ThingyMaJig

Thingy Ma Jig is the blog of Nicholas Thompson and contains any useful tips, sites and general blog-stuff which are considered interesting or handy!

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websites

Working with the web everyday as a job and hobby often leads me to find useful websites. Below is a list of websites which I think are useful to everyone.

New Drupal Site: Rate My Christmas Tree

09 December 2010
Drupal websites YADS cool announcement

Ever wondered if your Christmas Tree is really any good? Well last weekend I decided to make a website for this purpose. It's just a bit of fun really! You login using your Facebook credentials (using Facebook Connect) and can create Chrismas Tree posts by linking to Flickr or Facebook photo's. You can then vote on your favourite tree's in an "A vs B" type match. If you like the sound of this and fancy something a bit festive, please give it a go and let me know if you have any thoughts! Head over to Rate My Christmas Tree :-)

Free Christmas Wallpapers

30 November 2008
websites free design cool

As part of my RSS reading, Smashing Magazine is rapidly becoming something I look forward to reading. Every month they do a roundup of desktop wallpapers which include a calendar and are, in some way, seasonal. This month is no exception! They have a fantastic selection of christmassy wallpapers for you to chose from and they're all free!

Abessive For Drupal 6

16 September 2008
websites Drupal design announcement

My first theme, Abessive, gets a new release today for Drupal 6. Turns out to be a pretty easy upgrade!

In case nobody caught onto what Abessive was the first time; it is an (almost) image free theme with flexible 1, 2 or 3 column layout (depending on where/if you place any blocks). Each block/section has rounded corners and slight top & bottom gradient which is achieved using only CSS techniques involving margins, padding and background colours. This makes the theme very lightweight and elegant at the same time.

Abessive Screenshot

My First Drupal Theme

12 June 2008
websites Drupal design

I have just finished commiting my very first theme to the drupal community! I'm not a designer by nature - I prefer to be deep in the code. Thats why I commited this theme - it contains very little design (in terms of Photoshop work). This design is, pretty much, image free! On top of that - its SEO friendly too!

Abessive Screenshot

I say 'Pretty much' because it is still using 3 core image files for the bullet points. But what I'm pleased about is the curved CSS-only corners with a slight gradient on them AND the fact that if you remove content from a column, the content fills out over it automatically.

Getting the most out of Fedora Core 4

28 September 2007
websites software linux How to geek Drupal

I recently looked into which versions of software I was running and was a little concerned to see how backward Fedora Core 4 was in some areas. I did a little Googling around and found a website (http://remi.collet.free.fr/) which is predominately written in French (but has a few English translations) which provides a new repository for Fedora Core 4's Yum Installer Package which provides far more recent RPM's for the likes of PHP and MySQL... So I installed it!

Very cool illusion

23 April 2007
websites miscellaneous free cool

A friend sent me a link to one of those optical illusion thingies. I'm often very sceptical of them however upon inspection, this one seemed different and legitimate. I don't think its fake - but I equally don't understand why its screws with your eye's so much! Here are the instructions from the website…

The Web is Us/ing Us

08 April 2007
websites video geek cool

After looking through the list of mentors for this years Google Summer of Code I noticed that I have been paired up with a fellow Drupal-eer called kkafer for the project we chose to mentor (I'm probably not allowed to publicly say yet, so I wont). Anywho - in a quest to find out a little more about this 'German gentleman' I decided to pop over to his Blog and, while having a little read through, I found that he'd bloged about this YouTube video regarding the difference between Web 1.0 and Web 2.0.

Thingy Ma Jig finally moved to Drupal 5

30 March 2007
YADS websites Drupal announcement

It's taken me long enough to get around to, but finally Thingy Ma Jig has been upgraded to the latest and greatest in all things Drupal.

All in all, I'd say it was a fairly (and surprisingly) painless experience. There were a few minor glitches along the way though…

ColorJack: Sphere Widget

07 March 2007
websites mac free design

ColorJack is a recently popularized Color Theory Application

They have a fantastic online system and an offline OSX Dashboard Widget. Basically, they have a whole load of settings which you chose from. You then drag one of the points around on the colour "sphere" (circle) and you are provided with a list of complimentary colours.

To try this out, get your browser over to the ColorJack Sphere where you can try it online.

I have my own page!

11 February 2007
YADS websites Drupal announcement

I bought the domain a while ago but haven't had time to set anything up - well this is a start. Its not much to shout about yet (and probably never will be) but I'm pleased with the design and think that its good to have a kind of "CV" site.

1000 Damn good icons!

17 January 2007
websites review free design cool

I have a never ending quest to find good free stuff. Finding free stuff is easy - its the GOOD bit that stumps me…

Often I dont even mind paying for something if its quality, but obviously free is better!

Quality Icons are something I am always on the lookout for and I have been a member of Icon Buffet for a long time now — I'm a big fan of the free deliveries — and, although I've purchased a few packs (Oslo, Oslo Buzz and Soho), they are very expensive for a "bedroom programmer" such as myself.

Site updates

14 November 2006
announcement websites

The site has recently had a few updates…

  • Tagadelic - A Tag Cloud which shows all the tags used on this site but sized and weighted to show how often they are used. More cool than practicle :-)
  • Design - The headers have had a slight design change - I quite like the gradient/line/drop-shaddo look they have now
  • Photo's and projects added... You can see more and more content coming onto the site!

Welcome to Thingy Ma Jig

30 August 2006
announcement websites

Welcome to TMJ. This site contains the work and thoughts of its owner, Nicholas Thompson. This is version 3 of Thingy Ma Jig. It started out being a table-based hand written site with very basic features. I then started to write version 2 with more features which I learned since starting version 1. Since then I have been introduced to Drupal which is, in my opinion, the best content management system available (or at least for free).

This is a drupal powered site which currently contains a few Dark Basic Pro programs and games I've written (I hope to upload MANY more), a blog which I have just started and some RSS feeds from some sites (down the right).