So I won a competition from dicecreator to get my own custom dice, which rocks. So I spent an afternoon working on the design. I’m sure you’ve seen my the Cthulhu-inspired image on the front of this webpage (and it doubles as my twitter icon) but if not, here it is again.

I thought this might make a cool face on one of the dice, so I went about re-working it a bit, using my trusty lightbox. I’m sure I could have done the re-work on the computer exclusively but I still like to use pencil and pens. It’s more satisfying somehow, at least for me.

I removed the background, filled in his wings which highlighted the tentacles much better. I was keeping in mind how it would look on a small dice.

I wanted “Fudge Dice”. Fudge dice has two faces with plus “+”, two with minus “-” and the final two blank. Keeping the Cthulhu theme, the minus and plus have to be tentacles!

I cheated though, I drew one half of a tentacle and then using my lightbox built up a minus and plus.

But, I won two customised dice and didn’t want to waste the opportunity with just one design! Using some themes from stuff I did for Lost Heroes RPG and the same technique as the tentacles, I came up with theses:

Now with my two designs, I sent them.

And I got the results in my hand right now:

I think they look rather cool myself!

(I’ll write up my initial impressions in another post)

I came across dicecreator via twitter. He makes these exceptional custom dice for gaming such as these amazing Fudge dice (image on the right). And during some testing of his equipment he decided to use my twitter icon as a test for some dice:

Which, to use the American vernacular, is awesome!

Anyway, he recently ran a competition and guess who won? Me!

So now I get to design my own dice, one black and one red both six-sided. My first thought was to use some of the “icons” I created for Lost Heroes, but these might be too complicated to fit nicely on a dice. Also, they wouldn’t be very practical in a game.

So my thinking turned to Fudge dice, perhaps with one of the “+” symbols is replaced, one would be the Lost Heroes main icon and on the other dice, a slightly modified version of my twitter icon. The actual + and – symbols I’d customise too, thinking for one a stark pointy sword shapes and for the other tentacle like. Hopefully over the next few days I’ll get down to do some drawing and see what comes out.

I’ll post the results here anyway. Also means I need to game in the next while!

I’ve just redone the colour scheme of thedeadone.net and have thrown out that over-powering black and grey mix. Tell what you think?

(Poll won’t work on LJ, so come on over to thedeadone.net to vote)

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

I don’t pretend to be a great web designer or programmer. Most of the stuff I do is really just tinkering and as part of that I decided it was time to create a new look for thedeadone.net, which involves creating a new “Theme” for WordPress. About a week ago, I got the theme up and running, the layout done. I’ve kept adding configurable options so that I can use it as a standard WordPress theme and also have it customised to how I think thedeadone.net should be done. I decided, as a first step, I’d change the colour scheme to match my previous theme, then install the new theme here and start using it.

A week later I’m ready to throw my laptop out the window. At first, I didn’t find it hard, modifying the CSS stylesheets to get the right look and spacing. I checked it in Opera and used Firebug in Firefox, everything was great. Then I tried it in Internet Explorer and elements were all over the place. Slight padding changes would shift around half the page, I had to start again, adding fixes and changes to get it to work in Internet Explorer. It sucks. It’s like writing code that is completely standards compliant but finding it doing utter different things on different operating systems.

Anyway, I’ve started to use the new theme here. It’s not finished, lots of stuff to do on it, but I’d rather see it in action than continue to work in the dark on it.

This is the frontpage of my previous theme

And this is an example of a category list

This is the brand new frontpage, still lots to do, but much better

Just for comparsion, here is the new theme

I’ve been working on a new theme for thedeadone.net for a little while now. The functionality is about 90% there. The layout is 99% done. But there is about 50% more to go. I have to choose colours and modify the layout with icons and images to make it “pretty”. I also need to make it work for the forum so at least I have a similar theme across the two sites.

I’m actually very happy with it so far, but its been a lot more work than I anticipated. The current theme I have, I don’t like at all, even though I created it. Even though I haven’t done colours or images yet, I’m very tempted to actually start using the new one now, because the layout will greatly improve usability of my site.

If you have the time, check out our “Murder of Crows” gaming site where I have rolled out the unfinished theme and tell me what you think?

Update #1: (9.35am) Ah pants. Just as I posted this, “Murder of Crows” gaming site isn’t up any more. In fact Redbrick’s webservers seem to be done.

Okay, so it looks like I made the jump to the new host fairly successfully. WordPress is up and running and all my data transfered okay. The only hitch, right now, is that the forum is down. I’ll fix that soon.

It’s certainly different being on new host. Like buying a new car without driving it first and finding controls in different places and finding new features and grunting when you can’t find that one or two great features from your previous car. But so far, it looks good.

For the record, I have hosted thedeadone.net on Redbrick since about 2002, I think. Redbrick is a College based club based on computers and networking. I’ve been a “associate” member (which is ex-student/alumni member) for quite a bit. The webspace they offer is great, seeing I was able to run WordPress (with some hacks), do WordPress plugin development, use a domain, automatically have shell access and, for a service ran by students, a great up-time (except for the last two months or so but they were the exceptions)… all for a ridiculous low price IMHO. My new host is Digiweb and the reasons for moving are many and do not reflect on the service provided by Redbrick.

Anyway, back to doing real stuff again…

Just a quick heads up. I’m going to be moving host over the next few days and my website will be unavaliable from tomorrow until whenever the nameserver changes propagate across the web. So I’ll be closing down the website tomorrow morning and moving the final snapshot of data across and updating the name servers. This affects the support forums as well.

This does not affect MOC, the Irish Gaming Wiki or my livejournal page.

See you all on the other side!

It’s seems I’m back online again. The admins of Redbrick, the host of thedeadone.net, turned Redbrick off after it was discovered that people’s personal webpages had been hacked. Now it looks like everything is up again (if you find something a-miss on the site, drop me a comment). The admins have re-installed everything from scratch and re-instated all the user-data from back-ups before the attack. A pretty large amount of work for admins-slash-students to do.

In all the time I’ve been on Redbrick, this feels like the longest it’s been gone. And it’s a strange experience to have lost my online presence for such a longish unexpected period. I felt like I couldn’t connect or speak about anything, nearly as if I ceased to exist in an online context. Not that I would have hade much to say, having just gotten over the vomiting bug and having to work from home while my daughter recovers from chicken pox. I’m absolutely shattered. But anyway, I’m back online and I do have a small queue of posts to put up.

Check item #7! (“Do some further work on TDO Mini-Forms”) Of course I could continue at full steam with it but I decided to slow down. Work will continue, just not as time-consuming.

Also item #6 (“Try again to get a gaming group together”) occurred without any prompting from me. I was doing some work on our roleplaying group website (moving it to a different address) and the players started to trying to figure out when they can all play next. However, it might not be until July! Must bug them again.

As for item #5 (“Move Hosts for thedeadone.net”) will occur when I make enough money from donations for TDO Mini Forms. I’m already half way there for a 1 year hosting planning…

Item #9 (“Upgrade and package the current thedeadone.net theme”) won’t happen. It’s been a maybe, but I just can’t muster the energy to do it. I think it really depends on finding a new host for thedeadone.net and getting all that up and running. Then I can think of getting a new theme and closing off the current one.

Which nicely leaves me with only one item left: item #8 (“Write-up and make available some RPG rules I created a long time back: Story Hooks and Passions”). While I think the two systems; Story Hooks and Passion, have since been done much better by Fate’s Aspects, Riddle of Steel’s Spirit Attributes and Shadow of Yesterday’s Keys, I think it’s still worth while closing them off. I did create and use them before I discovered these other systems and they are different and I hope to actually use them in my LH project. They certainly won’t be as long as TDO Fudge Combat v0.1 (short version available here) but they will probably garner about the same level of interest (which is about zero or so).

1. Upgrade and add some features to TDO-Forum for WP2.5
2. Test and Upgrade the Theme I’m currently using for WP2.5
3. Create a merge of TDO-Forum and my current custom Theme (for the forums) (maybe)
4. Update thedeadone.net to WordPress 2.5
5. Move Hosts for thedeadone.net (maybe)
6. Try again to get a gaming group together
7. Do some further work on TDO Mini-Forms (AJAX, Form Hacker, find some way to get rid of the dependency on $_SESSION – I’m a little tired trying to sort out people’s host problems, there is only so much I can do, etc)
8. Write-up and make available some RPG rules I created a long time back: Story Hooks and Passions
9. Upgrade and package the current thedeadone.net theme (maybe)

Okay, so I managed to upgrade to WordPress 2.5. Not as easy as I thought.

I also had to patch WP 2.5 to work on Redbrick as several features don’t work out the box and it’s still messy if your using a virtual host (like me).

The livejournal-crossposter and Slave Me 2 WordPress plugins both break in WordPress 2.5. I’ve updated Slave Me 2 WordPress to work in WP2.5 as from the website for it, looks like there is zero activity. So that’s now working. However the livejournal-crossposter is dead, so no LJ for me until I fix it (again the current website for the plugin has zero activity).

Most of the other plugins seem okay. I have to update NextGen but I need to patch the version I’m currently using (like I have to patch WordPress) so I haven’t done it yet. (I do like the automated plugin updates).

All of this cutting into actual time in work, so not good again. But now I’m all WP2.5! I have to tidy up and delete all my WP2.3.x dev and test installs now too to really cross out that item, but who’s going to quibble with me?

Of course, I may not do item 3 at all and I’ve added a new wishful-item 10, more of a way of prep-ing to change the theme of my blog.

If you see any problems with the site, after the upgrade, do tell!

1. Upgrade and add some features to TDO-Forum for WP2.5
2. Test and Upgrade the Theme I’m currently using for WP2.5
3. Create a merge of TDO-Forum and my current custom Theme (for the forums)
4. Update thedeadone.net to WordPress 2.5
5. Move Hosts (maybe)
6. Try again to get a gaming group together
7. Do some further work on TDO Mini-Forms (AJAX, Form Hacker, find some way to get rid of the dependency on $_SESSION – I’m a little tired trying to sort out people’s host problems, there is only so much I can do, etc)
8. Write-up and make available some RPG rules I created a long time back: Story Hooks and Passions
9. Upgrade and package the current thedeadone.net theme (maybe)

Update: NextGen updated and I think I may have got livejournal-crossposter now too. Let’s see.