James McDonald is an 18 year old web designer from Scotland, and for those of you that read my blog you may remember the name from his old blog, EatFruitPlease. James no longer writes for that blog, but has recently opened a new blog under the name ‘Flockey.com‘ which concentrates on web design along with offering superb web design services.

If you need a web site designing then James is well worth checking out, take a glance over his portfolio for yourself, and if thats not enough to sway you subscribers to my RSS feed via email can receive an additional 25% discount off their first order at Flockey.com. All you have to do is look out for the promotional code in your inbox if you are an email subscriber to ChrisBrandrick.com, if not subscribe; the code will be sent out to new subscribers daily. To use your promotional code just mention it when ordering through Flockey.com!

The 25% promotional code is valid for all of April. Flockey deliver high quality website design.

Apologies for the lack of updates this week, it’s been a busy one, with easter and University work (more on that soon) taking up a lot of my time.

Today’s blog post is about how an idea went from concept to being live on the web within less than a few hours, and within a day having received over 30,000 unique hits.

The time it takes to build a time machine is (according to j0n.org) merely a few hours, as Jon has, in the space of a short few days gone from concept, to approaching a developer and having the site up and running and successfully having people from all over the globe using the service; which is an email time machine. Send an email to yourself in the future, sure such sites already exist, but the impressive thing here (for me at least) is the rate in which the site was created and fully working.

You can check out Jon’s posts about the sites creation here and an even view a quick update here. Looking for a developer, then this is the guy who made the site in record time, and finally of course, here is the time machine its self. Impressive web development.

UPDATE: TimeMachiner has now been sold.

I had some free time this evening and came across this Photoshop tutorial over at PSDTuts and decided to give it a go, so here is a wallpaper to celebrate Easter, just click the below image to see the full size version (1280×1024).

I would also like to take this opportunity to wish all my readers a happy easter!

Version 2.5 of Wordpress has been anticipated for some time now, and the new version will bring with it several impressive changes, such as Gravatar support as standard, multiple uploads, and tagging management. All this in a fresh new interface.

Recently the guys over at Wordpress put up this article which gives a sneak peek at the final 2.5 interface and a general idea as to what you can expect. It has to be said at first I was weary of any changes being made to the Wordpress backend, but the latest interface has an overall impressive style and seems to flow very well, and if you prefer the classic blue colours, you can even switch back to them.

Wordpress 2.5 should be hitting very soon, so be on your toes and ready to update.

Today I woke up and opened my laptop to check my emails, but that wasn’t to be as for some reason I had no wireless signal. After a bit of investigation work the realization was that there had been a power cut, and the power was still down.

I am currently on my Easter break from University (I do a Web Technology course) so I planned to put some serious time and effort into working on my various sites over the holiday. Of course with no power, and no internet this was going to be tough. It suddenly hit me, that I was going to have to be creative on how I spent my time, especially considering my laptop had only two hours left on the battery. I spent those two hours doing some work in Photoshop, and playing around with CSS in Dreamweaver, but once the battery had died, what was I to do, especially considering work was a priority for the day.

I ended up drawing (yes hand drawn!) some website designs and drawing mock ups of logos for upcoming sites, among with listing my plans for some sites, along with tasks I wanted completing soon, and prioritizing them. Having this time away from the Mac, and more importantly the internet, really did help me focus on what needed doing and when by. Oh and I took the dog for a walk or two.

The power was out for over 6 hours. Lesson being? It’s always healthy and more often than not, productive to take time away from your PC (if thats your primary work area).

What would you do without a PC and net access (if you work online that is)?

Just a quick little tip. In my spare time I more often than not find myself on YouTube checking out some videos, and today I figured I would share this handy hint for viewing YouTube content in a higher resolution.

Just find any video on YouTube, and add the following code on to the end of the URL: &fmt=18

So for example,

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hQAWYj3cq38,

would become,

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=hQAWYj3cq38&fmt=18.

Simple! Ofcourse if the video was poor quality regardless then the benefits will be slim, but it sure can boost the quality on certain clips.

Apologies for the lack of updates in the past week, it’s been a busy one!

Goal number eight in my goals for 2008 is to launch gaming site Gamebrit, I briefly mentioned it in the linked blog entry, but today I am going to go into more details as to what to expect.

Development on the site began just before Christmas, with the basic design being completed (see blog image for a sneak peak). The site is currently functioning and running on a good content management system, currently I am just adding content, and of course games into the database, which is taking far more time than I would like. I could outsource this menial work, but trying to keep costs down is key.

The site, as you may have guessed is going to focus on gaming, specifically within the UK. I hope to eventually be able to interview, and run features on UK game development houses and studios. I have successfully gained a foot in the UK gaming industry before (although a small one) so I see no reason why I cannot do it again with a more focused site.

In addition to the aforementioned CMS, which I will touch upon in more detail in a later post, I will also be implementing a forum to hopefully gain some community around the site; a collection of UK gamers, interested in the development of the UK in the gaming industry, oh and bloody good writing.

I initially wanted the site to be ready this month, but due to lengthy input processes I can see this being knocked back. Either way I will keep you updated on it’s progress, this post was really just to let you know, and because I am excited about the opportunities the site will bring. Any questions or comments, just leave your thoughts in the comment section.

This seems crazy, but today it hit me that I didn’t have a contact page on my blog! So as you can now see in the menu above a contact page has been added, and on it you can either contact me via email or via instant message on MSN if I am online.

I am not 100% sure as to whether the MSN IM add on functions correctly, but for those of you interested in checking it out you can create your own on the Windows Live site.

FreelanceSwitch is a blog I have been reading for quite some time, not only does it have some superb well written advice for freelancer’s it also has many an article written by one of my favorite bloggers, Skellie.

FreelanceSwitch have a book published, both in e-book and paperback format which covers how to get going as a freelancer and eventually getting paid. The book, ‘How To Be A Rockstar Freelancer‘ is ideal for me, the younger less experienced blogger who is just starting running a handful of websites. Plenty of handy new tips.

I recommend checking it out, as its definitely an e-book worth your pennies. Failing that be sure to add FreelanceSwitch to your bookmarks, a superb site all round.

Apologies for the delay in posting the results for last weeks winning wednesday competition, but due to being out of town access to the internet was limited.

Last week subscribers to my RSS feed via email had the opportunity to win a custom avatar, review, and more. The winner of last week’s competition is:

Andrew of Mach2Designs. Congratulations! Be sure to check your email for more details.

Last week’s competition was the last in the current run of contests, but to those of you that subscribe to my RSS you need not worry, in the future you will be automatically entered into any similar competitions, and in the mean time you get to read my content from the comfort of your inbox! Keep it on ChrisBrandrick.com for more!