The Psychotic Factor

Yes, I am a Metallica fan. Nope, I didn’t grow up with them I just love pretty much anything Metal. My fave music genre, in fact (my fave bands being Metallia, Avenged Sevenfold, Marilyn Manson and Rage Against the Machine).

Metallica’s new album is coming out. Titled “Death Magnetic” it comes out on September 12th and to be honest, I can’t wait that long, I want it and I want it NOW. The songs I’ve heard from the official site are just too damn good. In my personal opinion, they just as good as they ever were. And I really do hope they make another album after this one.

So let’s list the previews, shall we?

The Day That Never Comes (god how I love this song)
My Apocalypse
A Little Taste of Death (9 parts of what I assume is an instrumental)

Click the links to listen to the songs via the official Metallica website. For everyone who loves Metallica or Thrash Metal in general then please, take a seat and reward your ears for all of their hard work. I think they deserve it.

…In the form of guides and possibly Frequently Asked Questions (FAQS). Soon I’ll be writing some very simple guides on Basic XHTML. I will be going straight to XHTML because it’s good to learn first, for anyone wanting to know. Any beginner web designer would learn it at some stage and because the W3C’s standards and rules for XHTML compliance are widely used and not as hard as some people may think, I will be using it. XHTML Transitional to be precise.

Transitional is obviously less strict then XHTML Strict. Hence why one is called “XHTML Transitional” and one is called “XHTML Strict”. I’m not an expert at Strict and I actually like some of the shortcuts that the Transitional standard allows. All my templates have always been coded under XHTML Transitional and future ones to come will always be as well. I don’t particularly want to change for anyone, unless absolutely necessary, of course.

Guides for HTML, XHTML and CSS will be made. That’s what I focus on. I do not focus on PHP or MySQL because I do not know anything about them myself. In truth, both PHP and MySQL both interest me quite a lot but I don’t have the patience to learn them and it’s harder for me to learn them via trial and error (I’m using the manual at the moment, I’ve heard it’s a good source for PHP information).

Trial and error is a damn good way to learn, IMO. I also believe people benefit from viewing other peoples source codes. Otherwise known as “open source”. I love open source products, with websites it’s not so much a problem because the source code of a website (even the style sheets used) are publicly available. With a software, the source code isn’t as easily obtainable but more and more programmers are giving people the chance to view their software’s source code, and I like how they’re accepting it just a little bit more all the time.

I’ll start off with teaching basic HTML. Questions like “What prerequisites do I need?”, “How hard is it?” and “What are HTML tags?” will be answered alongside examples of code. I will also recommend in every guide, that people try to follow me through things and I may even try to add a little quiz at the end of each guide for some “extra curricular activities” for people to test what they’ve learned.

What I do ask is that if anyone thinks I am a skilled writer, then please, think again. I am no writer, I have not written a small comic let alone a book or even a guide, for that matter (though I’ve tried). I will try to make it as understandable to newcomers as I possibly can but, if anyone doesn’t understand anything then never hesitate to contact me after my guides are written and I’ll be sure to try and help and explain further.

I’ve just found out, from a blog of a web developer (and a damn good designer at that!) that CSS3 exists. To anyone not familiar with web design of the sort then this entry is not for you, for everyone else, read on!

Yes, it seems I have been living under a rock for the past two years and the existence of CSS3 has somehow managed to escape my grasp. Until now, that is! I’m sure it’s common knowledge to most designers now, so you guys can probably just look away but to anyone uninformed, like I was, well CSS3 adds some pretty interest, and equally fun, opportunities for us designers.

CSS3 adds border radius styles, which I’ve known about for some time but never knew it was considered CSS3, as well as border images and the use of custom fonts (which you can ’scr’ link to). Custom fonts don’t really interest me though and quite frankly, I’m not up for the idea if people are going to abuse them and just use them all over the damn place. But border radius’ and border images will be of use, especially for me as I’ve wanted curved borders for a while now (without the fuss of images to aid you).

The problem however lies in the fact that most browsers do not support it. And I’m fairly certain there is no W3C standard for it. Internet Explorer 6 never supported it as far as I know and I’m unsure if Opera does. Mozilla/Firefox does support it but it seems Safari supports it best, at this time. As for IE7, I don’t think it supports it (not from my tests as of now). So even after two years people are still slow on the uptake there, which is sad really.

For more information and some live previews for CSS3, be sure to check out www.css3.info. And yes, I know I’m a bit slow on the uptake myself, =P.

WoWWiki, an incredibly popular and VERY useful World of Warcraft is having a contest to celebrate the Beijing 2008 Olympics. It seems Clopper Whizbang has lost his WoWlympic gear and he needs your help to find them!

This is a great competition and I’ve successfully completed it (and it’s not easy, let me tell you now). What can you, I hear you ask? Well simple: Wrath of the Lich King Beta Keys and, what I personally believe to be the best of the two - A Tyrael minipet!

Interested in winning if you’re a WoW player? Then head on over to the WoWWiki WoWlympics page for more information!

Here’s the Age of Conan layout in a darker shade of… blue. What’s it for and why does it look different? Simple. This is the version I’ll be using for The Death Reapers, an RP Guild I’m setting up on World of Warcraft’s Steamwheedle Cartel realm.

It will also most likely used for The Ownerz, my Social Guild on the Barthilas realm (that is yet to get members, but then, I’ve yet to reach level 70, lol). There isn’t much difference to the layout except that the background is different and everything is blue. Some may argue that WoW isn’t blue, but I beg to differ.

Also note that the title was misspelled, not deliberately, I just couldn’t be screwed correcting it. As for the slogan, for those of you who have never looked up Warcraft lore - 26 is the year that World of Warcraft is set in.

And I’m done, for the three days I’ve been working on an Age of Conan based template (based off the game, not the site). 18-20 hours later and I’m done!

The end result can be seen right here! Don’t hesitate to tell me your thoughts and opinions on it.

I’ve nearly completed the Age of Conan layout I’ve been working on the past 3 days (about 18 of that being work time, lol). And I think it’s coming along damn nicely, if I do say so myself… which I do, =P.

I’ve redone the navigation bar again, just a teeny tiny tad, it may not even be noticable to some of you, who knows (it should be though, because if it isn’t then you’re bloody blind!). Also changed the background to how I wanted it.

The only problems I’ve encountered so far is, as usual, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer loves being a bitch on me and so it has slowed down production time, which really pisses me off. It’s not completely working in IE as of this post, because I prefer getting it to work in Mozilla first before anything else. But it will work eventually.

I won’t post a preview, sorry guys! Reason is because it’s so near it’s completion that it’d be rather pointless of me to do so. So you can sit on your ass and wait, just like I’ve been doing during it’s creation.

Here’s another preview of my upcoming Age of Conan themed website interface. You may not notice much but there is a big difference. A rundown on the new previews changes just below.

I’ve changed the banner again. I hate making banners and I believe I really REALLY suck at them. This one also incorporates the redone navigation bar on it, as well. My original plan for the navbar didn’t turn out as planned but I like it how it is, nonetheless.

Footer (copyright area) changed to look like the other headers. These will be subject to a change though because I want to personalise them more. I need them to look more Age of Conan-like, and to me, at this point in time, they just don’t.

And the last change is an updates are. For all the latest content. The idea is to only ever have three bars there, anymore and you’d have to make those bars much smaller and doing so makes them just look damn weird. Besides, three is enough, in my opinion. These will be subjected to imagery updates too so they also look more AoC-like.

The background hasn’t changed but I’ve got plans for that tomorrow, if I finish the updates bit. So far it’s taken me, I’d say, around 12 hours to get it like this. I’m not sure on the current working time I’ve put into this but it’s been around that, so that’s not too bad.

Well that’s it for now guys, check back in a few days and I should have another preview, if not the finished product, up for you to gawk at. I say a few days because I honestly don’t know how long it’ll take and because timezones suck, =P

Well I’ve had to remove the whole Friendly URLs option. Hover over a link and check it in the status bar, you’ll notice it says something like: http://randomtastic.com/?page_id=131. Friendly URLs change the links from that to something like http://www.randomtastic.com/development-journal/.

Since then I’ve had a few problems with updating Wordpress (which I will get around to, if it doesn’t screw up again) because every time I do, the whole Friendly URL option stuffs up and I’m left with a ton of goddamn 404 errors everywhere I look.

The Wordpress development team really need to look into an auto-installer in the next release, because that would be so damn helpful. Something that you could upload the zip file, have the CMS unzip the file and then put all the updates wherever and you can specify certain options (like if you’ve got custom templates, settings and plugins).

Some software does it, take a look at SMF (Simple Machines Forum). It can update the whole thing just by uploading the latest zip file. It can even add new templates and modifications by using the same procedure. It’s bloody useful, the forum software in general however is crap. Never use it, no seriously, don’t. It’s bloody shit and phpBB will serve you better. A damn ton better.

Here’s a screenshot of my latest work in progress. It’s an Age of Conan based layout (Age of Conan is a very recent online video game, for those not aware). I was suggested to make one when I was asking around for ideas. More after the jump.

It, of course, is not finished yet and there is still a ton I can do with and want to do with it, so I will do it. Well anyways, here’s the template. See for yourself what I’ve been up to as of late (besides slacking off and playing WoW).

Click the image to enlarge. Uploaded at TinyPic.