Although it may not be the quickest way to find out alternative words, this certainly is an interesting way of looking up words - visualthesaurus.com

To push this further, it would be great to have more information available about these words when you click on them e.g. Variations of word, Word in context, Origin of the word, Evolution of the word, Translations of word. All of which open up as a sub cloud (maybe different colour or different level).

I think this design method would also work well with the synonyms within word processing software... I can see it nicely greying out the page content to then show a word cloud.

It would also be interesting if you had a search facility with an 3D word cloud similar to this, however having panels either side of the screen showing visual information about that word e.g. go to wolframalpha.com and type in ‘Brazil’. Once set up you could the personalise this for say Lawyers or Mechanics to then show the relevant info towards their field (buzz words included).

We have always made observational drawings of things around us... Aaron Koblin is a prime example how we are creating artwork from the new digital mediums that are around us.

Watch this video and visit some of his websites for some of the digital art that he has created with the help of miscellaneous people around the world.

This is an interesting TED talk about how we doodle.

Interesting ideas about how you can use it for learning information.

Great lecture by Steve Jobs, in name of his resignation.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_jobs_how_to_live_before_you_die.html

Currently the site has a very structured style, with a slight variation between the site and the blog.

Often there is a big divide between a blog and a ‘normal’ website, however I want to merge the two together and allow user interaction to take control.  I have always been very interested in Zen Garden, in that you can have the same content, but style it towards different users.

With the integration of tags, my aim isn’t to change not just the background images/ colours, but to enable the user to change the layout and content they wish to see.

Incorporating with the tags and various cookies/ logins, I could potentially create a site that is completely dynamic so that the user can choose what to see e.g. 

• Showing only blog and about pages
• Only showing new and updated pages from the site, and display them in a listing format
• Show the whole website as images rather than text/ titles to enable a more visual experience of my background / work.
• Showing every page/ item on the site as a boxed image… and once that box is pressed it will then enable them to choose what material they want to pull out e.g. text content, associated images, pages/ blogs of the same interest
• On the slightly fun side, I could make a tetras game, so items of content fall down from the top in different shapes. Therefore completely destroying any standard format of reading the web pages. 

Over all I will say that I am not going to chuck the user on their heads and expect them to view the page upside down… I want to the keep the site as simple as possible and make the content speak, rather than turning the web content into an optical illusion.

Sometimes its nice to experiment with different methods of displaying images e.g. Flash/ JavaScript sliders on the home page, rotating banners and animated menu’s. However I often find that this just confuses the user, and therefore makes it harder to get the content they want out of the site. Therefore I am going to try my hardest to make these alterations without confusing the user.

Anyway… I’m going to getting back to work now. I will make another post in the near future about any updates / interests. 

Some of my goals are larger than others. The smaller goals starting at the top and bigger, long term goals towards the bottom.

• Ability to download my flash code for free
• Drop downs menus for the top navigation, including pictures
• Add Iframe or RSS feeds of items that I’m interested in, within the homepage text
• More SEO tweaks e.g. h2 tags for box list items, dynamic lists of sub page links in footer, automation of image name creation with folder structures accordingly
• Currently I have an image uploader which can create 3 different thumb images. It can choose weather to use landscape, portrait or exact size automatically… however, I need to get some flash or JAVA based application to be able to upload multiple images/ media.
• CMS flash file uploader which will have CMS width, height and importantly CMS background colour in order to change the CSS styling for the .swf background.
• Search facility that will bring up the page title, page into and small thumb nail for each article in real time (AJax)
• Once happy, I will give the CMS code away for free

I have also a long term plan for tagging which will be featured in the next blog post.

After playing around with Wordpress/ Joomla I got quite frustrated with the functionality. I found that some things were very easy to create, however other things were near to impossible. 

My background is within graphic design and I haven’t really had the chance to get my hands dirty with some php/mySQL and JavaScript. 

It therefore seemed like the perfect opportunity to start right from scratch and create my own CMS system.

My aim was to create:

• Content managed pages (with tinyMCE) with infinite parent/child levels.
• Implementing an image cropper that would resize and create various number of thumb images
• To create a section that would enable the user to view flash files so that they can create their own work. 
• Create a separate blog section which will take a more free flowing format.
• The ability to update/ edit all of the above
• Automated SEO friendly URLS, title tags, meta tags 
• W3 Compliant
• Cross browser supported (not mobile just yet)

So how’s it gone?

Well I have 95% of this done so far and overall quite happy with it so far. 

Getting the navigation and SEO URLS were defiantly a challenge however, overall I have very much enjoyed it!

I am still finding some IE6 issues, however I will readdress this when I get more content up on the website.

Also things such as print view and flash replacements still need to be done… once again I will look into this once the main body of work is on the site to then fine tune.