It also, much to the dismay of others, featured some rather politically motivated photography… in fact many of our themes did. We decided that, in the interests of a wider audience, we’d do away with that – plus we couldn’t find a good high-res photo that was copyright free and I’m not quite rich enough to pay for stock photography.

So instead, I took a high-res photo of the GU1 “Extreme” graphics board out of my Indigo2, and based the theme off of that. You can just see the tip of the SGI logo under the top of the star on our header.

We started coding a theme from scratch, but decided in the end to just hack up a pre-made one. We borrowed “Arthemia” from Michael Hutagalung, and pretty much just reversed the color schemes. Rather than roll new images for the rounded edges, we decided to make use of CSS3′s blossoming features… after all, Google’s trashing IE6 so that gives us an excuse to as well. The great news is that it should degrade gracefully for the most part, which was always important to us.

As time goes by we’ll be ripping out more of the IE6-based insanity from the theme, cleaning it up and making it lighter and faster. I’m sure it’ll take us quite a while to find all the little stuff that’s buried in it, but the results will be worth it.

Eventually we’ll likely release it under the terms of the GPL (not my favorite license, but the license to WP and Arthemia leaves us little options) once we feel the code is clean enough.

Thumbnailing

We use Flickr, so we ditched the thumbnailer included in the script – TimThumb. However, it we were to use it, we would likely turbocharge TimThumb with aggressive caching.

Social Media Icons

In order to speed things up, we decided to take the “sociable” icons included with the theme, throw them away, spruce the icons up a bit with a couple of free icon sets (Social Media Mini and Social Media Bookmark, courtesy of FindIcons) and then merge them into a CSS Sprite.

Welcome to the new Hungry Hacker.  I will add more to this later.

The guys who cover a soda can in 200 LEDs and then try to drink it before the tiny battery goes flat? That’s us. The guys who take apart Sega Dreamcasts and then name the hapless consoles after porn stars? Guilty as charged.

We started this site many, many years ago. Truth be told, it started life as a Hacker’s mail-order – supporting myself as best I could by selling off things I’d found for well below their worth at flea markets and things I’d found in garbage cans. Things that other hackers like myself might find interesting to play with.

When things improved financially and I no longer had to resort to going through trash, we turned the site into a clearing house for all manner of articles on just about any topic available. We built up quite an array of articles, many of which we hope to clean up and put back at some point.

One of the things we aimed to do, and have thus far managed to maintain, is to prevent our site from falling victim to advertising. For starters, there has, in it’s life time, been exactly one banner on the entire website – a big pat on the back for anyone loyal enough to tell us what it was for.

The rest of our advertising has been limited to text links – mainly to affiliate programs for things like eBay, where we’d link to stuff that was useful or otherwise interesting and get paid for it. Absolutely no weight as to the monetary rewards of a link was given, the links were either in a completely arbitrary order or they were in order of relevance.

We’re sticking to our guns at this stage, and we’re going to continue this trend: No outward advertising will be found on these pages for the foreseeable future.

The site’s been a little bit dormant lately, we’re hoping the revamp changes that. We’re making it easier on our authors, and hopefully we can turn out some quality content periodically in the future.

The first thing we’re going to be posting is mini-bios about the guys that make up the site, and then we’ll work on getting some great content up.