A few weeks back, my partner and I (along with her family) went away for a week. We went to a scenic area in Northumberland on the coast, and also traveled to Edinburgh, my first time visiting Scotland. A selection of the pictures I took during the trip can be found on my Flickr page.

Within the set of images on Flickr are two images I took which can be used as a texture when creating your designs, the two dark wooden textures can be downloaded here and here.

2008 was an interesting year. ChrisBrandrick.com had somewhat of a rollercoaster year, some months having more posts than others and at times my blog experience lots of traffic to nearly none. This is my ‘Year In Review – 2008′.

January

In January of 2008 I made a total of 18 blog posts, covering such topics as promoting your RSS feed for free, adding a favicon to your site, and of course my goals for the year (which I will review in an upcoming post). The site received over 1,300 unique visitors from a variety of places including the UK, US, Japan, Brazil, Australia and so on. Back in January I had just under 5 or so subscribers to my RSS feed. This is also the month I started to heavily use Entrecard, as can be seen by this January blog post.

February

February saw 20 blog posts being published onto the site, two more than that in January, and this month I was clearly feeling generous as every Wednesday was an opportunity to win some prizes, in what I dubbed ‘Winning Wednesdays‘. Winning Wednesdays was an effort on my behalf to attract more subscribers to my blog, and due to the regularity of prizes, ranging from free blog reviews, entrecard credits, to cold hard cash, it clearly worked as my subscribers jumped from a pitiful amount in January to over 70 subscribers by the end of February. Running contests in addition to other content such as, how to install gravatar support on your blog, giving some link love on valentines day, and my findings on facebook advertising, was a massive help for improving traffic also, as February’s traffic was more than double that of January, coming in at over 2,600. In February I also began using the Kontera plugin in an effort to further monetize my blog.

March

The month of March saw a drop in posts, down to only 11. As for why my posting frequency dropped I’m unsure, but either way it seems to be the start of a dissapointing trend for less blog output throughout the year. During March I blogged about the progress being made on the development of my gaming site Gamebrit, the then upcoming version of Wordpress 2.5, along with how to watch videos in high quality on You Tube. Despite posting considerably less in the month of March, visitor numbers remained encouragingly ‘high’ coming in at just shy of 2,500 uniques.

April

Not a lot happened here at ChrisBrandrick.com during the month of April, and I only managed to post four times. This complete drop off in post frequency was down to personal matters, such as sorting out and actually moving house. It wasn’t all bad though, as I managed to share with you how awesome of an application GrabUp for the Mac is. Also back in April I upgraded wordpress to the then current version of wordpress 2.5!

May

In a very similar fashion to April, May suffered from a lack of blog posts, only this time it was due to my internet connection not being installed for nearly over a month, not at all a good thing when you work online, in addition to this I also had University work and an exam to prepare for! I sure did spend a lot of time at my local coffee shop using the WiFi that month, yet still only managing five blog posts, one of which detailing how to follow me on twitter!

June

One post. During June I only posted once. Not cool. The only post I did make was explaining why I wasn’t posting, reason being of course I was in the process of starting up a new company with a few good friends of mine. Kufu Design LLP is the name, and web design is our game, check us out! Suprisingly enough I still pulled in more than 1,000 unique visitors. Oh and at this point in the year, I had not gained any RSS subscibers, but lost about 10 or so.

July

A slight increase in blogging returned to the site for the month of July, despite me speding two weeks of it on holiday in Turkey! During July I blogged a total of 7 times, twice about the aforementioned holiday, along with updates on my photography over at flickr and my page rank increase. Unique visitor counts were up on the previous month.

August

During the month of August over 1,200 of you stopped by to see what was going on, and I was clearly enjoying my summer to much! Not only was I working at Kufu, but I was also getting ready to attend the annual music festival at Leeds! In addition to that music related blog entry I also updated on what was going on over at WooThemes and how twitter decided to drop support for SMS updates for those in the UK, a sad day for us UK based twitter folk…

September

This month I returned back to University to commence my final year of my degree, so naturally i blogged about it, along with how Google Chrome was introduced, how the iPhone was hitting Pay & Go and another update on yet another WooThemes release. Traffic increased this month to over 2,000 uniques, most of them coming to read about the release of Googles browser.

October

In October I posted 8 times, and during this spooky month I posted a fair number of reviews, in a somewhat successful effort to generate income via my blog. All of October’s posts can be found here, including one revealing details on how my gaming website project ‘Gamebrit‘ is going.

November

Novemeber only saw four posts, including more reviews, and word on how Google had finally added theme selection to their email service GMail. During November my RSS subscriber count stablized at around the 50 mark at which it has remained since.

December

A disappointing end to the year with only two blog entries, one of which was Entrecard releated, the other wishing all my readers (thats you!) a very merry christmas!

An epic blog post I’m sure you will agree, but that is my year in review of what went down here at ChrisBrandrick.com during 2008. Be sure to look out for my goals for 2009, (and a review of my 08 goals) soon along with more blog updates!

I have recently added a number of photographs that I took over the Christmas period to my Flickr, be sure to check them out and leave a comment or two.

I have just been at my mum’s new place with my girlfriend for the weekend, and I took a fair few snaps, all of which can be found over at my Flickr account. I have dumped them all in this set for your easy viewing pleasure.

As always comments, both here and on Flickr are appreciated.

That’s right folks, after what seems like a pretty busy year (so far), what with University, moving house and starting up Kufu (which is now online by the way), I am off on an all-inclusive holiday to Bodrum in Turkey for two weeks.

Flickr has a really nice selection of pictures from the area which are worth checking out, and I have to admit it has gotten me really excited about going, which thankfully is only in a few hours time. So with that, I am off, my flight is in less than 8 hours so I need to get some sleep, see you in two weeks!

Just a quick post for those of you who follow my picture taking over on Flickr. I recently went for a nice evening stroll with my ladyfriend and the good old DSLR and think I took some rather nice shots.

You can view the set here, or by visiting my usual flickr page. Feel free to leave a comment or two, be it here or directly on Flickr.

Today I went around a small area of uphill Lincoln (the city where I currently live) and took a small selection of shots just as the sun was setting. Be sure to check them out over at my flickr page now, and either leave some comments over there or of course here at the blog.

For those of you unfamiliar with my blog it may be worth reading this entry, which details my new D40 DSLR camera.

I hope you enjoy the images!

Apologies for the downtime last night, I had some issues with my host and all is now resolved!

This is just a quick update informing you guys that I have now installed the Wordpress plugin flickrRSS, as you can see it is now displaying the last four pictures from my photostream on my sidebar. Be sure to click through have a browse and maybe leave a comment or two.

The pictures on my flickr have been taken with my new D40 Digital SLR.

I recently turned 21, and for those of you who are interested I had a great birthday. But the best thing about my day was receiving a superb Nikon D40 Digital SLR Camera from my parents.

I have always had a distinct interest in photography, from feeble attempts to be arty, to just taking pictures of friends (and annoying them in the progress); but in the past my cameras (in my opinion) have always been lackluster, from very early digital cameras to modern phone cameras it’s all been a bit grim. Now I am very much so the amateur when it comes to taking a good picture, so I am currently attempting to educate myself on photography terminology and reading up on techniques used by others; in addition to this today I have been browsing the photography section on entrecard, with some really great results.

For example, BenSpark has been uploading ‘every-day’ style shots to his blog now for over 1,000 days, some of his pictures are great, so check it out. Another blog I clicked through to via entrecard was ‘My Beginnings In Photography‘, not the most catchiest name admittedly but this blog has some excellent beautiful shots. Finally another interesting blog I found was one which touched upon making money online via taking pictures, the blog has some good advice so check it out if your interested in monetizing your picture taking.

Now no doubt over the coming months I will be getting to grips with my new camera and taking a load of pictures (mostly rubbish I’m sure), so I am considering installing one of the wordpress flickr plugins to my blog to share my photographs with the blogging world. So be on the look out for that.

Finally for those of you interested in just the camera itself, and not my random musings, check out it’s wikipedia page.

A little personal post today about something which is bothering me, and that Macbook owners should be aware of.

In January I bought myself a Macbook as I was long overdue a laptop. Since then me and my mac have enjoyed a great relationship, where it worked, and I was happy. In fact I am so impressed with the Mac OS I find myself on my PC less and less, but that’s another story.

Over the past few days my ‘Magsafe’ Power adapter has been giving me problems, initially upon plugging in the charger it charged…but only for a few minutes, then charged again. This intermittent state of charging was random, unsatisfactory and more than anything concerning. Last night this problem revealed it’s true side.

The cable had melted, and the inner wire was visible. I stopped using the cable immediately as I would prefer not to burn down my home. After a brief period of research online, I discovered that this was a common problem many Macbook owners were experiencing. Just check out this Flickr set for examples.

An example of what my cable now looks like.

Despite me being under warranty I still checked out the Apple site to see what the going rate was for the power adapter. Unfortunately it was, to my disgust, £59.99 (Which works out at about $120).  I am going to call Apple later today to try and get a new cable. It seems a revision has finally been made to the cables, as seen in this picture from Flickr, so hopefully I will receive one of these newer models.