Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

There a few things that are really easy about running a website. I am involved with a few and have my own, most of them on WordPress which is arguably one of the easiest ways to blog out there.

One of the most common things I am looking for are color code when I am making visual changes to my website. I don’t like to keep things the same forever and so I change themes on occasion. Rarely do the themes look 100% the way I want out of the box and so small changes such as background color are the first things I look at.

Some themes you are lucky enough to have a choice of background color but with most you will have to make a change in the CSS (style sheets). This can be done from the Appearance/Editor option in your WordPress admin panel.

But this little web tool that I am about to share with you isn’t for people who blogging on WordPress, it’s for ANY web admin.

The tool? Just go to http://www.colorpicker.com/!

There you can use the slider and pin point tool to choose your color and shade. The wonderful result is an RGB (red, green, blue) value, a HSB (hue, saturation, brightness value and of course the web color code at the top #000000.

Happy web design :)

Well it’s about friggin’ time! I saw themes on my buddy’s regular GMail account in November of last year. Immediately I went looking for the setting in my hosted service and sure enough it was not there. I remember reading about the service from Google’s blog but was never sure when they would be working on it for us hosted clients.

This really seems like a simple upgrade to the Gmail interface but in all honesty every individual has an easier time looking at certain colours and contrasts. If you use Gmail as much as I do, then the default blank white theme can get tired on you fast. It is a clean look but is fatiguing to the eye.

The options they have provided to us are simple in reality. If you look at the image below you will see that most of the themes are colour adjustments but they do what they are supposed to. They offer us all an option to look at something different.

They have also created a section where you can make a custom theme or change the settings for your current theme. The chooser is simple and should be fast to edit what you would like to adjust.

So welcome to all my fellow hosted google mail users. We can all enjoy this new feature that was released today!

Turns out that it was time to make some changes on the site. The old background and colours are gone and I am back to something a little more blue. It was time to update some of the plugins I use, 6 of them had newer versions and who knows what those updates would fix.

I have been working on testing a recording scenario for podcasts and that has taken most of my free time lately. The techy side is a lot of fun but my real dilemma is still the theme. I have been talking with a friend who I think will join me as a co-host about this and we are both really interested in tech/geek crap in general. I think that we are going to shoot for a general tech show related to current events and then throw some interesting features into the show.

Only outstanding thing right now on the blog is the email. Right now I am getting 2 copies every time I post. EMAIL ME IF YOU ARE TOO!!!!

Ciao for now.