WordPress murdered my juice
28 August 2007, 2:56 pm. 24 Comments. Filed under Design, Site-related.
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.
History dug out
5 August 2007, 4:47 pm. 26 Comments. Filed under Miscellaneous, Site-related, Web-related.
When you look back at your old design works, do you feel proud about how much you have improved?
Fortunately, thanks to Internet Archive, I've found one of my favourite designs from the past. And unfortunately, I think I like it more than this current design. I shall enlighten you with a little snapshot: Version 12. How bad does it feel? To think that you designed better three years ago than now? But I'll comfort myself by the fact that I have certainly improved in terms of layout accessibility and coding. By the way, Version 11 had 46 header slices. I crown myself Queen of "Optimisation".
So what were you like several years ago? According to Version 4, I was quite a little brat. You know, that type of attitude many 13 or 14-year-old girls roaming on the web has (I'm just being stereotypical here), which a lot of us probably despise of. The following proves self-explanatory:
Splash page:
Requirements :+: CSS :: PHP :: 800 x 600+ :: IE 5.5 :: Sign Guestbook!
I then greet you all with a "Would you like to vote for my site at DNW Top 100?" pop-up. Surely, that earnt me a lot of votes! I mean really, it did. I also had a changing title bar! How cool is that? But the post on 14 July 2003 was "teh biatch":
Watch out people... You skip the splash page I kill you...
Reason? I placed my OKcounter on the splash page. I wanted to see the numbers go up so skipping was a no-no! Attention-seeker. And I also had a "Wall of Shame". Hee hee heee.
Forgive me, I was 13. I really want to know what I had on my ancient "Wall of Shame" and how I constructed my "Rules/FAQ"; but those pages were gone.
A while ago I also dug out my childhood diary and this was on the front page: (excuse the poor English, it was during my first year in NZ)
Date: 15.9.98
... some people get some letters from me. The letters inside, I had write somethings about Jenny was so bad, when after holidays, she came back to NZ, she didn't have any friend can play with her, Ha! ha! because I'll writing letter to everybody about she was very very bad...
Hey, how cool was that? Miss eight-year-old egghead. Incredibly cute though, the last pages of the diary were filled with my personal "love stories" from 2001. I wonder what I'll think of myself now in a few years' time?
Halfway through
1 July 2007, 2:15 am. 11 Comments. Filed under Holiday, Site-related.
It is currently 2am. I just finished two pages: Reading Log and Quotes. Amazing, isn't it? I couldn't find the book cover of that first book I read (Perfume) anywhere on Amazon or Google Images. So I'll need to scan that in another time. Oh, and not to forget, I strongly recommend that book! If you don't like reading, watch the movie. 
It's a reasonably new movie that came out at the end of last year and it's just... well, indescribable now because I'm falling asleep.
But oh, I love the holidays. I love living in a fictional world as a form of "escape" out of this little cage I live in... that's another long story. On the other hand, it's already been two weeks of my holidays gone, halfway through! Life goes so fast when you're enjoying yourself.
And thanks for all the comments and feedback on the new design in the last entry. One change to be expected if and when I (ever) finish all the rest of the content: I'm adding a little "something" to the left side of the design header. Given there's still plenty of space leftover after the addition of the little "something", I will enlarge the site title on the header so... bear with me if it looks a little empty up there for the moment being!
I shall now... "scramble" into my sweet bed...
One more thing: I woke up. It's July 1st here but still June 30th in Canada so... Happy Birthday Veve!
Update: That blog search form was easy. That Archives selection to the right was a mental killer. Challenging my limits gives a feeling of ecstasy—after success.
