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What is The Matweex?

I doubt most of the people who’ve found my blog realise the rotates.org history of pretty-but-useless splash pages. Essentially, the original purpose of this site was to display my current ‘cool thing’ that I’d created. It’s actually a huge passion of mine and great fun to knock something up in a few hours that looks really nice and is uncomplicated and pretty much pointless. I suppose that fits the bill of ‘art’ – thankfully I’m not so pretentious that I’d label it under that banner!

Anyway, after a major hiatus, I’ve created a new ‘splash page’ (for that is all that it is, and will likely ever be) for the online gaming clan I’ve been a member of for 10 years:

www.clan-sqs.com

Really, there’s nothing to discover, it’s exactly what you see. I’d love to have the patience and the skill to work on something akin to Windosill but alas it doesn’t slake my desire to see instant results. If you’d like to see some of my previous splash screens, you can view them here.

I hope you enjoy these little bits of my history – I’m hugely proud of all of them, and they serve to really show how I’ve come along in my profession as a web designer.

P.S. I’ve spent the night drinking Leffe Blonde and listening to Devin Townsend – Ziltoid the Omniscient – awesome 😀

This is the best news I’ve heard all year…

After several attempts to buy an iPhone off O2’s blatantly broken site I finally have one of these beautiful devices. Oh and I’m updating the blog from it as we speak! 🙂

Winnar!

Appropriately, I’ve decided to add some Flash to the header (which is likely to become more and more resource intensive as I meddle inexorably with its source) which is also appropriately melded in with CSS and Javascript via the nifty new colour changer…

Yes that’s right, you can now change the colour of my blog! Far be it for me as a designer to impose my will upon you and make you put up with my dodgy colours – choose your own dodgy colours instead!*

I’ll include the jQuery (and jQueryUI) source for the colour changer soon when I’ve cleaned up the selectors and made them a bit more portable.

… or at least it will be – at the moment it’s rather drab (in a very Lew sort of way).

So, I’ve sorted myself a server out, I’ve created a blog on it (harnessing my new love of WordPress) and now I’m itching to roll out some of the projects I’ve been working on.

Some of the stuff that will be making its way here has already been seen by my crack team of testers – also known as #SQS – and includes such delights as:

• Muster – a game management system (GMS, I like it!) which allows easy creation and sign-up to online games.
• Clarity – a PHP/Flash-based automatic gallery creation system that runs without a database, provides intelligent caching and reads and displays EXIF data to boot.
• Caboodle – the back-end PHP/JSON-based engine that drives Clarity.
• Chaos Enhanced – my big project, an online-enabled, Flash-based update to the cult classic game Chaos: The Battle of the Wizards which will use the whole spectrum (ho ho) of my abilities to realise.

Anyway, enough chatting – I better get to work!

The thrashery is about to begin…