Violent Blue homepage

So bandcamp sets up your account by album and then by song. You can set prices (all ours are free), setup creative commons rights, lyrics, artwork, etc. Will and Billy also recently got their bandcamps setup. Will was able to put up his wonder-making albumian intro into album-world, In Flight. Billy put up some old stuff and a new single, Almost Reversed (which is awesome).

I’ll be working on a different main violentblue.net site, likely just a hub where you can choose between our bandcamp, blogs, and various forms of communication. But for now bandcamp is where it b at!

Go check out our stuff at violentblue.bandcamp.com or just violentblue.net, either way! We only put three songs up at the moment, but all our stuff is free, and we love feedback!

Don't Fall Asleep download

Happy Trails,
Samwise.

Will really liked my LOST theme I did here for my blog, so I told him a while back that I’d make him a Fringe theme for his blog. He’s a bit of a “fair-weather blogger” (all credit and royalties for that just-coined phrase you can give to me personally), but lately he’s been pretty good about posting. He posted his lengthy review of the LOST video game, Via Domus (Will’s right, it’s so terrible), some stuff about McGrimmys, and even some of his favorite videos. With all this text flowing forth from his fingers, I figured it was time to upgrade his theme. You can go check it out at http://www.violentblue.net/willmccarry/! It’s pretty snazzy, and is obviously Fringe-based.

A portion of Will's theme

My mom was having problems putting up posts. She got a fancy new iPad for Christmas and has since been blogging from it about her experiences at work at Hancock Fabric. Some pretty interesting and funny stuff happens there, so go check it out. Thankfully I got her blog all sorted out! You can check her blog out at http://renerodgers.wordpress.com/.

Of my friends I pestered to blog, Billy was my last holdout. I even hacked him up his own awesomely/obnoxiously cool theme to try and coax him into posting. After nearly a year, he finally called me yesterday and asked me for his user info! Horray! He put up his first post today and he tells me he has a few more he’s cooking up, so go check his “Blog of Wonders” out at http://www.violentblue.net/billybacci/

Happy Trails,
Sam.

The original theme

It’s pretty funny and cool looking in my opinion, and it got Will McCarry jealous as to why I “made a cooler theme for Billy than for me! Mine just has a weird cat thing in the header!” That combined with my previous mention of how I wanted to hack some other themes got me actually wanting to do it. So I am.

I’m currently making a Star Trek theme and a theme for Fringe. I decided (after much intense debate) that I’m going to give the Fringe theme to Will. I mean, really, he can have the Fringe theme, I have the LOST theme, and LOST is better. So anyways I’m basing the Fringe theme off a pretty popular theme right now entitled Aqua Blue, and the Star Trek theme off a theme I’ve previously used entitled Inanis Glass.

Aqua Blue for Fringe	Inanis Glass for Star Trek

I see exactly what I want to make each of them, though I have a feeling both of these themes are gonna be kinda hard/confusing to make. I also don’t know exactly how I want to go about implementing the theme, because I kinda want to keep the LOST theme up. If there were a way to select a theme at the homepage or something, that might work. Though that might involve making separate blog directories, and then I’d have to worry about RSS feeds and page views and links matching up and other stuff… blehh we’ll see, I’m only just now starting to work on them. I’ll keep ya updated!



Happy Trails and Namaste,
Sam.

PS – If you’re wondering what happened to that home page project I had going a while ago, well… it’s still being worked out. Once I get some serious free time from homework and classes I’ll be able to really sit down and start dat der coding for it.

For a beginner in web design, a CSS template like that is pretty tricky. So far I’m working on the basic page look in Photoshop. It’s not finished yet, but in the screen shots below you can see the sort of look and feel I’m going for. The multiple shots show examples of different backgrounds the site would have. Obviously I want the backgrounds to look epic, and I’m going to make them all pictures I’ve taken (or else taken of me). (click pics to enlarge)

At the same time, I don’t want to look all cocky and have huge pictures of me show up every time someone loads the page, so I’m really trying to mix them up. Except for the third one, which was too cool-looking to leave out. So that’s it so far, I haven’t even gotten to the coding yet. Any thoughts? Comments? Suggestions? I’m trying to learn on the fly, and this is really a great way to figure this stuff out. Mo’ stuff ta come.



Happy Trails,

Sam.



P.S. – Keyboard Cat is awesome