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Season’s Epilogue WordPress Template

Categorised as Design, Site-Related & tagged with Design, wordpress.

Season's Epilogue

The way out of a design-block is to rant about a design-block on your blog, because I just finished my first WordPress template! It was the third design I said I was on the verge of scraping, but right after the rant post I changed the colour scheme and now it’s complete… After three days.

So I finally get to open my virtually empty Resources section… After two months. It’s only virtually empty because I have stacks of PHP tutorials sitting in the corner of my D drive.

Coding the template for WordPress sucked the juice out of my brain and I’m waiting for it to recover in 24 hours. Perhaps because it was a first attempt, but I thought it really did have the potential of driving an inex­per­i­enced sane person nuts, let alone a somewhat insane young lady like me. I had to do several peek-a-boos in the default WordPress theme and Han’s How to write your own wordpress theme. But there’s always dif­fer­ences between one coding/tutorial and your own template so that was… trouble.

Well, I’m satisfied with the design because I actually feel like using it for my site design. I guess if you could create a pre-made design that you think is good enough for your actual site, then it should be reas­on­ably good enough for you to offer to visitors.

I’m going to see if working on my Stat­ist­ics assign­ment will help recover my sweet brain juice. Critiques and error reports for the template (or anything on the entire site, really) is welcome.

A snapshot of youth

Categorised as Arts & tagged with drawings.

I started three designs and got stuck. Seems like I’ve lost my old sense of “artistic” designs and started joining in the trend of the whole “clean and simple” blog designs. Don’t know whether that’s a good thing or not but I’m not very good with it either. Official design block and driving me nuts. Any inspir­a­tion ideas? Here’s me on the verge of scraping my latest design.

So in place of my design block, I opened up a new canvas in Photoshop and started more doodling in remin­is­cence of my high school days last year. I welcome my gang: Meep/Eeep from me, BoBo from Jennifer (I fail to draw the evolved version) and the r3t4Rd3d Momo from Mona.

Meep Bo Mo Gang

I remember how we’d very naively sing It’s a Small World to my lyrics and the junior girls would look at us with unanimous weird expres­sions since they had always thought we were “mature” senior students.

The bulk of our comic strips were evil acts against Mo because well… It’s a pretty… r3t4Rd3d-looking goldfish.

Evil acts against Mo

And I just pro­cras­tin­ated more from studying. But today’s the first day of my two-week holidays, give me a break. Now I need design inspir­a­tion, inspir­a­tion, inspir­a­tion… They’re looking so plain and boring and doodling makes me blanker. Grrr.

Dream-aroused fantasy

Categorised as Personal, Romance & tagged with drawings, dream, love.

Do you often have vivid dreams where you’re able to remember clearly the next morning the “dream dimension” you had entered into the previous night? I don’t have many of these vivid dreams where I can recall them long enough for me to record into my “dream diary”, but I still maintain one.

I only started this year and I’ve managed to record a few inter­est­ing adven­tures. By “inter­est­ing” I mean super­nat­ural and horror, a few stupid ones too, and one of them though not bothered to be recorded, has remained vivid enough for me to attempt writing a novel out of.

Two other vivid dreams I had perhaps two years ago I can still remember the bulk of their plots. This was how my fantasy for vampires deepened. (It had already started earlier from two romance novels.) I dreamt I met my vampire soul-mate in first-year at uni­ver­sity so I’m sulking now because my first-year is almost over and still no sign of him. (I’m not really sulking it’s just the feeling of “sigh, awww”.)

So the other day, I was having a weird argument with my friend on MSN, as usual. And we were debating about vampires. He said vampires are violent and bloody but I argued that vampires are romantic and sexy. They also have cute pet bats. “Cute?” Well, here’s my random doodle-depiction of cute vampire pet bats:

Vampire bats

Normal bats are… normal. But vampire bats are cute because they’re fat and round. That is because vampires are rich and powerful, they live in beautiful antique-style villas and mansions or the grand medieval castles, so their pet bats get well-fed. (At least in my fantasy dimension they do.)

Agree? Disagree?

Fantasies keep up your ima­gin­at­ive and creative young self and I studied my history. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered that powerful line: I have a dream. We should believe in our “dreams”, right?