kristarella.com in 2008

With the year coming to a close it seems an opportune time to reminisce. I don’t have lots of good memories of this year— having completed a thesis and having not enjoyed it much at all. However, looking back over the last year of posts I think it was a pretty good year for blogging and developing skills of all kinds.

January

To start off the year, I discovered a bit more about using the Mac Color Picker for colour management. I also made my own protective camera wrap in preparation for my trip to San Francisco.

February

Then in February, thanks to his new job at Google, my husband and I got to go to San Francisco. We had to pay for my part of course… It was a great trip though, I loved it.

March

It looks like my first month of honours was a good month for image manipulation, with an Introduction to the GIMP for Creative Curio, a mammoth example of adjusting a fireworks photograph in GIMP…

Easter happened and I was quite a bit more positive about it than in previous years.

I also wrote a sort of photo noir tutorial. Good for learning to use paths to create selections in GIMP.

April

Google brought out a predictive search tool to get tomorrow’s news today, just in time for April Fools’ Day.

Some more fun with GIMP found a newsprint/halftone effect and I also had a wallpaper published among Smashing Magazine’s April wallpapers and wrote a tutorial on it.

Expressive words were good fun and did the rounds of some design and design related blogs.

May

I learnt a lot about WordPress and PHP this year and shared some of it in the form of tutorials. Including, How to create a custom homepage and putting content in that homepage.

I also had the chance to check out a whole lot of image editors for Mac. If you’re a Mac user definitely check out this list, which has both lightweight and heavy duty editors.

I redesigned my blog this year and as part of that process thought a lot about semantic code, CSS and the details of a website, including favicons, which I think no site is complete without.

You just ended that sentence with a preposition— bastard!

Col. Jack O’Neill SG1

June

The second half of the year was very busy at uni and not particularly pleasant, but I did find a little fun and release in The rather difficult Font Game on iLoveTypography.

I also did my first video tutorial about grid masking using Inkscape and GIMP.

July

I created my Haiku blog, which uses a few custom functions to take advantage of categories more.

I began using Coda, a top notch site management and text editing program for Mac. I’ve loved using it in conjunction with MAMP to test and manage sites locally.

September

You can tell August was a nasty month, since there were no posts really worth mentioning! To relieve a little of that uni stress and maintain some semblance of life I took part in the $50 camera challenge, which was excellent.

Somehow, what was honestly an attempt to keep my blog active and put to use some photos I’d taken with my phone, the Life through my phone post was a bit of a hit. I’ve been taking a few photos and even a video on my phone lately, so there could be another one of those coming up.

Now I’m thinking I was just starting to procrastinate at this point: I implemented clickable tags in the WP write panel. Of course, it’s obsolete now that WP has finally implemented that feature themselves. Yay!

October

October was Breast Cancer awareness month again. Although I wasn’t able to do as much as I would have liked (due to it also being thesis writing month *shudder*), I did turn my blog pink and I was able to go to a Pink Ribbon brunch.

November & December

These two months deserve to be rolled into one, since I not only had finished my thesis and was on holidays (until further notice!), but it was a big two months for me and WordPress.

I ported my blog design over to Thesis and I’ve never been happier with it (of course, I have ideas to make it even better). Along with that move came tutorials on full-width headers and full-width footers in Thesis.

At the end of November I went to WordCamp Australia, where I met some excellent people, started some good relationships, and heard some exciting things.

Post WordCamp, I got around to adding location functionality to my photoblog and thought a bit about WordPress licensing and how it relates to themes and affects theme developers.

Tonight is New Years Eve! I don’t think I’ll have a chance to take photos of fireworks, but I think it will be a great hang-out time with friends.

Happy New Year!