Welcome back Ed Price
A short rundown of why the site design has changed, and what to expect in the coming months from my, hopefully re-energised, blog
So, welcome back Ed Price Is Hungry. It's true that there's been not one update since 2009 dawned, and some of the blame for that has to lie at the feet of my previously uninspiring design. It had some pretty colours, but it didn't honestly represent the kind of image I wanted to get across.
This new look - which shall sensibly be named 'Ed Price' (though not after sporting journalist Ed Price) - comes a lot closer to, well, making me feel at home in my own blog. At first glance it *does* look a bit Twilight-y, and for that I apologise, but then again I don't claim to be striving for originality in my designs - just something that makes me feel good when I look at my own web page.
My photoshop skills are a little on the wane, so the graphics aren't quite up to the standards I was after. However, I would rather spend my time creating content for this blog than dithering over visual details. I think the graphics are good enough for you to 'get the picture'. It's perhaps a little too bloody - I was aiming for a sort of blood/ink ambiguity but got carried away by the fact that deep red is much more aesthetically appealing to me that dark grey. Also, it was really hard to create an effective image of black ink pooled on a black background, and I really had my heart set on a great big black banner...
Incidentally I'm trying out a web app called Write Or Die to help me put together this missive. I've somewhat rashly set myself the task of writing 600 words in 15 minutes. As the counter ticks down towards 7 mins and my word count hovers under 300 words I realise I may have bitten off more than I chew, despite my tendency towards rambling on aimlessly once my fingers hit the keys.
Still it's certainly keeping my on my game, at least as far as this quarter hour and these 600 or so words go. I plan to try this out with some of my creative writing, but using perhaps a less masochistic target and timeframe.
So - now that I've more or less contracted myself to produce more content for this blog, what sort of things can you look forward to? Well, there'll be a few PHP, MySQL and general web design tutorials. Over the past few years my confidence in my coding skills has grown to the point where I feel I can legitimately share some tips and tricks with the wider community - at the same time I'm always keen to have those tips and tricks improved up, so feedback will always be welcome.
I'm also planning to do more creative writing this year. I've recently published a short story in ebook form on smashwords, and hope to do more. I intend to write a handful of short stories and, if all goes well, write a significant chunk of my novel throughout the year. I intend to publish the short stories for free, and upload some extracts of the novel here. Once the novel's finished I shall most likely look to something like Amazon's createspace to publish it - this is assuming that I can't get any agents or traditional publishers interested.
Also, even though I seem to find little time to read books or watch films, I hope to continue publishing reviews. If nothing else I do watch a lot of TV shows - most of them pretty good - so some thoughts and opinions on those may well be forthcoming.
Hey whaddya know - I just hit 600 words with more than a minute to go - and that's including going back to correct errors. And that means, thankfully, it's time for me to shut up!
