New Blog Design and Other Stuffs

Matthew Campbell, August 3rd, 2009

I hope that my poor design skills will not offend too many readers since over the weekend I went ahead and redesigned this blog.

Ego Check

It is not by any means perfect or finished and I will need to hire a designer for this task in the end – but, what do you think so far of the design? Honestly, the big motivation was the need to have a WordPress theme that did not mangle my code examples too much.

The Theme I am Using

On a technical note, I am now using the “Thesis” premium theme here and I like it so far. Give them a quick Google search if you are curious about Thesis. The short version is that Thesis is more of a SEO friendly framework (vs a standard theme) that you can easily customize using a system of “hooks”, CSS (but in an easier way than normal) and a tiny tiny bit of PHP (I think).

The theme cost either $80 or $160 depending on the conditions of the license that you want. It is pretty cool – if I witness anything extremely cool or very terrible I will let you know about it.

e-Book Stuffs

This week I have been busy updating my e-book to include an entire “Programming 101″ section to the material. The first version was directed to programmers who just wanted to make the switch to iPhone developers fast, but I have been finding that a real introduction to programming concepts specifically in C and Objective-C is very necessary for the overall process.

Current readers of the book can look forward to seeing the updated copy in their mailboxes soon.

Guest Bloggers

The guest blogger program started off last week with an interesting article about creating an iPhone game with the Unity game engine by Darrel Plant. We have another article that I hope to publish on Wednesday from a new guest blogger as well – keep at least one eye out for that!

What have you been up to?