The BBC has revealed the new look of BBC Three, and the orange blobs are set to go.

Credit: BBC. But I captured it all on my own!

According to research carried out by the BBC, viewers think that they’re “cold and shouty”. Personally, whilst I never really warmed to them, they’re unique and interesting. I think the background is a little cold, but you couldn’t accuse the channel of not having a personality.

Credit: BBC Press Office

Being honest, I’m not keen on the new branding. All I’ll say is that the channel gets a really hard time from the DCMS select committee and this’ll do nothing to help. ;-)

When I started this blog six months ago talking about chips, Birmingham and recently purchased books, I was really excited about everything I was going to post about. In May I had so many ideas for blog posts I filled a month and a half of my Google calendar with them, if I posted one every day. But like so many blogs, it’s gone quiet, and I could have done with some tumbleweed.

The year has flown by, and sitting here in that week between Christmas and New Years I’ve been thinking about 2008 and some new years resolutions. Here’s a few, and I’ll come back in a years time and see how I’m doing.

• Learn more about Photoshop. I really like Photoshop and use it almost every day. However, I know there’s so much I’ve not yet discovered. Two sites I plan to spend more time on are Radiant Vista and PSDTuts. The level of quality and professionalism in the video tutorials at Radiant Vista is phenomenal, and PSDTuts has been a great site for experimenting with Photoshop in downtime.
• Audit everything. I’m not Robert Scoble, and sure don’t need to be subscribed to as many feeds as he is. Last night I cleaned out my GMail inbox so I’m now down to 1 unread email (next on the list is starred and drafts). I probably don’t need three operating systems on the laptop (especially as I use XP and Ubuntu for only 2-3% of the time). Do I need so many accounts all over the place? Can I bring my to-do lists (in Tadalist) and planning (in GoPlan) and contact management (in Outlook) together, online? I haven’t updated Twitter in 123 days… do I need to use it? Does it need to be on the side of this blog?
• Do more learning. I’d really like to get into Ruby on Rails, and perhaps build a tiny project with it. It’d be nice to find time to read more of the paper, watch more decent programmes on Television and listen to more World Service and NPR.

A less serious resolution is to finally build a HTPC. Oh, and stop procrastinating over a portable music player. (That’s actually a good post for tomorrow). I’ve been playing with 43 Things (a site where you can list goals, have a public profile and set yourself reminders via email). Time to start adding to that list…

The website of the UK’s most popular radio station has been refreshed. The BBC Radio 2 website had been a little dated for a while now, and I much prefer the new colour scheme. The new logo is less interesting, but works well on the header.

Radio 2 have been changing their image for a while. A new schedule was introduced earlier this year and more TV names (Paul O’Grady, Davina McCall, Kate Thornton) have been presenting on the station. Visiting the website, it’s not where you’d expect to find The Organist Entertains. By appealing to a younger audience they might have grabbed some of the commercial listeners who enjoy the speech from Ken Bruce or Chris Evans, as the playlist feels younger too. At the same time, I don’t know anyone who has deserted the station as a listener. I think the new website reflects this. The internal presenter pages could do with updating now to keep within the new look.

Radio 1 updated their website last year, and it looks very good. Virgin Radio have always had an amazing website, but many in the UK still lag behind. Earlier in the year the BBC local radio stations started getting new look websites, but there appears to be a trend of using a tiny font size for descriptions. In the 100’s of websites I see a week on various forums and CSS gallery sites, there are very few going this way. Infact, try finding a small font on the Virgin Radio website.

I have to say, I think local radio stations are really missing a trick, and I hope the new community stations can find a way around this. With radio, especially BBC locals, there’s hours and hours of useful information and contacts every single day. Whilst you can get this information or a phone number by calling the stations helpline, this is often open from 10am to 4pm and unavailable to many people working.

As I see it, there are two ways around this. Give each show a blog, and at the end of every show simply list what happened, with links, guest names and phone numbers. This is extremely simple to put into place and easy for presenters or producers to manage. The other is to use a CMS and create an archive of information about every show. This might seem overkill but so many station websites are plastered in banners for the local shopping centre and dealership, with very limited information about the shows themselves, apart from a presenter Q & A.

I’ll be writing about this again soon - I think the new community stations could really shine with well designed, accessible and informative websites. Personally, I’d be very happy to volunteer a day a week (or few hours a day) on a community radio website.

There was a report at the end of the BBC 10 O’Clock news tonight concerning the following question;

What is 1/8 of 32

Apparantly many adults can’t answer that question. I think I only got it because of RAM and knowing 8, 16, 32, 64, 128MB etc.

There was a quote from a Head Teacher at the end though - it’s more important to show what you’re doing rather than just get the right answer (or something to that effect - there’s no video up). It reminded me of the song New Math, by Tom Lehrer.

Consider the following subtraction problem, which I will put up here: 342 minus 173. Now, remember how we used to do that: three from two is nine, carry the one, and if you’re under thirty five or went to a private school you say seven from three is six, but if you’re over thirty five and went to a public school you say eight from four is six. And carry the one, so you have one hundred and sixty nine. But in the new approach, as you know, the important thing is to understand what you’re doing, rather than to get the right answer.

New Math, on Wikipedia

A few weeks ago I saw Kate Russell mention this on Click - it’s an extension for Firefox. It makes the tabs different colours which is really handy when flicking between pages. I’ve found it especially useful in previewing changes, working with two admin panels etc.

Download ColorfulTabs for Firefox.

The default WordPress theme is very nice, in my opinion. However, I knew I’d have to theme a few WordPress blogs over the next month so coming up with something for this one seemed like a good idea.

The design was very easy to do. It’s a simple two column layout with a header and footer in CSS and XHTML. Once all the links and lists were cleared up it was a case of taking over to WordPress.

I remember trying to theme Invision Board and Mambo CMS a few years ago and it was a nightmare. The resulting code with a few changes was a mess and I never got something I could be proud of at the end of it. Working with WordPress has been an absolute pleasure today. Like Textpattern, it seems happy to let you set up a template file consisting of your own structure (or in this case, index.php, header.php, sidebar.php and footer.php) and insert the PHP code to do the hard work. All the CSS is your own and finding and fixing bugs is incredibly easy.

If only I could grasp Drupal’s template system as quickly.

Everything is simple black, grey and white. I’ve stuck to the default for most things, with a few icons from the Silk set. I thought it best to leave the sidebar (your honour) on every page, so have done that. I wanted to try something different for the sidebar bullets, but apparently Internet Explorer didn’t like the lower-greek list-style-type, so circle it is.

I’d love to know your thoughts… it’s not my favourite piece of “design”, but I guess it does the job for now. And it’s valid. Woot. 8-) The only bug seems to be WordPress strips the @ from my flickr URL in the navigation.

Over time I’ve used MySpace, Blogger and others for blogging, but having seen the latest version of WordPress (on which this blog runs) have decided to set-up something here. Hope you like it - please leave a comment on a post if you’ve something to say!