• Themes 101 by Brassblogs – For me this is the best tutorial I’ve found to date which covers how to create a Wordpress theme from an already finished html layout. The information is very straight forward, well written and easy to follow. If you have a great design you’ve put together in Photoshop and Dreamweaver (or something similar) but are struggling with making it all work in Wordpress, try this tutorial.
• Guide to the NextGen Gallery – One of the most important plugins I use on the Second Impulse website is the NextGen gallery. Across the bottom of every page are random thumbnails which when clicked pop up lightboxed photos of the band. Vuthy’s tips helped me quite a lot in making it all work how I wanted it to.
• Exporting and Importing Wordpress – With the Second Impulse site I decided to test it all locally using xampp, which allows you to run a test webserver on your own PC via Apache. While I am pretty familiar with what’s required to move a local test site to a live web server (in my cast HostGator’s servers), it didn’t hurt to have a refresher since it had been a while. Nick also has an excellent tutorial regarding Wordpress theme creation as well.

So I just finished playing Modern Warfare 2 on the Xbox 360 and I can say it absolutely lived up to the hype, without a doubt. I did my first run of the campaign in normal mode and it was nothing short of epic. For only being on normal, it was pretty damn challenging. I can only image how much more of a challenge it will be when I attempt it on more difficult settings.

The story was excellent, well acted by the voice talent and actually threw in a bit of an unexpected twist. I won’t say what it is, or course. You’ll just have to play it for yourself and see.

I literally played from about 2:30 this afternoon until about 9:30 this evening. I took a couple munchie breaks but for the most part, I couldn’t put it down. Each mission kept getting more epic than the last and I just had to see how it all turned out. Next will be a venture into the multiplayer and Special Ops modes which I’m expecting will be just as fantastic as the campaign.

If you’ve been on the fence about picking up the game, seriously, get it. It’ll be game of the year for sure.

After a hefty amount of sleep deprivation, swearing, trial and error and more swearing, I finished the theme in about a week and a half. I found some great tutorials along the way which I will make a separate post about. While there are still some things that needed to be tweaked – the Internet Explore 7 stylesheet (ugh), I am for the most part happy with how it turned out. I’ve yet to widgetize the site, though it doesn’t really need it right now. In all there are seven page templates and five different sidebars used in the theme. A pretty complex first theme, I suppose.

SI is a great band who has actually been around since 2005. Sadly they’ve never really taken very good advantage of all the internet has to offer. My friend and I aim to change that. Aside from creating the website, I’ve been helping with creating artist profiles for Second Impulse on as many indie music sites as I can find, like Purevolume, Unsigned.com, etc. I also have a few other tricks up my sleeve yet.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest layout. Still keeping it simple, but widening things about it.

For now it seems we’re probably going to be using the following layout or at least something pretty similar. In the future we may do something more elaborate, but this should be fine for the time being.

The replica was created by Rooster Teeth community member and GrifballHub editor, CaptainR3dbeard. It has been signed by Rooster Teeth staff Gus, Geoff, Burnie, Ben and Joel as well as Bungie and Grifball.com staff members.

You can see more photos here, including various Rooster Teeth folks holding the replica bomb.

100% of the proceeds will be donated to Extra Life – a 24-hour charity gaming marathon aimed at raising money to fight pediatric cancer. If you’d simply like to donate to Extra Life regardless of the auction, please visit the GrifballHub Extra Life Campaign.

If you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact Goose, Bobby or any member of the GrifballHub.com staff.

Tomorrow I’ll feature some gameplay footage they captured of Left 4 Dead 2.

Apparently once you’re in the spotlight you can expect to receive some pretty offensive and disturbing hate mail – both written, spoken and video. A female gamer who was recently featured said, “I did receive a lot of negative comments after my spotlight. A lot of them were because I am a girl. Also there were a lot of inappropriate sexual comments.” Worse than that, apparently some of the offenders decided to take it even further than that, using their XBOX video cameras to send her “naked crotch shots”. That’s pretty sick.

If you’re like me and having been considering the idea of trying to become one of the spotlighted gamers on XBOX Live, you might want to reconsider.