I’ve always used my blog as platform to share useful information with others, get feedback from comments that were posted and mails I’ve received. I’ve slowly built it up step by step from the 20th of March 2005 with a pretty rudimentary and early version of WordPress at that time. Due to my interest and work within the open-source area around Linux and the GNOME Desktop at that time, I had pretty much content I loved to share with other people interested in those topics.

By the time passing, the content of my blog also changed. I slowly moved away from Linux as an desktop operating system, towards using Mac OS X and its tools. Meanwhile, I took my own know-how about the Linux operating system on a higher level by starting to use it heavily as server-side operating system. My blog posts became from “Hey, check out this desktop notifications daemon I’ve written! There wasn’t anything like that on the GNOME desktop, now there is!” and “Oh look, this would be a great idea for a Sync-Application on the GNOME Desktop” to information sources for setting up a Linux instance on Amazon’s EC2 service, stripping down Ubuntu Servers to several hundreds Megabytes and setting up a Debian server that provides SSL-secured WebDAV with LDAP as authentication back-end. So instead of sharing useful information for Linux desktop users, I transited to share information about my experiences and creations on the Mac.

Through the years, my blog grew bigger and bigger, with more and more content. I was pretty happy with how it worked out, except of one part: The design. “devilx.net” never really had an unique identity shaped by its own design. I switched the look & feel several times, using freely available WordPress themes with smaller changes hacked by myself. For the pure sake of information sharing it worked out, but due to that my blog never really got its “own face”. I wanted to change this fact for like ever already, unfortunately I never really had the time and – what’s even more important – the muse for doing so. Now, after all those years – and especially after the last few months, in which the majority of returning visitors probably thought of my blog being another victim by the Twitter, Facebook and other Web 2.0 platforms’ distraction-hype – I decided to take the time, search for at least some creative inspiration and replace my yet-another-downloaded-WordPress-theme with something made with my own hands, giving my blog its own shape and style.

My abilities in the matter of creativity and design clearly aren’t the best, but I thought like… “Man, 2011 is coming, you just have to!”. So I turned on Pixelmator in full-screen mode and started drawing. I kinda had like dozens of concepts, drafts and even several PXM-to-XHTML implementations, but none really was something I’d like to have running on the internet, with my name on it. Meanwhile, I was testing Posterous, one of those Web 2.0-“we can streamline your blog with your Twitter account, your Facebook profile and the two-hundred-forty-nine other platforms you might be using”-services, which should have been the second update for today actually. I really liked it and I liked their theme-templating. I gave it a first shot, by exporting my WordPress’ database and importing it into Posterous.

The result unfortunately was… well… pure fail. It stopped at twenty-one out of several hundreds and didn’t advance for a couple of hours. After contacting the Posterous support, I got the advice to first clean up my WordPress’ spam-queue, re-export the database and try it again. So I did and finally the import ran through pretty quick. Curiously I checked out how the imported Posterous site looked, since I didn’t thought of for example comments being also imported. For my surprise, they were. Unfortunately, the import was incomplete. Some why three-fourth of my WordPress blog posts were missing. Again, I contacted the support which answered after two days, telling me that they’re on the problem and can’t provide me any help yet.

While I was waiting for a solution to my problem, I already translated one of my drafts into Posterous’ templating format – but soon I kind of realized, that Posterous isn’t pretty much what I needed. It works for many people and it surely is a very cool service, free of charge! But for me, as someone that’s pretty much into technology it’s just way too inflexible and closed. For example, I have found a way to import my WordPress’ data, but none to export the Posterous data. I guess, hacking through the API is probably the only way to do so. Also, Posterous’ content delivery isn’t performing really well, at least when requested from Germany. I built in some Base64-encoded images and a @font-face (because Posterous does not provide you any space for actually uploading pictures, which is why you would need to pay for some webspace or at least an Amazon S3 account anyway) and as soon as they were live, the page’s loading-speed decreased to a quite ugly value. Also I was unsatisfied with the template-editor/-previewer Posterous provides – it is really slow and for me (as web developer et al.) a pure pain to use.

Please don’t get me wrong – as I’ve said before, Posterous (as well as Tumblr and all those other services) really is something great, especially when you’re into writing quick shouts most of the time. But for me, as a person who likes the ability to extend the platform for sharing information to fit my (growing) needs, Posterous and others simply are too limited.

However, after realizing that I won’t give up my WordPress from one day to another (and by that actually had no second update to share with you today while I’m still sticking with the plural “updates” in this article’s first few lines), I’ve re-started concept-creation, drafting, mocking and all that stuff professional designers probably do the whole day. In the end, I came up with a pretty neat design that fits my taste pretty good and isn’t too exaggerated or improper to be used on a blog: It’s the design you’ve been staring at for the last, well, I would say fifteen minutes, if I haven’t already talked you into sleep.

“Okay, so your blog isn’t dead yet, huh?” – Yepp, that’s right (and that is the second update, hah!). I’m really looking forward to the next years of blogging, sharing and communicating with others. In the past several years digital life changed a lot and blogs became more and more irrelevant thanks to the possibility of fast and instant exchange with each other through Twitter for example. Unfortunately people sometimes tend to forget, that all those tweets would be nothing without the information behind them, that contains more than only 140 characters.

Having said this, I wish everyone a nice evening (CET UTC+1) and furthermore a great year in 2011. Have fun!

And yet another, brand-new Bluebird Theme: Plain.

It’s simple.

It’s light.

It’s Plain!

Download plain.bbtheme

UPDATE: Plain v2!
… just as requested.

Plain v2

Download: plain-v2.bbtheme

Indie Bluebird Theme

Indie-Compact Bluebird Theme

Indie-Mini Bluebird Theme

Three brand-new Themes for Bluebird: Indie, Indie-Compact & Indie-Mini.

Themes were inspired by the Indie Labs.

Download the Indie-Collection!

Sleek Bluebird Theme

Yay! Yet another cool, new theme for one of best Twitter-clients available on the OS X platform: Bluebird. This time, the theme called Sleek is inspired by 2Smoke’s Silent Night Theme for Bowtie, what’s one of the best Bowtie themes available out there btw.

The theme itself is 100% CSS without any pictures besides the background-image. That one’s the same I’ve also already used within my HUD and HUD-Mini themes. I call this environmental-friendly recycling.

I made use of the cool features Safari already implements, like for example round corners or gradients. It’s just nice to see how much can be done using these features – at this point, the CSS hacks replaced any kind of image plus the whole work needed to make gradient-images in HTML/CSS scalable. A very cool time- and work-saver!

However, I hope you enjoy this new Bluebird theme!

Download sleek.bbtheme

HUD-Mini Bluebird Theme

As requested, I’ve just “scaled down” my “HUD” Bluebird Theme to make it more minimal and small-sized. The theme now is less padded and doesn’t eat-up that much space within your Bluebird as before.

I hope you like HUD-Mini.

Enjoy!

Download hud-mini.bbtheme

HUD Theme for Bluebird

Some weeks passed since I’ve released my last Bluebird Theme called “Refresh”, mostly because of the lack of time to think of other cool and new designs, but “luckily” today it was a pretty crappy-weather-sunday, therefor I can now just announce a new Theme called “HUD” for the great Bluebird Twitter-client!

The Theme itself is based on and made with Pixelmator ( / Pixelmator’s HUD user-interface) and additionally inspired by Delta909′s Summer Wallpaper. Of course, as usual you can replace the background if you should not like it by opening the bbtheme’s package-content, navigating to /img/ and replace the background.png.

I hope you enjoy my new Bluebird theme!

Download hud.bbtheme

//comment: I’ve just updated the theme to use text-shadows. Enjoy!

Silence. For no reason.

Enjoy!

Refresh Bluebird Theme

A fresh theme a day. My latest creation for the Bluebird Twitter-client is called “Refresh” – a refreshingly new theme!

This time it’s no modification or port of another app’s theme to Bluebird. Instead, it’s a new theme from scratch. The theme is held in a dark mood combined with orange and sky-blue colorized elements. For the background picture I made use of zygat3r’s Dark Wood wallpaper, which I’ve modified a bit in order to still look good if the window would ever get too big and the image’s borders would be visible.

The icons for the individual tweets are the very same icons from Mark Jardine’s “Mars Metallic” theme, with the difference that I’ve inverted their colors to make them fit better into my theme.

The tweets use rounded corners and all kind of transition effects provided by the WebKit CSS-properties. I actually also inserted a property for making the avatar images have rounded corners, but as it seems either Bluebird or WebKit itself doesn’t honor this at that point.

However, the theme is written using Bluebird’s new theme-definitions and should be compatible with Bluebird 1.0 Beta 1.1 and (hopefully) later.

Enjoy!

Download refresh.bbtheme

Minimalistic Tickets Bluebird Theme

Yet, another Bluebird theme.

“Minimalistic Tickets”, like the name already says, is a minimal theme where each tweet is being displayed as a “ticket”. The idea came me, when stumbling through the currently existing themes and noticing that each one has something in common: They all go from the top to the bottom. There was none, where the tweets are right next to each other, side by side.

The theme is pretty much just a demonstration of how new themes could look like. “Breaking the ice”. Trying out something new.

Whatever. I hope you enjoy!

Download minimalistictickets.bbtheme

Sicker Style Bluebird Theme

And yet again, a new theme for the Bluebird Twitter-Client. This time I didn’t just modify an existing one – I took two themes and mashed them up, heh. I took the Bubbling Citrus Bluebird Theme by Sarah Tan and Laurent Baumann and took the Adium Message-Style “Sticker Style” by “bobjr” and threw both in a mixer, heh.

This is one of my first tries to create a bubble-style Bluebird theme. The theme as you can see it on the screenshots uses the DIN Medium font, which is a commercial font. The font is not included in this theme, but it uses alternatives as a replacement, if the font can’t be found on the system.

However, I hope you like the theme. Enjoy!

Download stickerstyle.bbtheme

The GNOME Shell redefines user interactions with the GNOME desktop. In particular, it offers new paradigms for launching applications, accessing documents, and organizing open windows in GNOME. Later, it will introduce a new applets eco-system and offer new solutions for other desktop features, such as notifications and contacts management. The GNOME Shell is intended to replace functions handled by the GNOME Panel and by the window manager in previous versions of GNOME. The GNOME Shell has rich visual effects enabled by new graphical technologies.

So, the GNOME Shell is actually a more lickable and not-so-crappy version of what we can remember from old Windows 98/2k times, usually called something like Talisman Desktop or similar. Those applications were replacements for the actual explorer.exe binary, which hooked into the system logon and tried to build a better looking and feeling, theme-able interface for the end-user. Though, these applications never really found a market niche, last but not least because of the mostly exorbitant pricing policy. A few time later these add-ons were pushed away by Windows XP’s own theming abilities.

However, as it seems the GNOME community now starting writing a similar add-on for the GNOME desktop, using features provided by modern soft- and especially hardware. The whole Shell is hardware accelerated and seems to be working pretty fluent – not only because it’s exceptionally not written in Python or any other sick scripting language. Instead, it makes use of native C code, combined with Clutter and hooks for JavaScript plug-ins.

From what I’ve seen so far, it’s not that bad and finally seems to really be an add-on that integrates into the desktop, instead of being just another application which I need to bound somehow into my GNOME desktop. My colleague just quickly compiled and ran it and at least on his nVidia accelerated hardware it worked out pretty smooth and at least while testing it didn’t crash once.

It could become a pretty cool and promising project, if the people running it will find somebody concerned about UI-Design/-Usability and maybe some graphical artists, too and maybe make it look more “stable”. At the moment, the whole ‘shell’ still looks pretty half-cooked, but of course, they’re just at their beginning. So let’s wait and see – or better even contribute and change!

A "chrome look" Valvecover bought on eBay.

Around half a year ago, I bought a customized valvecover for my CRX on eBay. The guy was selling these things like as he would mass-produce them. However, on the picture it looked shiny and chrome, but when it arrived I thought Ugh, wtf? – it was pretty ugly and that “chrome look” described by the seller looked more like a plastic-toy you get when buying a Happy Meal at some big fastfood franchise. On monday I decided to finally do something with it, so I went to the Honda dealer and ordered a new valvecover sealing with overnight express. Unfortunatelly I missed the 12 o’clock deadline, so it took two days instead of one. Still the express was faster than waiting six or more days for it.

The "chrome look" Valvecover after I sandblasted it, heh.

However, today I went to that friend’s of mine garage and sandblasted the whole chrome paint off the cover. After that, I was thinking of what color to paint the valvecover…. yellow? Green? Blue? Black? White? But after a while I decided to take red. Red is a pretty cool color combined to the black of my car/my underhood and the chrome of my strut bar. So, together with that friend of mine I went to a local car shop and bought a can of heat-proof red paint. That stuff is pretty expensive, by the way, but it doesn’t look that bad. At least while it was still wet, it had a nice glossy look which I hope it keeps after it dried. Now I’m going to let it dry until friday and then I’ll start painting the Honda emblem/text.

My shiny, red-painted Valvecover.

I was thinking of painting it either black or white, though I’m not yet sure on how to do that. I guess I’ll sand off the red paint from the logo and then use a tiny little brush to handpaint the letters.

Anyway, after it’s all done I will polish the valvecover and mount it onto my CRX’s engine. I’m really excited of how it will look. I’ll handwash the underhood and make some pictures of it as soon as it’s in. So far, so good.

Download: Lastfm.tar.gz

Hm… maybe anyone’s interessted in writing one? Too bad I’m not a snake-charmer, heh…