Five months.

That's how long I've had a Virb account. Five months. And in those five months I managed to join one group. That's it. No friends, no blog entries, no activities, not even a profile photo. Instead of spending time on my own profile I was reading other Virbians' blogs, looking at other's photos, and watching stranger's videos. What's that you say, lurker? I can't argue with that but if you ask me this whole social networking deal is quite intimidating.

This is my first blog entry, not just on Virb but my first entry ever. Surprising as it may seem, I'm not much of a writer. The truth is I am probably as good at writing as I am at shaving in the dark. I have a lot of ideas, but it is hard to translate my ideas into words. This little entry is my way of testing the waters. We'll see how this one goes over and then decide if I want to make a habit out of this or just delete my account now.

After months of putting it off I finally told myself that the only way things would get done is if I treated Virb like a client (by the way Virb, you owe me $5,000). So I started from the beginning. I logged into my empty Virb account and begin to see how the modules were built and what I had to work with. Oh, and before I go any further, I am a huge Nerd. That being said, after I explored the modules I followed up with a simple wireframe diagram to help me decide what would go where. Yes, this was both helpful and unnecessary.

At this point I didn't think I was going to really mess with the default Virb skeleton. The standard layout is eye pleasing out of the box so I was not planning on straying to far. I ended up creating a photoshop file of the default Virb layout (which is available for download at the end of this entry) to help with the design. My intent was to simply adjust the original images, colors, and sizes.

Soon I realized that I really needed to change things around, I needed to start from scratch and create a completely new design comp. After several revisions of the original I was ready to move on. I knew that I wanted to change the Virb source code as little as I could get away with so the buildout process began with the creation of a local HTML buildout of the default Virb profile page (again available for download).

Virb has so many CSS hooks baked into the markup that the build out process was painless. Of course I had my share of IE6 surprises. I decided to take the easy way out and completely hide the design from IE6 users. Sorry, but it just isn't worth my free time to support such a crap browser. It seems as thought I was wrong and my IE6 styles are not working. Not sure what the exact problem is; might be that the *html hack doesn't work, !important isn't allowed, or I was not specific enough in my CSS declarations. At any rate you can check out a picture of the ideal scenario below. I think IE7 should be working pretty well but I still need to go through things with a fine tooth comb. You know, cross all the t's and dot all the... lower case j's. If you see any problems in your browser of choice please leave me a comment.

Now here were are after nights and nights of work and I finally have a finished profile. How do I feel about my hard work? I hate it. I am not happy with how it turned out at all. It's too "web pagey", there is next to no orginality, and it is an all around bobo design. I need something that has more personality, something less confined, and something darker. I guess I will just need to keep working on it. This will give me an excuse to work more with the custom modules, I feel like I am just now figuring out how useful they are.

A redesign is already on the list but will have to wait, now it's time to make some friends

As promised here are the Virb resources available for download (inludes photoshop file and HTML source code of default template).

Download Virb Resources