Mat Bowles

Firstly, on July 7th last year, someone linked to tyrell, who linked to lithium_doll, both were collecting quotes about the London attacks. She said "don't friend me if you want interesting, friend him, I'm boring" or words to that effect. But, y'see, she lives in Exeter, so I friended her anyway. She was wrong about the boring. Y'know why?

Make your own icons easily

She was bored today, it seems, so she played around with some php scripts (something I still can't get my head around, then, I'm not really trying). She made this, fairly simple icon maker. It'll insert text, greyscale, border, etc. All the things you want from an icon, in one easy place.

If anyone has bases or simple images that make good all round icons to share, give her a shout, she'd definately appreciate it. Me? I've used it to finally update all my category icons, I'd been sent decent copies of the Fineas art awhileback, now I have all my categories back in non-teeny versions. I also have, um, about 15 alternates saved, witht he same text on different pics. I may have got carried away. I'm definately not going to go back and start doing other things in a few minutes. No, not me. Not at all.

Livejournal announces (belatedly) project to improve User Interface

Let's face it, the LiveJournal userinterface and navigation system, well, sucks. After freddiefraggles pointed me at it, I've got used to the new beta navigation layout, it's a lot less ugly than Dystopia, although I still hate pop up menues. But, they're now going to give the whole site a going over, to make it easier to use and find your way around. Don't know about you, but I get lost, regularly, when trying to do stuff I don't use that often. I hate certain aspects of how it works. That post is rather long, and contains the usual amount of "we don't like change, it was good enough for me when I started" bollux. I have no doubt, whatsoever, that I will dislike some of the changes they end up making. I have no doubt that some of them will be worse than the existing method. I also suspect they'll fix bits like that fairly quickly.

But, overall, LJ is very difficult, at times, to use, and it breaks a number of usability rules in places. So, a tentative thumbs up to the project. I will, of course, bitch about the details.

In the meantime, I have a new userpic for this post. D'you like it?