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.

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!