The Back-story

As I’ve probably already mentioned to some people who read this blog, Opera were sending out posters and badges of their logo because they want people to take pictures of it in random places throughout the world. I thought I may as well comment and see if they chose me to be one of the 50 people they were going to send them to. Well, I was – the next day I received a friendly message on My Opera asking me for shipping details.

Today I received an odd shaped box in the mail:

What was in the Box?

After opening the box and seeing a big red “O” badge fall out I realised instantly what it was (even though it said on the side of the box it was from Opera – I didn’t realise this until later…).

They have sent me (and 49 other people) these gifts:

It contained:

• 2 fairly large double sided posters of the Opera logo.
• 2 Opera pens
• 2 Opera badges
• 2 Opera Stickers
• A small “thank you” note

I knew they were planning on sending a poster and a badge (I assumed it would be one of each), nice to see they sent a little extra too! The thank you note topped the scale though. Either someone sat and wrote out 50 of those, or they only did a few and got bored (and I was one of the people who got one), I haven’t seen anyone else who posted about getting their posters say they got a thank you note (but I really doubt I was the only one…). Here’s a close up of what it says:

And here are close ups of the other things (in-case anyone really wants to see them):

What am I going to do with them?

Well, that’s a good question. I’ll have to go take some pics somewhere with the logo to send back to them like they wanted, but where I’m not really sure – any feasible/creative suggestions?

The other poster will be put up on the wall near my computer. The stickers I’m at a loss of what to do with (I don’t really like sticking stickers to anything of mine, and sticking them to random people might be frowned upon). The pens will be used as pens (surprisingly enough), and the badges, well, one will go on my laptop case, the other I haven’t really thought about. Any suggestions on that are welcome too.

This month has had it’s ups and downs but all in all a pretty interesting month.

Freelance Work

Colour-Coded – www.colour-coded.com

Colour-Coded is a video game that was designed and developed by a group of students at my University (the University of Abertay, Dundee) as their entry into the 2009 Dare to be Digital competition. They went on to win the competition and become nominated for the 2010 “Ones to Watch” award from BAFTA Scotland (As far as I know it’s not until next month – so they don’t know if they have won that yet or not).

I re-coded the website for them as a favour because their old code was just generated from dreamweaver and they wanted it coded properly. I did tweak a few things on the site to make it look and function better – e.g. adding rollovers to the menu and embedding the flash “create your own explorer” in the layout (previously it was just linked to the .swf file). I also optimised the main images on the layout for the web because previously they were rather large .PNG files which were increasing the page load time significantly.

Other Bits and Pieces

As usual I have done small bits of work/edits for a few regular clients, including:

• Wordpress Theme edits
• HTML/CSS page edits
• Small JavaScript script creation
• Image Optimisation
• Another Wordpress Login Image

Other Work

This Site (my Portfolio)

I’ve done very little this month to my Portfolio site; a few edits here and there of things that needed fixed, but nothing major. I have however been noticing a few things that I could have coded better when making the site in the first place that I will likely get round to changing soon. For example I want to change how the main menu hover image works (so instead of changing the image it will show the bottom half of an image – saves loading an extra image when the user hovers over the link), I also want to make some kind of button for the “Live Site Preview” links on each of the portfolio item pages.

I’ve also been looking into ways to make my contact form more secure (i.e. so less spam gets through it’s filters). Found one or two ways that could help me do just that without annoying the user by asking them to fill in anything extra (e.g. a Captcha), so I will likely add them into the form’s filtering process. Not that this is something anyone but me will really notice, but I thought I may as well say what I’m planning to do.

I did plan on making the comments of this blog look nicer than they do this month, but I just didn’t get round to doing it. I will try to do it soon if I’m not that busy.

My Wordpress Theme site

I’ve not touched this site in a long time (and you can tell…) but I went back to it this month to re-code the themes that were there previously (there were only two…the site theme and one I was giving away free). They now should work better, have widget integration and a few other enhancements.

I also created another free Wordpress Theme to give away from an old design I found on my computer. It isn’t the best I could have done, but until I go back to it to make it better it will work okay for anyone who wishes to use it.

University

As said previously I am back at university for semester 2 now. We only have 3 modules this semester:

1. Dissertation
2. Project
3. Persuasive Narrative

It’s the last one that I don’t really have a clue about. Basically we need to make a documentary type video for the end product. Not quite sure what exactly that has to do with web design (especially as I am now in my last year of the course) but ach well.

I also got a few grades back from modules last year/early this year:

• Dissertation Proposal: B16
• Ethics Report: B15
• Dissertation Presentation Number 1: A19

For those who don’t know (and want to) the number after the grade is the mark you receive (it is marked out of 20). An “A” is 19 or 20 marks, a “B” is 17 or 18, a “C” is 14, 15 and 16, a “D” is 12 or 13, and below that you’ve failed. I hope I’ve got those numbers right by the way, I’m unsure if I got the C grades right…I’m concentrating on getting A’s and B’s anyway!

Next Month

I have a few “jobs” lined up already – just need to get the information from the people I am doing them for. I say “jobs” because I’m doing them out of the goodness of my heart (i.e. not getting paid). One I’m not really sure if I will be doing or not, I offered to do it and the person has yet to contact me about starting it, but the other is a portfolio site for a friend which should be pretty fun to do (and a nice addition to my portfolio).

I would also like to get my business card finally finished and possibly sent away to get some printed.

Other than that I will be working on my university work and whatever else comes along as per usual. Hopefully I will get around to doing those edits to the comments and sidebar on this site that I had planned to do this month…we’ll see.