For the past day or so, I’ve been thinking about creating a WordPress plugin to display recently “dugg” stories from Digg.com. Then I remembered that Digg offers RSS feeds for each individual user, so you can keep up on items your friends are interested in. Writing a whole plugin to display a simple, styled RSS feed is overkill, and more work than I want to do.

Browsing around for a simpler solution, I discovered the highly configurable Feed2JS, which will take RSS data and display it using JavaScript. After tinkering in BBEdit and Photoshop for about half an hour, I had my newly created Dugg Stories section up and running, complete with RSS caching. The results of my efforts can be seen at right (jump there). That was far easier than writing a whole plugin, doing caching, and handling XML. (If you decide to do your own Digg sidebar area, feel free to swipe my Dugg Stories header image. I may also post the Photoshop file I created, if there’s interest.)

Update
Here is the Photoshop file I created along the way.

Recently, my Photoshop posts have been lacking in layers, which I tend to equate with how much others can learn from them. A file with few layers really only allows for simple usage of the content, and leaves little room to learn from. To try and make up for some of that, here’s a multi-multi-layer Halo 2 Photoshop file where a large portion of the background was cut away to make the image fit the design on (the subsequently redesigned) Xbox.com.

You can view the original screenshot here to see how much area had to be recreated. Luckily, I just happened to have some good source material to pull from. The photo used to rebuild the missing chunk of sky is quite possibly part of the original Halo 2 artwork, as it’s from a PDF I stumbled upon not too long ago. Looking at the original PDF, you’ll notice parts of the sky which have cloud formations matching those in the screenshot. With some clone stamp work, color adjustments, and a new black gradient, the restored image looks good as new. While the original Halo 2 image surely exists somewhere out there, this is a decent Photoshop file tutorial showing how to merge two related images with minimal changes.

Whether you use it for something, learn from it, or just find the files cool to check out, I’d like to hear from you! I know I always enjoy looking through others’ Photoshop files to see how they do things. Could I do anything to improve my posts? Have any requests?

With the upcoming release of the Xbox 360, I thought it would be fitting to post a few related images I had squirreled away (I save almost everything interesting I come across — a digital packrat).

The first image I have is the new Xbox Live logo for the Xbox 360, which uses the new, official, Helvetica-looking Xbox font. I like the old blocky font more, but I’m sure Microsoft will still manage to pull the marketing materials together nicely. Overall, I enjoy the Xbox marketing styles far more than those used for Windows.

The second file is an Xbox 360 ad I saw on a website, and recreated it in Photoshop. You can see the preview here, or download the layered Photoshop file. Enjoy!

Following a request, I edited a bunch of high resolution Tiger icons out of Jaron Brass’ excellent Tiger wallpapers and saved them as PNG files with a mask so they can be placed on any background image or color. The Mac OS X icons were originally designed by Cesar Carrera (and copyright Apple — don’t sue me, please!), however I’m not sure if the ones included here are all his. In this set, you’ll find:

• Address Book
• the Applications icon
• Automator
• Bonjour
• Core Audio/Image/Video
• Dashboard
• .Mac
• FileVault
• Finder
• the Home icon
• iChat
• Keychain
• “Mac HD”
• .Mac Sync
• Mail
• Preview
• QuickTime
• Safari
• Spotlight
• Xcode
• the Apple logo from “About This Mac…”

Each image about 500px in size, which is considerably larger than what you’ll find in Mac OS X’s standard icons. Here’s a preview sheet of what you can expect. If you like what you see, download the whole lot (3.7 MB). Personally, I’ve used a few in the past for sprucing up Keynote presentations given at MUG meetings. I’m not sure what other purposes they have — post below if you find them useful!