Over the weekend, I was browsing Iconfactory’s archives and discovered some amazing icon sets modeled after the Indiana Jones adventures.

Better yet, I found an an amazing desktop wallpaper:

This has to be one of the coolest desktop wallpaper I’ve ever seen. You can download it from Iconfactory here.

When I got my own domain a year ago, I whipped up a simple theme, “Version 1.0″, in a single weekend. By the end of the summer, I was tired of it, and decided to get a new look, “Version 2.0 beta”. Well, life happened, and Version 2.0 beta stayed on the site until yesterday without getting finished. Last fall, I decided to do a complete redesign. I spent many hours on the project, but never got it close enough to done to actually post it.

My life got busy and so the design work got delayed. During that time, I reevaluated my design and goals and decided to scrap that design and start from scratch. I did almost all of the initial design work on a Greyhound bus during a four hour round trip to Dallas this spring. To reflect my interest in photography and (hopefully) ease the transition towards making money as a freelance photographer, I shifted the website from a strictly blog to a full-featured website.

I had to shelve the design project for several really busy weeks, but decided to pull it out and finish it this weekend. I started early this morning, and for about eighteen hours straight I’ve sat in my armchair with my laptop tweaking code and getting everything working. At this point, “Version 3.0″ (I nicknamed it “Tabs”) is officially done. All the CSS styling is there (for the first time in a year!), everything should work just fine (if someone has a modern browser; I’ve tested in Firefox 3, Opera 9 and Internet Explorer 7).

The new site comes with a lot of new features. Check out the new:

• Ministry page: A central page for me to post my writings and talks regarding spiritual life and ministry issues.
• Photo Gallery: A full-featured, powerful photo gallery. Run by Gallery2 under the hood.
• About page: A new biography and questions.
• New Contact options: You can call my phone or chat to me right on the page.

Looking to the future, I have a few small tweaks I expect to make to this design, and then I’ve already got some ideas for a completely new look (”Version 4.0″) that I might be able to publish next fall.

Let me know what you think!

Yesterday, a construction accident between Big Sandy and Tyler took out our internet and phone service. I quickly realized how dependent I am on the global data cloud to function. This reaffirmed my goal of sharing one good website a week with you, my loyal readers.

Backpack is an amazing website/service from the innovative startup 37signals. It is essentially a web-based productivity/organizational tool. It is slick, flexible, and super-cool. In fact, it combines the total flexibility of a paper-based notebook with the infinite re-writable possibilities of electronic data.

Built using the flexible power of Ruby on Rails, Backpack is one of those no-brainer tools that hides mindblowing capabilities. It actually significantly reminds me of an Apple application. It just makes sense.

You can sign up for free, which gets you most of the cool features. If you want more, you can always pay a monthly fee and upgrade your account (I recently did and can’t believe I didn’t pay the price sooner!)

Backpack revolves around pages. Each page can then be filled with Lists, Notes, Files, photo galleries, and collaborative "Writeboards." These components can be edited, moved around or deleted to your heart’s content. It is easy to use and very powerful in function. All of the text in Backpack is formatted using "Textile" codes: Basically, using simple plain-text characters you can create dynamic formatting. Making something bold is as simple as enclosing it in asterisks: *bold* = bold. Making a list is as simple as adding numbers. Adding images and hyperlinks is also easy, which means that your lists and notes can all of a sudden be quite dynamic and powerful.

Backpack also has a handy calendar and a powerful reminder system. It can be set to send reminders to email or as a text message to your phone.

What do I use Backpack for? To run my life. At this point in my life, it makes sense to have things online. I have internet at work and in my room, and so it provides a handy central point to run things through.

I use a page for each of my action lists, and then a page for projects, a page for Someday/Maybe’s, and a page for Notes. This flexible solution works quite well for me and is well worth the paltry $60 a year price tag. Which is about what I paid for my planner in previous years.

Check it out at: http://www.backpackit.com/

For the website, I mean.

Last night, I actually ended up missing supper because of work-related training I was receiving over at ALERT’s brand new, state-of-the-art multi-camera remote control live production video recording facility. I headed back over to my office to grab my stuff and head home for a pizza, when I was overcome with an inexplicable, possibly insane, desire to see if I could design a new site from scratch in one evening.

I found that I was able to go from essentially zero to about 70% done in about five hours. The result is the new look you see here.

The first hour, I focused on the visual design of the site. This was all done in Photoshop, with traditional, familiar design tools. After an hour, I decided to go with the design, exported the image slices, wrote down dimensions and colors, and then started piecing together the design. I started at first with a simple HTML document loaded with static content. I laid out a structure, and began filling in the pieces. Once I was pretty happy with my layout, I started my CSS stylesheet and transfered all of the layout styling and the visual styling over to that file.

By now, I was about three hours into my evening, and I decided to move on once I was close to done with the layout. I fired up XAMPP (a free, locally based web server that runs off my portable hard drive), installed the latest version of Wordpress, imported my Wordpress database (off of my real website), and began inserting and debugging the PHP code. This took about an hour to input and an hour to debug. By now, I was hungry and tired, so I packed up, went home, and got some food cooking.

I had to upgrade my Wordpress installation to get the new theme to work, but now it is running smoothly.

There are several “goodies” now present, but three that make a difference for readers:

• Lightbox: The easiest way to explain this feature is to demonstrate it. Click on the header image on this page, and you will see Lightbox pop into action, cleanly rendering the full image. It doesn’t automatically work with every image yet, but when I post images in future posts, you’ll see what I mean.
• Popularity :You may notice a new item at the end of a post labeled “Popularity: (x%)”. This is a plugin that uses statistics such as number of comments, number of hits, links to a post, and total views on a post to generate a popularity rating. It displays this popularity rating as a percentage (so my most popular post has a rating of 100% and other posts are graded based on that). This does two things for me: First, it lets me quickly see what posts are most popular. Second, it lets me put a list at the bottom that displays the top seven posts right now.
• FLV Player: Most popular video websites (e.g. YouTube, GoogleVideo, Facebook, etc.) use an Adobe Flash player to play embedded Flash Video (FLV) files. This makes embedding video into a page super easy. Now, I can do the same. My first example is here. I can turn any video file into a FLV file, upload it, and embed it easily into my page. Just another cool way to expand what I am bringing to my audience.
  

At this point, there are many refinements that need to happen. In order to finish this theme in one evening, I cut quite a few corners; but done is better than perfect, and I can start working down this wishlist as I have time:

• Round out the CSS styling for post content (basically the text styles for what you see in a post).
• CSS-style my new implementation of Lightbox.
• Further refine single-post and page-view template files.
• Refine the archive and archives page.
• Implement a better search.
• Add a sidebar (maybe…still thinking about that one).
• Improve some other components.

Let me know what you think, and especially let me know if there are errors or problems!

My family has been seeing some amazing examples of God’s design in our backyard in urban Wisconsin.

I wish I could have seen these in person, but unfortunately, I am stuck in hot muggy Texas, where nature seems to like to bite, sting, scratch or otherwise injure me.

But my family is enjoying these rare and wonderful shows of God’s creation.

Recently, after dinner, my family was treated to an amazing show in which a number of foxes played in our backyard.

My younger brothers helped babysit the neighbor’s butterflies, and were treated to an absolutely beautiful demonstration of God’s design!