making some tweaks

maintenance

Yesterday i introduced a new facebook ‘like’ feature on the site. These days everything can be ‘liked’. You can like comments, like pictures, like pages… facebook are creating their own currency with this simple ‘like’ feature and over time, i’d image it will become hugely influential in determining the ‘quality’ of data… rather like google’s pagerankonly ‘like’ is driven solely by people…

Like button

There are guides on how to manually implement a like button on all posts / pages however i just used a plugin called (very creatively) ‘Facebook Like‘. The benefit of using a plugin over hard coding is that you don’t have to worry about losing the code when you switch themes, plus this plugin comes with a nice control panel so i can easily change how the like button appears on the site.

like

So if you’re on facebook and you like any of my posts, feel free to click that ‘like’ button. It will be interesting to see how people use the new like feature. Facebook only introduced it a couple of weeks ago but so far it seems to be going quite well – i notice a lot more ‘like’ updates in my own Facebook profile feed and i myself have started ‘liking’ a lot more over the past few weeks.

Cache

Another major change i made today was ditching wp-supercache. I’ve been running it for years without problems but i’m hearing good things about w3 total cache so decided to take it for a test drive.

w3 total cache

If it increases the blogs speed or doesn’t make any difference, i’ll stick with it. If i think it’s slows down things i’ll switch back to wp-supercache. So far, i haven’t noticed any major difference although there are tonnes of settings i’ve yet to play with & fully understand in the administration panel.

3D

A while back i said i wanted to get in to 3D design more. I’ve spent most of the day learning about 3D in photoshop CS5, so i’ve finally got around to playing with it and delivering on that promise. The ‘maintenance’ image you see above took a hell of a long time to create. In fact i spent all day coming up with it on and off. Creating text in 3D isn’t a problem but finding the right backgrounds and colours etc… is where i really lack experience. It’s easy in 2d, but you have to think differently in 3d… you can’t just slap any 2d background in with a 3d object in the foreground. I need to study more 3D images and tutorials and learn what works best.

I also discovered the joys of trying to render complicated 3D images too. To those that don’t know about them, rendering 3D images can take hours or even days depending on what hardware you have. I had an elaborate 3D image with diggers, cranes, workmen etc… created but in the end i got fed up trying to render it and just stuck with the image above for this post. So i’m still learning, still improving things, still striving for perfection and that’s really all i can ask of myself each day 🙂

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