OVERCLOCKERS DARK THEME:
To use this you will need stylish installed or know how to add style scripts to your browser.

NEW OVERCLOCKERS FAVICON:
There’s a few different ways to install this, if you’ve got firefox and stylish then click here, for chrome click here.

Enjoy

Anyway I’m a little disappointed with the favicon on the web albums page as it’s got a horrible white background so, being the geek I am I decided to pop up a few styles on userstyles.org to rectify the issue:

Transparent favicon | Square favicon | Square and transparent favicon

Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you’ll not, either way you can also check out all of my userstyles here.

So the first instinct was the old oversubscribing argument that for hosting so cheap they must be oversubscribed and hence slow speeds and crappy underpowered servers. However my experience has been quite the opposite. The first thing I have to congratulate them on is the excellent bandwidth and server stability. I’ve had less problems with Dreamhost than with any host I’ve used. There has been the occasional minute of downtime, but I’m hardly a multimillion dollar e-commerce site and these occurrences have been rare. Not to mention that as a continuing customer I still continue to get free rewards like a year’s free domain payment.

Secondly I have to praise their support systems and personnel, they are a light-hearted and helpful bunch who have always been there to help me out with any questions I’ve had quickly and professionally. Also of note is their forum and the wiki they keep up to date and full of helpful information. There are guides there on many aspects of the hosting packages and control panel. It was particularly helpful to me in setting up awstats on my site.

One thing that may put you off is Dreamhost’s custom control panel software, I’ve used cpanel and plesk in the past which are both pretty good systems though Dreamhost’s panel may take a little getting used to it has every feature I’ve used in cpanel and plesk and a lot more to boot. It will even automatically set up all your domain records for using Google apps so getting your own email through Gmail is as easy as possible.

So all in all I have to give Dreamhost a shining review, they seem secure, stable and helpful. Their latest deal is aroud $9 for the same package I’m on at the moment:

I have also added the ability to have an icon at the top left of the posts, using the WordPress ‘custom fields’ feature I can now put whatever little icon I want at the top of my posts, I’ve gone with a few standard ones and will be updating all of my old posts with icons in the near future, but for now all the most recent ones have been updated. What do you think, is this design better?

And finally I think I’ve actually finished fiddling with the X-COM UFOpedia, I just had to keep on adding and adding to it’s features, I added a search function and also optimized the URIs so that instead of /ufopedia/ufo.php?u=000 they new read /ufopedia/skyranger.html The question is, can I be arsed porting these features to the other UFOpedias?

Edit: Also finally figured out how to add little icons to the widgets on the right, I even wrote a little guide.

So after completing the other X-COM games’ UFOpedias I finally found the images to make the X-COM Apocalypse UFOPEDIA, probably the most important because there doesn’t actually appear to be another one online anywhere. Yet again I used more PHP to achieve relative page links by using elseif statements, much easier yet again than crafting each page by hand. Is there anything that PHP can’t do?

Whilst I was coding the new UFOpedia I also came across a strange problem with the USOpedia in which some of the PNG menu images were brighter than others even though they looked the same in my image editors. I tracked the problem down to an apparent core issue with PNGs and browsers, apparently the gamma information that is saved within PNG files is interpreted differently by different browsers, I headed along to this page and righted all the wrongs.

Not a single video transcribed is anywhere near accurate, I think there was one sentence in all of the videos I have checked that were slightly correct. Most of the text is complete gibberish and seemingly completely unrelated to the audio on the video. I assumed that as they are introducing this system to millions and millions of videos it would at least be half competent but I don’t even think that you could refer to it as speech “recognition” it’s more like a complete guess.

It’s and F to Google, please try harder.

Having coded every link to parse the URL parameters I only had to code one page, sure it may have taken close to the same time but it was a lot less tedious and a much better learning experience. It also means that I can update the page to fit into any design I wish with the minimal of effort. I think I will code up a Terror From the Deep USOpedia, should be pretty easy now I’ve basically got all the code.

Edit: USOpedia is now online too: Terror from the Deep UFOpedia, I also added an index page which displays all the images on one page like so. Maybe someone will find it useful, probably not.

It took a little while to perfect everything, and as usual I kept adding bits when I thought I had finished it already, not to mention the ballache I had trying to get it to look exactly the same in IE as it does in FF. Probably completely fails in other browsers but FF and IE are basically everyone. The other issue it took a while to get around was the transparent background as usually it makes what’s in the cell transparent too I used transparent PNGs to get the effect of transparency without coding it in HTML.

I also added the ability to look at a sprite on any background colour of your choice, thise outputs a different page with just the transparent image and the image on top of the HEX colour of your choice

Before: 105Kb

After: 32Kb

Mobile Blog:

As you can see in the first screenshot 2 images can barely even fit on the screen, after streamlining and making the thumbnails quite minuscule 32 images can easily fit on screen at once, I also upped the amount of images shown per page so there’s less clicking of links. I also streamlined the image page so that images fit easier and it is easier to get a link to the image to post elsewhere. Of course it still retains (and utilises) the ability for me to resize the images however I need to and to do a bunch of other image manipulation too.

I can’t leave without mentioning the last screnshot, which is of the mobile version of this blog, it’s clean, neat and fast. I used to use a more flashy version but I think it was a little cumbersome. This version just puts the posts ups there with no superfluous crap.

As usual it’s unlikely anyone will even visit the site on a mobile device except me, and as usual it’s mainly an exercise to teach myself more. But of course I will be using it all the time to continue the tradition of posting random images.