is nice to get feedback, to see that someone is paying attention to what you write or create. Feed count is one of those indicatives among others like page views and article comments, etcetera.

My Feed Count in these recent days have been fluctuating from 600+ to 800+ readers. Nothing unusual, except today. Today dear readers is the day that the Internet proves I’m Evil. There is no other logic explanation, If you look to the right you’ll see Google Feedburner tells you that there are 666 feed readers on Paintbits.com. 666. I kid you… I’m not the evil one, the Google Feed Count is. So don’t put too much trust in it. Don’t be demotivated by the count. What matters is if you’re still having fun writing. I am.

2.9 had some errors with PHP’s curl extension, so in fact I’m using WordPress 2.9.1 instead of 2.9.0. It’s still in Beta but since it’s a small bug fix release you can install it with no problem. Get it here.

WordPress 2.9 Features

If you see any mistakes due to the update, please notify me.

Thanks in advance.

First Light on the Bend – Photo by fortphoto.

I would just like to write, saying that the website might be down in the next days. Why? Because apparently the 100GB Bandwidth Limit I have from the ISP won’t be enough. I’ve been having around 10K visits per day in this week on my Wallpaper posts and that is “sucking” all my bandwidth.

I’ll have to find a solution, dunno what still.

What I know is that I can’t solve that here, only when I get home.

In the meanwhile if the website goes down you will know why.

Good vacations… I’ll try to enjoy mine.

PS – Bandwidth problem solved. Thanks WebHS.

I decided to release it before completely finished because I’m so tired of this temporary theme. I like dark themes but this one is a bit too black for my taste. :)

The Theme

Basically what you see is what you get (and I will get into more detail when I finish it, though I don’t think it will ever be finished, I’m one of those persons that keep tweaking stuff), but I can give a few more details on the work done so far (and I promise a more extensive post on sources and useful link to develop a theme from scratch).

I’ve tried to use as few images and icons as I could, I wanted a clean, fast and uncluttered theme, I think I kinda achieved that. Being a dark theme that felt like an upgrade from the last one was another goal, again I think that was also accomplished.

Some Details…

There is still a lot of stuff to do (you’ll find a lot of broken pages, like the showcase, tutorials, etc…), archives don’t quite work yet, search isn’t implemented, footer is empty yet, sidebar widgets still an ongoing process, but there are some functionalities we can see already.

For instance, the header features a nice breadcrumb menu. I always thought I missed it and I think it makes an essential navigation element for a streamline browsing experience. The main navigation menu features a nice lavalamp effect. Other interesting aspects of the theme can be seen for example on the automatic generation of a Related Posts list without the use of any plugin (same for the Popular Posts, the “widget” in the sidebar, so far the only one).

I can tell you that the part that gave me the most trouble was the comment section. I tought in doing the comments a la WordPress 2.7 style (that is, threaded, paged…) but I find threaded comments a bit combersume, so I decided to implement a system of Reply – Quote. This system isn’t working yet because I’m trying to program it instead of using an overkill plugin like WP-Comment Remix.

Overall, I’m liking the theme. I know I’m not trustworthy saying this, as I was the one doing it, but I do like the yet not final but close to it result.

Final thoughts

Remember, there is still a LOT of things broken. Pages not working, features not implemented so no need to report them since mosf ot them I am aware of. If you are into WordPress and blogging (most possible you are if you’re reading this) I really recommend if you have some time to read about wordpress theming, about CSS and XHTML (and a bit of PHP as a plus), its well worth it in the end.

Any advices or comments on the theme so far?

Anyway, in the above image you can see a short “preview”. I want to be able to code as much as possible the functionalities of the theme so the use of wordpress plugins is limited to the minimum, this of course, expands the time needed to program the theme.

Another thing, the theme will be dark, in close colors to what I used on the previous theme. I like dark colors I find them more suiting to read, white backgrounds hurt my eyes and in terms of design I find dark layouts way more appealing. So don’t expect something completely different. Another concern was to make the theme graphic light, so not much images present in the theme to make it quicker to load.

I hope you like the end result. I’m liking it so far. Still a lot to do like I said before. The footer is untouched too and still don’t know what I’m going to fit there.

Cya soon!

EDIT – It seems I enabled the theme by mistake for all users… meh not much of a surprise now! :P