Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Most of the content on the page is still the same but I have done a lot of back end work in the past couple of days. I use the WicketPixie theme that Chris Pirillo created with the help of some friends and it has served me very well. I like the layout as it allows me to add a lot of extra content to the side bars yet still have a cleaner look.

After a call out on Twitter/Facebook last week to my followers and friends, I found that many had problems with load times and broken Java. I really believe that the first public release of WicketPixie was broken by some of the things that I added to it and I have been limping without realization since then.

I did some looking and I found an updated version through http://chris.pirillo.com/wicketpixie/. The version that I downloaded was an RC or Beta depending on where you look on the site, but with a little tweaking it has worked out well. I had made quite a few changes to the original theme so I had to apply those same changes to the new version of WicketPixie.

I am happy with the outcome so far but I am curious to see what you see. Drop a comment here and let me know how it’s working. If you have and trouble at all, please send me a reply on Twitter @thesleepygeek of course :)

I have wanted to set up an IRC channel for the website. I plan to have a video stream eventually (very distant future) and I wanted to have the chat channel up and running when I am ready for that. I have looked at a number of options and in the end I feel Wyldryde is a great choice.

Wyldryde is a free IRC server. Anyone can join their service and create their own IRC channel if they wish. They don’t rely on advertising revenue right now, they rely on donations. This means that if you want to embed their IRC window on your website, there is no advertising in the way of your chatting.

I have created a dedicated chat page. I find that when you put a chat window in the middle of a page with a lot of other content it tends to confuse matters. I like to keep it clean and a dedicated page I think is the best way to achieve that. One day, a long long time from now…. I might put video and chat together because that just makes sense.

To set up a channel with Wyldryde is very easy. They have laid out instructions on their website in a clean step by step list. Simply follow the commands listed and type them into your IRC chat client. When the channel is created you can make a lot of adjustments including the ability to add free bots provided by their servers.

Kudos to Wyldryde!