Expect more wierdness as I mess around with the site.

Ok, I used Firebug to quickly reskin the Wordpress default.

Now I’m tinkering with Javascript, to provide dynamic fancy title styleing and shadows behind posts.

Javascript skullduggery is done.  I wrote a script to make nice titles and another one to add shadows under posts.

The Synergy design was made on a black t-shirt.

P.S. The files are huge so they take forever to load. I will scale them down later.

My starting image:

One of the filters I used in the Subtle Synergy background is the ‘Zoom Blur’ filter, which uses Quartz Composer.  Quarz Composer if a fully 3D OpenGL enviroment, so any filter that uses Quartz Composer is truly 3D.

Another filter I used in the background is the Stripes generator.  Stripes generator uses Core Image to render some simple stripes.  In the background, they’re used with blend mode Multiply to create the neon streams.  Creating stripes is something that isn’t impossible in Photoshop, just more time-consuming than it should be.  In Pixelmator, its just a few clicks.

Finally, the Page Curl ‘transition.’  All the Core Animation transitions that you may have seen in Pages or Final Cut Pro can be used as filters in Pixelmator.  Some, like Page Curl, are very usefull, while others, like Copy Machine, are rather useless.  Page Curl is a nifty filter to have around, and its got plenty of options.  The ‘radius’ setting sets the sharpness of the curl.

A brief closing note on Pixelmator’s speed:  Pixelmator is so fast with its filters that it renders them in full quality while you are adjusting settings, unlike Photoshop, which does a low-quality preview and then finalizes the filter (usually displaying a progress bar and the beach ball).  In fact, while making the test image using a Dots generator, I came to the conclusion the the preview was full-quality.  I didn’t apply any of the filters shown here.

Anyway, ScribeFire has a nice user interface that integrates well with Firefox. It has drag-n-drop image support, flickr and YouTube imbed buttons, and tabbed editing. Installation was a snap. Simply download the plugin, and it will walk you through a setup assistant upon Firefox’s relaunch. After you give it your blog’s URL, ScribeFire automatically detects its type (ie, Wordpress) and the API location. Enter your username and password, and you’re good to go!
ScribeFire has numerouse features and good integration with Firefox, and I plan to update this post with their details!