While I love the Redoable skin, I started to get a little bored with the shades-of-white on gray look. So I decided to liven it up by introducing some shades of orange

Anyway, to match this scheme, I also re-worked the wandering.net logo!

Since the last update, I’ve been using Adobe Photoshop alot more, and while still no expert, now do most of my graphics work in it. The logo is a simple Web 2.0 style, using a color gradient, outer glow and below-the-line reflection. I’m making the PSD (Photoshop source file) available, if anyone wants to see how it’s done: wandering.net Web 2.0 logo

If you haven’t heard by now, there’s a new search engine that’s getting abit of press. ChaCha Serach, is one of the newer and more popular kids of the block. The catch-cry is that the searches are powered by humans!

Basically it’s like a normal search engine (presumably using google-like relevance ranking) but after you get the results, you have an option of asking a “guide” for help. Which, then spawns a chat-window and the human-expert helps you find the answer you need. Further details of how the guide system works can be found here.

There are invitations floating around the Internet, for people to sign up as a guide. I don’t have the details, but I’m led to believe that guides do the work out of the goodness of their hearts (i.e. they don’t get paid) and can do it on their own schedule (which presumably means there’s alot of guides for each topic to ensure adequate coverage). I haven’t actually used the ChaCha guide system yet… I feel guilty to call them up just so that I can “test their value”.

For the record, most people are classifying ChaCha as a Web 2.0 Search Engine. Although, going back to human help would seem to make it a Web 0.5 Search Engine

For a tech-geek, I have to admit… I don’t have a MySpace account and wouldn’t know what to do with it if I did. I don’t understand the need to make “friends” with total strangers (I guess I was taught too well to “never speak to strangers!”).

As if I wasn’t far enough behind the “hip” crowd, along comes Twitter. The growth of Twitter is astounding, everyone’s talking about it, and everyone mother is throwing out invitations to join. If I were to summarize Twitter, it’s basically a public Instant Messenging service. The object (so it seems to me) is to put short sentences regularly and often about what you’re doing at any point of the day. I think it’s something to do with letting people know what you’re up to, although I haven’t quite figured out what other people are supposed to do with that information. Start a private conversation because you both frequent the same pizza joint? Try to meet you at some location? Stalk you? I just don’t get it

Anyway, this is an interesting picture that describes how Twitter fits into the grand scheme of technological-connectedness (yes I just made that term up).

While my view is in a miniscule minority, I am not alone. Other like-minded people (who explain Twitter much better) are: passionate and blyberg.

Looking wandering.net’s previous “traditional’ Web2.0 style, I decided it was a little too bland for me. It was basically comprised of 1 color with multiple levels of shading, creating a clear-white reflection.

I wanted to make the shading a slightly different color. To all intents, I wanted a “real-world” relfection with color bouncing off a third object. Here you’ll see the a section of where the logo as it appears on this blog…

Basically it’s the purple logo, with a shading gradient mixed with yellow. So the yellow bar below the logo looks like it’s reflecting against (and mixing with) the purple logo. At least that’s what it looks like to me

Here are Photoshop and PaintShopPro format source files for those who would like to play with creating their own logo using my modified/evolved Web 2.0-style.
Photoshop format
PaintShopPro format

I bought Adobe Photoshop CS2 (the latest version) a few months back, tried to use it, but am still sticking with PaintShopPro. I can’t seem to find anything in Photoshop that PaintShopPro doesn’t provide. Oh well, that was $300+ well spent

I decided to freshen up the look for this blog.

I’ve noticed that there’s a move away from light-backgrounds to what I would consider a “dark polished” look. After a detailed serach, I came across Dean J Robinson’s Redoable skin for Wordpress 2.x.

You might also notice that I am now using a new wandering.net logo. This is my “evolution” of the standard Web 2.0 reflection graphics, creating a small “bright” area and a shaded gradient for the rest of the logo.

Oh, and finally managed to get the tag-cloud working again, thanks to Dean’s Ultimate Category Cloud 2.0 plugin.