Leateds.com

I Bought A 22" Monitor

April 25, 2009

Yesterday i decided that i would buy myself a new monitor for my computer. I am sick and tired of looking at my basically square monitor. It is a flat panel on at the moment but it is just too square!

I have been wanting to get a new monitor for a while now and bit by bit i am upgrading my different sections on my computer, first new speakers then a new desk then a new keyboard & mouse and now a new monitor 😀 the only thing that is left that i got when my pc shipped from the factory will be just the machine.

l_01199224

So next time i am changing something it will be the tower part 😀 So the monitor i ordered is the Samsung Syncmaster 2233bw 22″, it is going to seem massive when put beside this old monitor for comparison.The monitor cost €169 and i got it from Pixmania here.

So it will be great when the monitor arrives, i will be expecting to receive it next week and it will arrive by courier, i will write a post about it when i get it 😀

One Year Of WordPress

April 23, 2009

: Image via CrunchBase

It is exactly a year today since i first started to use WordPress. Thats not to say this site has not been here more than a year. Before i started to use WordPress i was just using a plain old html site, it was not even a blog, since this URL ‘leateds.com’ was my first ever domain i was new to the whole scene of creating websites.

I used to make some old very shabby looking sites in basic html,that i would then host on a free hosting account that would be riddled with bloody advertisements. These sites would i suppose provide some use, first off they gave me the ability to begin to learn how to code a basic site, then the other service that it provided was for when i was in school, since the schools would block links to certain websites i used to have available on my site a proxy version of certain sites available through an iframe. My whole class started to use it to get into bebo and then a few other years began to find out about the site and that they could get into bebo that way.

So in order for the teachers in the school to not be able to get onto my site i added a password to it so that they could not block the links that i was using on my site 😀 and then i gave the password out to the class, even if they had blocked my main url i would just create a new one and use the same content. Luckily enough they were not smart enough to think of blocking the main url :P, but they did see my site popping up in the history a lot and would try to find out who’s it was, they never found out though!

ss3

Anyway, the reason i started to use wordpress was because i like how easy it is to manage all the content on the website and instead of creating pages manually i would just have to click a button and it would just create one for me :D, simple and fast. Also i was terrible at designing sites so with the vast amount of themes available to the wordpress community it was basically a no brainer to switch.

I had however never heard of WordPress until i came to college, one of my fellow college classmates showed it too me. So then i decided i would just give it a go and see if i liked it or not, and now here i am a year later still using it 😀

Also i never intended on using it as a blog, if you look at the first month of posts in the archives page you will see that the posts basically relate in no way to blogging, they were basically just me adding things i liked such as some videos.

I also never really knew what blogging was :O, i didnt really read too many either. But now i read many blogs and subscribe to loads of different rss feeds, from news to entertainment and personal blogs. Reading through other peoples blogs gave me an insight into what the main kind of trend of blogging was. So eventually i decided to give it a shot, at the beiginning i was not too successful, i struggled to gain any traffic and my site was bearly indexed in google, my posts soon began to get less and less each month.

I finally decided towards the start of this year to give it a proper go, it was now or never, so since the start of this year i have started a constant posting of posts on a regular basis, and since i have started to blog on a regular basis now people seem to return to the blog and also the stats show that the visitor count is on the rise every month!:D

By beginning to use WordPress i have broadened my knowledge of coding websites. I never had any understanding of php code at all and now by using wordpress in order to be able to modify the site i had to learn at least the basics of php code.

Nobody had ever taught me how to code sites. Back when i first started out i was using Microsoft’s Frontpage Express. Then i moved onto the likes of dreamweaver and text based editors such as textpad. When i came to college then i had a few classes which taught the basics of html which i was fairly confident about and then i was also taught css code which was all new to me.

And now since the use of WordPress i know more advanced coding techniques such as php. The next step is a new way to create a website, i know that next year in college an assignment that we will be set is to make a website using Visual Basic!

Anyway, one year so far with WordPress and i expect to have many more in the future. I have no intention of changing the platform that i am using for blogging 🙂

If you like what you are reading then why not subscribe to my RSS Feed?

Google Chrome

April 16, 2009

Over the past few weeks i have started to use Google Chrome as my main internet browser, i decided to start using it more because it is really fast to open. Although i really like Firefox i will be using Chrome for the next while for the bulk of my browsing.

I will however still be using Firefox because i use it a lot when editing websites because of all the great plugins that i have that make problem solving with websites a breeze. I will never go back and use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and have not used it in about 2 years now.

g-chrome-screen

I found that when watching some of the high definition videos in firefox it made the video jump when you try to play it when the video is still finishing off downloading. In chrome however i found that it plays seamlessly, i would assume this has to do with the fact that because Firefox uses so much memory compared to other applications, when you try to run a HD video it just becomes a little too much and since Chrome uses less memory it dosent find it as such a struggle to play the HD videos.

There are a few other reasons i switched to chrome, i like how much screen space i now have with this browser, i can see a lot more of the page which is great 😀

There is one other time when i use all of my internet browsers, (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer), i use them when i want to check to make sure that my website is displaying right in all the different browsers, because chances are when you are designing and using the one browser to check if it is looking ok, by time you come to finally check it when you are finished you will most likely find something that has broken in one of the different browsers because the code differs slightly from browser to browser.

Its That Time Of Year

April 10, 2009

Anyone who is online and has there very own domain will eventually come to the time of renewing it. It’s fine when you have just one domain but when you have multiple domains it can certaintly add up. When i started registering domains i decided to register a bunch all at once. I thought it was great to just get started with the whole thing.

But now that the time has come to renew, it means i have to pay for them all again. And it adds up to quite a bit, i own in total at least 6 domains. It dosent seem like much but to me it is. When you throw on top of that a years hosting it adds up to a lot. Luckily this year in regards to hosting i paid just under €6 ($10) for the next years hosting, i got this during the promotion that dreamhost were having.

domain_renewal

Although my hosting on this account with lunarpages does not expire for another 2 months i figured that it was worth buying it now and save myself some money. I now have all my renewals paid for in regards to hosting and domains and i am happy that it is out of the way now.

I have just started to take a major interest in websites lately and have set out to make my first good attempt at creating a successfull website, more on that later as i make further developments. I have also teamed up with a college friend of mine to kick start this idea and also have agreed to help out with a few other team based websites. I hope that by partnering up on creating a site it can give me a better insight on how to get things done in a more efficient way and it may give me some pointers on how other people go about doing things.

New Theme Live

April 08, 2009

Finally after over a month of me saying that i would be getting my new theme completed, the time has finally arrived. Today i added the new theme to the site.I have also incorporated a new section ‘Photos’ which links to my Flickr account, and pulls in all my photos.

On the right hand side i have an updated method of displaying my latest tweets and below the search bar is a link to the main social sites that i use.

In the footer of the theme i have a tag cloud which lists the most popular posts in my blog. Also it shows my latest blog posts and the most popular blog posts. When viewing my posts on there own individual page there is an option to share the post across multiple sites including stumbleupon, twitter and digg. Also below the posts it shows a list of related posts which may interest you, such as another post talking about the same topic that you are currently reading.

Finally i have a new great looking logo. I paid to have this logo designed and i think it was well worth the money. It cost me about €20 from logonerds. I am really happy on how it turned out and they really do include exactly what you want. And they seem to have taken the Irish part of my site to the extreme with the shamrocks, i like them though they look great.