Aston Villa Central
Aston Villa Central began to come to life towards the end of 2008, but the curtain wasn’t really yanked away until January 2009. The aim at first was to provide a home for the wallpapers and videos I was making at the time, but also to share some statistical research work now and again.
That was the aim anyway, I didn’t really intend to write much myself, but it wasn’t long before I began to enjoy the writing process (most of the time) and the blog took on a life of its own. The focus has always been to do something different from the existing blogs in the same sector; a lot of work has gone into researching and creating original content and the way it’s presented.
AVC is built on the WordPress platform and has been through several iterations over the last couple of years; the current version being 3.5 following a significant re-boot to the existing theme(s) for 2011. AVC actually uses two installations of WordPress, one each for the blog and wallpaper mini-site, and the news aggregator is powered by SimplePie.
Aston Villa Blog
The blog is the backbone of AVC and is naturally housed in the root WordPress installation, the posts displayed on the front page in a typical linear fashion with a sidebar on the right.
You can subscribe to the blog RSS feed here.
Aston Villa Wallpapers
I’ve uploaded more than 70 wallpapers to AVC, most available in multiple sizes including some images designed for mobile devices like the iPhone and Blackberry. A number of suitable existing wallpapers are currently being re-configured for iPad.
You can subscribe to the wallpaper RSS feed here.
The Villa Wire
The Villa Wire is a news aggregator in the same vein as popurls and Alltop, preferring to use only a select number of sources in their own fixed location on the screen over the “river of news” format favoured by most aggregators.
The Villa Wire was a forerunner of footballURLs, another AWAY!!DESIGN project.
Aston Twitter
When originally conceived, Aston Twitter consisted of two frames using Monitter scripts to update live Tweets from opposing sets of fans during matches to form a kind of “crowd-sourced” commentary. Early tests using the 2009 Super Bowl suggested the idea had some merit, but the volume of Tweets during Premiership matches never got close to replicating the early promise and development stalled.
For now, then, Aston Twitter uses search widgets developed by Twitter to provide live updates of several key, preset search terms and remains “just for fun”.
