Keri Henare

I've been using Steve Smith's Tiger Admin(istration) Plugin for WordPress for quite some time now. Basically it just restyles the WordPress Admin Panel to look a lot nicer. I recently managed to get my grubby little fingers on the Tiger Admin 3.0 Beta. (By which I mean that I got it from Steve, not illegally.) I'm sworn to secracy so I can't give away too much but it looks very, very sexy. Expect huge changes which make for a better product. Keep visiting Ordered List to get a hold of your own copy when it releases.

Yes it's one of those double posting days. I've told you what the current status of the website is but what about me. A lot has been happening in the real world too.

When last we left our hero... Well I wasn't suspended over a large vat of lava at the mercy of the Joker. I was however on the other side of the world back home in New Zealand (forget Disneyland, New Zealand is the greatest place on Earth). I've travelled literally about as far from home as possible without leaving the planet. I'm now living in Preston (Lancashire, United Kingdom) with my beautiful girlfriend Carmen.

The weather is terrible here. For the first time in my life I own gloves, a scarf and an umbrella. Not to mention that when I try to have a Christmas Barbeque in shorts, a singlet and jandals I'm guessing that I'll likely freeze to death.

What, drawn, and talk of trends! I hate the word, As I hate hell, all Montagues, and thee. Well OK a little over the top, but Shakespeare sure knew how to rant. On one of my all-too-frequent visits to SimpleBits I noticed that Dan had decided to tear things apart and do a live redesign. This approach leaves the website styleless or incomplete in the process. Most people choose to develop the website in private, then through slight of hand replace the old site with the new one seamlessly. Some wish to criticize this approach and others wish to follow the trend. It reminds me of computer game release delays. Everybody complains when a game is delayed but, when John Carmack delayed Doom 3 by 12 months there was no complaint. You don't doubt someone like John Carmack and you don't doubt someone like Dan Cederholm.

Soon there were plenty of people following the trend. I had been considering this approach for quite some time but was unsure if I should. Then I thought, if Dan can do it so can I. But now it's a trend, I have a natural opposition to trends. I decided that I should put aside my feud with trends and do as I intended for the sake of the website.

Like Bryan Veloso and Mark Hadley, I'm using the Sandbox theme as a starting point as it is semantically sound and already comes with built-in Microformat support. It's likely that I will completely rewrite the markup though as I'm rather particular about my semantics.

There are some changes behind the scenes as well with Wordpress being updated, plugins changed, file structure changed, etc. So expect breaks to links and pages for a little while as I go through and fix them. The redesign will take place over a longish period of time and I'll try to blog about all aspects of the change. So basically my CSS Refresh is back on.

When I first got my MacBook I installed Transmission to look after my BitTorrent downloads but found it a little too lightweight for what I wanted. Bit Sticks has to get an honorable mention as a cool widget for for downloading torrents. Runner up was BitRocket but the top podium spot has to go to Xtorrent.

Xtorrent is made by the same team as the Inquisitor plugin for Safari. It is feature rich with a great search tool, organisation features and iTunes integration. Now if it would only hurry up and download my Ubunutu image for Parallels.

More than anything, this post is just about claiming my blog on Technorati. I don't really use Technorati, as exciting as it's release was it's just never really clicked with me. Apparently I don't visit the site nearly as much as I should as I never re-claimed the blog after switching domains last year. So while I'm at it, here's a chance for everyone to tell me what's so great about Technorati. So what is it?