Just thought I'd share a nice milestone for myself. My one and only comic book work 'Coffee Beans' has now been downloaded over 250 times since I originally 'published' it. Here's hoping I get to finish off more comic book stories in the near future. Thanks for reading.
OhLife - If you start seeing more blogging action here on the 'Kode in the coming months, it'll be thanks to this site. Over the years I've used different methods to actually communicate online. First it was a newsletter to my friends as a long bastard email. Then it was this blog. Then it was Facebook for a while and a bit of twitter. Now, now it's nothing really. But I love writing, and I love maintaining this site. Writing an email to myself every day, with my most banal things is a good way of getting back to blogging again. At least that's the thought process.
One thing I love about the OhLife site is just how beautifully put together it actually is. It's a single column design (just the way I like it) with subtle backgrounds and little details everywhere. The colour scheme is calm and the little bit of red brings out everything as well.
The guys have been smart enough to make sure to allow you to export your entries as well incase you wanna do something with them, and setting up an account is exactly as it should be, completely painless.
It's that time of the year again, where all of geekdom heads on down to San Diego for a weekend filled with comics, pop culture and weird shit. Thank god for the internet. Here's a list of items that have caught my attention (I'll update this list throughout the weekend):
ComicCon from end to end - gives you a real scale of the damn thing.
Matt Broome on Defcon 2055 - I have the original Defcon 4, which was an amazing comic when it came out. Part of me really believes that Broome could have been a massive creator, but he didn't make the right decisions I feel early on in his career. Still this is a step in the right direction.
Hickman and Pacheco on Ultimate Thor - It's been a while since I bought anything from Marvel, and not really a Thor fan, but get those two names together and you know there is magic in the air.
Tron Legacy - 'nuff said.
Grant Morrison's Sintarao - It'll probably start AMAZINGLY and then petter out into complete weirdness, much like most of Grant's writing.
First look at the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Vol 2: Century - Get on with it and release this bad boy.
List of the Eisner Award Winners - Asterios Polyp gets some love, as does Parker: The Hunter and Footnotes in Gaza. All some of the very best graphic novels to come out last year. Once again, David Mack doesn't get anything which is a fucking travesty. Give him something already you bastards, he's probably been nominated more times than anyone else, and he bloody deserves to win.
And I'll leave you with the image of the con for me so far.
You probably haven't noticed but now the 'Kode comes with a completely responsive shiney design, and by responsive design I mean it responds to the size of your screen, well by responds to the size of your screen, I mean if it's less than 480px (size of your iphone/ipod/blackberry?) then you'll still be able to read very clearly (without scrolling horizontally) my AMAZING writing, and the brilliant commentary that I provide to you on an extremely sporadic nature - what can I say I'm feeling in a sarcastic mood today.
So if you're reading it on your feed reader, I guess you could visit the site properly to have a look. The main area i'm pretty happy with is the fact that even the images resize to accommodate (like in the illustration section).
The truth of the matter is, the current version of the 'Kode is soo simple that doing this was pretty painless, and took an a few hours to read up on how to actually do it. The best resource as you would expect is found at these two A List Apart articles:
Then of course there are the prime examples to look at how this is achieved. Jonathan Hick's for example has gone ALL out, with stylesheets for the iphone, ipad, 600px resolution, smaller, bigger whatever, it's crazy - who the hell's got the time? The general plan for the site is to keep doing general maintenance on the site and adding little things like this and generally bringing the design tighter together, trying to stay abreast with what's going on the web (rather than being ahead of the curve).
Obviously, I could give a shit if it works in Internet Explorer.
So I'm there minding my own business, just checking my feeds and I see a familiar sight. Manji was mentioned on Devlounge as one of the single column themes of choice.
That's pretty cool actually, seeing as it was designed over 4 years ago and hasn't really been modified since. What's interesting to me really is that there does seem a severe lack of super simple themes out there. Super simple is fucking hard to do and make stick - but that's a topic for another time, which I fully intend on exploring.
Oh and btw, this is officially Broken Kode's 1500th post.
Inspired by Coudal, I've decided to have a Page 2. It's basically everything that doesn't fit into my minimalist design. I'll have to go into this design a bit more to be honest, because it's basically longest running design. Every time I try and make it 'better' I always end up coming back to the same thing, only with a minor tweak here or there. I've not really talked about it, because it never seems all that interesting. What is interesting is that I've got over 15 iterations of the current design as I experimented with layout always coming back. I'll have to post them in a gallery at some point.