I decided that the best course of action in developing a theme would be to take the Wordpress default and modifying it to suit my needs. I think the new design looks more professional and personalized, and will certainly allow me to add more content.
I have changed my blog theme back to the Wordpress default; it is arguable better than my poor excuse for a theme and has the added benefit of being able to support more than three pages and a much longer sidebar. I am still working on my custom one, and have the idea down on paper - just need to translate it in to HTML and CSS which is taking some time given my asinine attention to detail.
Today I finally deployed Formatilicious 2.0 after a few months of sporadic development, it is a complete rewrite from the original and this has certainly benefited the code quality and ease of modification. The major change is that the upload box and the output format selection box are now spread over two pages; this is because I am hoping to support new formats soon and it would be nicer to only list the possible formats that the input file can be converted to, rather than every single format available. I was eager to get copy from URL support in to this update, but I have been having trouble limiting the file size that downloaded files can be - so this has been put off for now, hopefully I will be able to enable it soon though.
The next major stepping stone will be in developing further format support (I’m really interested in audio conversion, as well as perhaps video conversion) and providing an API so that there is an additional revenue stream and I can use multiple application servers if desired (this may be necessary for audio conversion to be feasible). Statistics also interest me, this will take a bit of work and is a bit pointless for the time being given the low usage level.
Currently I am in the process of cleaning my room out and redecorating it, and needed to reorangize the furniture so that my TV would be in a more convenient place. Rather than experiment with moving everything around (which isn’t really very efficient) I decided to cut it out in paper to try out layouts in small - it is quite effective. Later this evening or once I’ve got the tonne of homework that I’ve got to do over the weekend out of the way I plan on implementing this as an actual program, hopefully being more precise and better overall.
I’d like to talk a bit about one of my four major projects, Formatilicious. A friend of mine, Niall Coleman, came to me with his idea of a format converter. The inspiration came from the fact that Newgrounds - a site Niall is obsessed with - does not accept PNG image uploads (so I am told). Converting to JPG can often result in reduced quality due to the lossy compression technique used. Microsoft Paint, for example, does a very poor job of this, and loading up a photograph manipulation suite such as Adobe Photoshop, Paint.net, or the GIMP can consume a lot of time and resources; Formatilicious is simply a web page, and provides a decent compression level, reducing any resultant artifacts.
Currently Formatilicious is in its early stages, it’s a basic input\output interface and doesn’t do much else. In a month or two, once exams are over and the holidays are started, I plan on doing quite a bit of work on it (and a couple of my other projects too) - ideas include image cropping, resizing and supporting more formats. At some point I also hope to offer video conversion, but this is far deeper and would require a lot more work (but nothing’s impossible).