I finally took the plunge and setup a personal tumblr powered blog. You can find it over at blog.nickhamze.com. The design is a modified version of MicroInkdrop by the guys over at Obox. I have two goal in mind for this blog. One, to regularly catalog all the things I discover while online and two, [...]

Today I am happy to announce the arrival of my first child theme for Canvas, Graph Canvas. I have been wanting for a long time to release something for free to the WordPress community and Canvas gave me a perfect opportunity. I was also inspired by A Lyric a day by Lukes Beard and decided [...]

Woothemes expands to yet another CMS system. I wish they would slow down a bit, they are expanding faster than I can learn how to use the newly supported CMS systems, hehe. I checked Drupal out and if I ever get any free time I would become more proficient and offer Drupal customizations. But for [...]

When deciding what features I wanted to incorporate into the new design I went through the past 10 Woothemes releases to see if there were any features that I absolutely had to incorporate into my new design. When I examined Headlines I found that at the bottom of every post there was a set of social icons that was really impressive. It does a much better job than plugins such as Sociable. So when I went to figure out how to integrate these links into Postcard I was pleasantly surprised, how easy it was. I thought maybe my clients would enjoy knowing how to do this as well. With the redesign of my site I have made it my goal to write one tutorial per week to keep my skills sharp and give something back to my clients.

It has been a extremely busy month for Steam Engine Media. Not only were we busy helping our clients we also decided it was time for a complete redesign. We were extremely pleased with how our new logo turned out and we thought our clients might want to know what the process entailed.

“Most Powerful Weapon in the Freelance Web Designers Arsenal”

Many freelance web designers, including myself, often fail to realize the extreme importance of the creative design brief. Many times the client and the web designer just want to get started and mistakenly believe, they can iron out the details along the way.

I woke up yesterday to a pleasant surprise. Mark Forrester (If you don’t know who he is, have you been living under a rock?) mentioned my site, FaultyRobot.com.

Recently I was working with a client’s site and noticed it was running extremely slow. I mean slow, sometimes it took almost 30 seconds just to load the home page. I checked the files and his home page consisted of only 19.22 kb of data. There is no way it should have taken so long to load. So on a lark I look at his Name Servers and found out he was hosted on ******* servers (I shouldn’t say what company). I did a reverse IP search and found out that he shared his IP address with 2,648 other sites. No wonder his site was running so slow. If you are curious how many other sites you are sharing your server with, try Reverse IP Search.

2010 is going to be a exciting year for Steam Engine Media. First as you all know all our sites are built using Wordpress. Wordpress 2.9 just came out and adds some very useful and interesting features to Worpress.. Here are some of the features of Wordpress 2.9.