Over the last week or so I've been working some more on the CMS. The main factor contributing to this is that I'd told a friend (Matt) he could use it on his site. Last week he bought his domain name and wanted to get started. The main features that I've added are:

• HTML Widgets
  These are bits of html users can create with the WYSIWYG editor and then include into the left or right hand side of a page. You can see these in action to your right on this page (About Me).
• Media Manager
  Media Manager will now automatically create a thumbnail when you upload a JPEG, GIF or PNG image. Also, the simple ability to include a thumbnail into a page with a link to the original link already embeded.
• Other tweaks and nice touches
  Theres a lot more little features I've added just to make things smoother and more useable. Here's a quick list: better options when saving a page that isn't published, after a page saves the URL is shown, the list of pages now links to each page and even more that are too small to mention.

You can see the cms running here on www.nojacko.com and also on Matt's site www.mattcrane.co.uk. I've let him have full access to the skin, views and css so he has full controll of the site's look.

As for the next set of changes... top of the to-do list is mainly behind the scenes improvements. They shouldn't really take too long (fingers crossed). Afterwards it's going to be galleries or blogs and then some widgets for both of them.

My current song of the moment is by Fightstar. Never Change is their latest single. It's  got a great upbeat beat and a little chatchy. The video isn't really anything special but it's funky. I like the lights in the background between 1:45-1:55 and the interesting use of the Non-Newtonian fluid. Never Change isn't my favourite song off the new album (Be Human), that goes to Colours Bleed to Red, but it's still good.

Hello World. This is my first post for the new nojacko.com. I'm going to touch on a few of things: Who I Am, This Website, It's Reason for Being & The Blog.

Who I Am
I am James Jackson and this is my personal website. That's all I shall say in this post about myself. If you want to know more check out the about page.

This Website
This site will be a place for me to blog, show off my work, collect useful links, test new stuff I'm working on and other things I've not thought off yet. This site has actually been around a few years now. It's not been kept up to date. The main reason being is it was all static html and a bit of a pain to update. So about 8 months ago (August/September 2008) I started working on creating a CMS. I've been working on it on and off since and in that time so much has changed and at one point I even rewrote the lot. All the time has actually worked out really well! Because I've been taking my time I've been able to think through everything before starting to implement it. The CMS so much better for this, as any project should be if you plan it well. At the moment the CMS is not for sale, but after it's been proven to work and new features are added it might be avalible to buy...

..back to the point. The site is now running on the above mentioned CMS meaning it's really easy for me to edit and update. So with the new easy of updating and a promise to myself to keep the site update it's looking good.

Reason
The original reason for this site was to have my own personal site. Before, I had only had websites trying to make a little money of the interweb. This site was to really to be about me, bring together all my sites and also be a site that wouldn't disappear off the face of the Earth like some of my other sites have. The name? nojacko was a name I thought of for playing games online. Jacko is a way to common nickname, so I came up with something more unique. I think it came from a friend of mine who would say "Nooooo Jacko" if I did something stupid at school. I was a bit silly at school so it was said a lot  and the way he said it was always the same. So when I decided to think of a unique name it must have popped into my head. It wasn't being used by others and seemed alright to me... so I used it.

Blog
A quick note about this blog. The blog will be about anything and everything. Whatever I feel like really. Each post will be tagged and categorized, but until there are most posts I won't be listing the categories or tags. It'll look a bit plain with only 1 or 2 posts in each category/tag, and I haven't really finished the blogging system. You won't be able to comment on posts. I don't really think this is necessary for my site but if you do want to comment feel free to contact me.

Well that's it for my first post. Quite a bit longer than I originally thought it would be.