While the design she had been working on thus far didn’t look bad at all, the official Japanese website opened up a few days ago, so we were wondering whether we could do something with the high-res official art that had been released.

After some brainstorming, I opted to just do a quick mockup to see where it’d lead. While she ended up not using the design, I thought I’d post it here — if only to show I haven’t died after spending hours on cleaning my music library (as tweeted about earlier this week).

Ingredients for this design:

• Some of the official artwork
• A high-res version of the official logo
• Stock imagery for the parchment
• Photoshop CS4, running in Wine

Having thoughts about this design you want to share? I’d love to hear them!

What an illuminating voyage has it been. This design has, without a doubt, been the most ambitious design I’ve ever wanted to make so far. Even though I had a general idea of what I wanted to make before even touching my tools, actually making it turned out to be quite a challenge, this time. Not only did I initally require lots of markup, I couldn’t settle on a colour scheme, either.

Markup techniques

As you’ve probably noticed, the site is sliced into widgety areas, surrounded by semi-transparent rounded borders and separated by gaps. These transparent borders were the one of the very first things that came up when I started brainstorming about the design. Despite being slightly hard to realise, especially when combined with a background image, I ended up not wanting to settle for anything else, which almost became my downfall.

Now, looking at the initial HTML I wrote up, this design would’ve used quite a few nested divs to achieve the border effects. I really didn’t like this, so I started looking for alternatives, which I found relatively quickly in the form of the CSS3 border-image property. This property allows me to draw the borders with but one image, which is sliced by the browser automatically. The initial show stopper for using this technique was the fact that current versions of Internet Explorer don’t support CSS3 properties yet, in contrast to all major other browsers. Much to my relief, CSS3PIE was announced when I was in the progress of rewriting the markup, allowing me to use this technique in Internet Explorer as well!

The colour scheme

Finding the right colour scheme turned out to be rather problematic. I started out with the idea of using photos as the background, but finding a good photo — or any other image, for that matter — turned out to be very challenging. I can’t possibly post all design attempts, but here are a few anyway:

Busy times

So, how long have I worked on this? To be honest, I can’t say exactly. I started working on it around the end of April, but due to me being busy at university, I didn’t have much time to work on it during May and June. I did, however, end up using the initial version of the design for a small university project. Let me throw in a screenshot while I’m at it:

WordPress

When I started planning out my new website, I opted to use WordPress as a CMS, too, instead of the home-made framework I had been using until then. Using WordPress means blogging everywhere, not just at places with SSH access, including on a smartphone. That, combined with the massive community behind it, really appealed to me.

You’ve probably noticed this isn’t quite a vanilla WordPress installation. Amongst other plugins, I’m using the Lifestream plugin to generate the fancy feed on the frontpage and the WP Super Cache plugin to keep things running super fast.

Not all pages are served fully by WordPress yet, though. Due to time constraints (as well as me having had enough for a while ), I ended up writing a wrapper for my old project and portfolio pages, allowing them to use the WordPress template system without being proper WordPress pages yet. I may dedicate a post to this later.

In conclusion

It’s been a long journey, but I’m quite happy with how the design turned out. I’m practically always looking for some feedback on my designs, so I’d really appreciate any comments with thoughts you might have. Thanks!

So, here’s the deal: I wrote a PHP script containing three classes, to be used via PHP-CLI. The abstract class AwstatsFile is used as a generalizer for both the AwstatsFromFile class (reads an existing Awstats statistics file) and the AwstatsMerger class (merges instances of AwstatsFile). CLI arguments are the filenames to merge; the merged statistics file will be echoed to the output buffer, effectively STDOUT, and can be piped.

Let’s give an example. Say you have two Awstats statistics files awstats062010.aaronweb.net.txt and awstats062010.projects.aaronweb.net.txt, and the AwParse script as awparse.php. Assuming php is the binary for php-cli, you’d merge these files by executing:

$ php awparse.php awstats062010.www.aaronweb.net.txt awstats062010.projects.aaronweb.net.txt > awstats062010.aaronweb.net.txt

Without further ado, the file can be downloaded via the following link: awparse.php.

Suggestions and other comments are more than welcome!

Now, on Windows, there’s plenty of software to choose from – as long as it uses the Haali Media Splitter, you’ll be fine. On Linux, the choices are somewhat more limited, at least as far as I’m aware. Using SMPlayer combined with FFmpeg works for me, however, I encountered a small problem after reinstalling my pc recently: the video part of the SMPlayer window was completely transparent.

After doing some research on the net, this turns out to be a side-effect of Compiz. Fortunately, there’s a workaround, albeit not a very neat one. Run the following in a terminal to create an SMPlayer launcher that basically circumvents the problem:

$ sudo bash -c "cat > /usr/bin/smplayer.helper" <<EOF
export XLIB_SKIP_ARGB_VISUALS=1
exec smplayer.real "\$@"
EOF
$ sudo chmod 755 /usr/bin/smplayer.helper
$ sudo mv /usr/bin/smplayer{,.real}
$ sudo ln -sf smplayer.helper /usr/bin/smplayer

Note that because this basically replaces the default SMPlayer binary, you may need to re-apply this workaround after your package manager updates it.

I’d be happy to hear of a better solution, really. In the mean time, I hope this helps those still looking for a solution.

After lots of attempts, I’ve finally finished the design for the new Aaronweb.net site!

So, what’s keeping me from launching the site? Well, there’s a few things left to do, most notably importing the current content into WordPress and finishing support for Internet Explorer. The latter appears to be quite a pain for versions 6 and 7, so I may end up presenting a somewhat less fancy design to those browsers. Not sure yet.

Of course, this post isn’t complete without a proper preview, so here goes:

Please let me know what you think via Twitter (@aaronvangeffen)!

I haven’t been maintaining this blog for quite some time now. As I stated earlier on my blog page, this mostly has to do with personal reasons I won’t go into here.

Now, I know this blog still gets quite a few hits on its RSS feeds, so I’ll break the silence by listing my short-term plans for this site.

The first thing on my list, is converting the site to a proper CMS. I’ve tried several over the past few weeks, and it looks like I’ll go for WordPress. Despite its flaws, it’s a very user-friendly product. Also, it has mobile interfaces for smartphones, which is a big plus for me.

After the site is successfully converted into a not-so-generic WordPress site, I plan to blog a lot more. The thing is, the site as it stands doesn’t have any form of admin interface, as I never got around to write one. As it stands, I have to log in via SSH and insert the new rows into the MySQL database manually via the MySQL command line interface. As you can probably imagine, maintaining this blog isn’t exactly a fun ride due to this.

Now, obviously this will change once the site runs on WordPress. Unfortunately, I’m still the perfectionist I used to be, so it’ll take a few more days until I’m satisfied with the new design and site.

Until then, please stay tuned! If you haven’t done so already, subscribe to the RSS feed and you’ll see exactly when the new site is online!

When I started dual booting Linux and Windows a few years ago, one of the first things I wanted to do, was to link a ton of Linux folders to my Windows partitions. Fortunately, read/write support for NTFS drives was already relatively stable back then, so I edited /etc/fstab to mount my NTFS partitions on boot and linked relevant directories in my home directory to their NTFS counterparts. Doesn’t require much effort at all, yet it thoroughly lowers the barrier of true dual booting — I might even explain this process in a future blog.

Another issue I encountered was my Firefox profile, which was constantly out of sync with my Windows profile. As the saying goes, simple solutions are often the best, so I looked into bridging it, too. Now, a relatively dirty solution would be to just link both folders via the ln -s command, but Firefox has a much neater feature built into it: the Firefox Profile Manager. How can this be used to link profiles? I’ll guide you through it below.

1. Open up a terminal and run the firefox -profilemanager command.

2. Click the ‘create profile’ button.

3. Click ‘Next’, after (not?) reading the introduction text someone jotted down.

4. Enter a profile name and click the ‘Choose folder’ button.

5. Look up your main Firefox profile on your Windows partition. These are typically stored in folders like C:\Documents and Settings\%username%\Application data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%profilename% (2000, XP) or C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\%profilename% (Vista, 7).

6. Click ‘Finish’ to link the profile.

7. Select the profile you just created and hit ‘Start Firefox’ to start using it.

That wasn’t so hard, was it? Enjoy your linked profiles!

These numbers definitely keep me motivated to keep working on updates, so I would like to hereby thank everyone who’s using any of my programs!

Aaron

On a side note, I’m still in the process of bringing parts of the website back online. I aim to have all content online by the end of next week.