Progress is currently slow but I’m hoping today will give me the opportunity to make a big dent in my workload. I have found that my Uni work has been taking a back seat due to me exploring some online services and sites. The main one being Entrecard:

Entrecard is a traffic exchange site for blogs. You add a widget on your site, like over at my technology and gadget blog and when you visit someone else blog you can drop your card their. That person will see you have dropped your card and see it in their inbox, they may wish to return the favour and visit your blog and drop their card. It is basically used to create more traffic to your blog and I found that while I was going about dropping cards I found more and more blogs I would like to read. Although it is a great way to increase traffic and get to know other bloggers and other sites you might not have found otherwise it does take a considerable amount of time from my day, distracting from my Uni work.

Today I have decided to leave entrecard well alone and get some more work done. After this evenings class there will only be 2 weeks of Uni remaining this semester. Time to knuckle down and get the work out of the way before the Summer sun arrives.

I do a lot of searching the net and often visit places I think are great and then come across somewhere else and totally forgot about some places. My forgetfulness has lead to the Internet Student top sites. When I find a top site, I will write it down here in my blog where I am keeping other random notes etc for my studies in web design.

So here is my first entry, a design blog called “stylish web design”. The site is visually great from when you first look at it. It looks very web 2.0 without going overboard on all the typical traits. I read the top post and although it wasn’t of great interest to me the writing style caught my eye as something that I could easily get along with. It was then when I spotted a post that did grab my attention, the post was on the spyware community. Its always good to have information available that explains things in a way you can understand. I also read a great post on user accounts and saw plenty more I will be going back to read. Mainly on the programming topics.

I will be adding to this list, and I guess posting the entire list in some place sometime soon. More details will follow. If you had 1 site you could tell someone about as being a great resource of info, which would it be?

May the 1st, 1 month away from turning 26, 10 days away from the due date of my baby boy and 2 days away from the weekend.

I guess I’ll carry on this random post my sharing a few things I’ve read on the various blogs, forums and other site on the net today.

Google PR Update - It looks as if Google are in the middle of updating the PR that you will see if you have the Google Toolbar installed. There seems to be a lot of pages fluctuating and some people gaining page rank 5 from page rank 0. Still no movement for me, have you checked your Page Rank (PR)?

GTA IV Problems - Rockstar games have recently released one of the most anticipated games ever only to have customers complaining that after the very first cut scene the game freezes. This seems to be effacing Xbox 360 and PS3 users, (although not all of them). I have also read a rumor that it would take an hour to drive (in the game, obviously) from one side of the GTA IV map to the other. Would be interesting if it turns out to be true.

Twitter - This seems to be the next big thing in social networking. I have seen a lot of bloggers using it and a lot of posts about it. Are you a user? Watch out for a Phil Benwell joins Twitter post.

Oh and I have a few assignments to complete - best stop wasting time and get down to some work.

Anybody else seem to do anything but what they should really be doing?

I was searching the Internet the other day and I came across a tool that will help me no end in designing web sites. The tool is called Absolute Color Picker, what it does is run from the desktop and say you are searching the net and you see a colour that you really want to use, all you do is open Absolute Color Picker, click and drag the box over the colour you like and release and it will in turn give you the RGB and Hex values of the colour.

Here’s a screen shot of the program identifying the wordpress admin theme colour:

I think the title sums it up really. Week 9 of the Practical Web Page Development module had us looking at Content Management Systems (CMS). In its simplest form a CMS is a system that not only splits structure and presentation, like XHTML and CSS but splits the page further into sort of a template where each section can be added separately.

Wordpress, which I run this blog of is a blogging focused CMS. It allows users with not experience of XHTML to publish content on the web, saying that having the knowledge makes the experience of using such a platform much more flexible and rewarding.

We looked at a fair few alternatives from “through the web” CMS, like wordpress, drupal and webgui to Desktop based software like Adobe Contribute.

It was one of those sessions that covered what it needed to then went off onto a debate about technology and science, about people learning to only have to unlearn certain things in order to advance. Where else can you go for a IT related debate including references to Shakespeare, Physics, Atoms and the schooling of 9 year olds?

Another brief update but I will try and write something else later in the week to give more details about what we discussed.