BricksABillion

FHF – S07 ‘Ujio’ – Ground Type, originally uploaded by Fredoichi.

I am not a Mech builder — yet, but I greatly admire the craft and ingenuity that a number of folks have in putting these things together. Fredoichi’s FHF – S07 ‘Ujio’ – Ground Type is a great example. continue reading…

1930, originally uploaded by Tito0o0o.

Several months ago I started a Flickr group specifically for minifig-scale LEGO furniture. This image is an excellent example of some sample furnitured designed with a 1930 setting in mind.

What we have here are a gramophone, a sofa, and an end table with a lamp on it. The end table looks like a 2×2x2 box with a 2×2 tile on top — nice effect!

The sofa has a few techniques I don’t remembering seeing before. I like the sloping back. The 2×2 tiles also give a padded-cushion look, and the rubber band going around the couch to give the idea of the seam (or whatever else you call that thing that goes around couches at that level) is very well done.

Business Wire had an article that preceded the one I mentioned yesterday; it appears the one I’d read may have excerpted from this one, without citing it as a source, as this one contains everything the other had … and more.

Though it leaves many of my questions unanswered, it does appear that this is more of a recent decision just announced, and will be several months before we see a final product. The site will apparently be redesigned by ATG (Art Technology Group, Inc.) and utilize the ATG Commerce platform to run the site.

via Brickset

While I liked the simplicity of the old theme it was … getting old. And there were a number of things I needed to do here on BricksABillion to get it up to speed. This new theme, Eos 1.3,  from SRS Solutions is simply brilliant. I wanted something fixed width, centered, more modern looking with an RSS feed button at the top, more navigation at the top, space for a splash blurb, and some helpful advertising, without compromising the existing posts.

Oh, and it wasn’t a requirement, but now that I see it’s there I’m twice as happy — I love the quotation marks setting off the Block Quotes. See, for example, on the Angus MacLane interview.

By the way, if you catch anything broken or not looking right — give me a holler, I’ll be tweaking some things for a few days to make sure everything is “just so.”

I hadn’t seen this anywhere else, so I wanted to document it.  A very brief article on New Media Age mentioned it. This stood out to me since:

1. I’m into LEGO
2. I’ve felt for a while that LEGO needs to revamp their site (more about that below)
3. My day job is working on an eCommerce website.

There are several aspects of the LEGO site that may or may not be transparent to all consumers, but stand out to me as a webmaster. To their credit, these things are small, and not impossible, be improved on. continue reading…