After many headaches, my very first blogger design has been accomplished for my blogspot site “Little Mayvelous Things“. There are a lot need fixing yet it’s up and running as planned.
The first impressions I’ve got from some reviewers (very unfavorable reviewers: my bro and sis), it’s was “Eeeuu PINK!”, “Too Childish”, “Very girlie”, “Too flowery”, etc etc…I was pretty disappointed that they didn’t like my design.
Nevertheless, my siblings are always too much pain in the … that I’m so use to ignoring them.
Anyway it took me the whole day and night to think of the layout, color, font and design as I never been good with designing.

I’m trying my hand on site designing and hope to design this main site when I have time. Blogger template is easier to redesign than wordpress cos’ blogger has only one file to think of where else WP involve lots of template files. Another reason I’m very slow in rework of mayvelous.com is that I have no php/mysql experience and never build a site using those. So cracking each WP theme templates line by line is very painful process especially when you’re not familiar with php coding.
Anyway now my first step of cracking blogger template has been done, there’ll be only sometime I manage to crack WP as well.
May be next year… will put that in my new year resolution.

So please do visit my newly redesigned site and review how you like or hate about it. Any help or suggestions regarding accessibility issues/errors are most welcome and will try to fix them as I can.
The design is still in progress with a few layout adjustment to made. Anyway I had a busy xmas weekend with that.
Hope you enjoy browsing “Little Mayvelous Things“.

Technorati Tags: redesign, template, theme, blogging, blogspot, sitereview

My favorite photos of the week. Just relaxing in our front yard.
Such a sunny hot day. It’s so suffocating inside so we all chilling out under the mango trees.

Oh yah that’s my mom making faces at my brother. She always joke around with us. She’s such a nice mom as well as a great friend to us.

P.S. Don’t joke with my dad, he’s no fun. Only when he’s in good mood then good to tease. Otherwise you’ll get a yell.
He seems pretty good mood then in the picture tho.

Well, well it’s Christmas eve here and I got nothing to do except watch a few DVDs over long weekend. I got some books to finish and some songs to listen.
Apart from that we got no plan for this 4 days long weekend. May be my mom might make some good cooking tomorrow.
Anyway we don’t celebrate Christmas so we never know the real joy of Christmas except that it’s a good relax holiday for us.

Anyway I’m here to wish you all “Happy, Merry & most enjoyable Christmas!”.
Enjoy your long festive weekend and be safe & merry.

P.S. I received a few Christmas cards from my friends and I’m so ashamed that I forgot to send them one. I don’t know what’s wrong with me these days. Weeks passed by so quickly and I keep forgetting things that I need to do. May be I’ll send them late xmas + new year card next week.
Oh the image is just for fun, my bro sent me that one last year and it’s pretty funny so I kept it for this year.
No, no, I’m not sending that to my friends.

A friend of mine passed me this link “Why you should continue to date me” and it’s really nice/funny diagrammatic summary of reasonings. Although he took great effort in creating those charts, luck wasn’t on his side.
Poor Guy.

I just want to say, she did not continue to date me.
I’m a weirdo, but available : )

Link: See the slide show of “Why you should continue to date me” at “Culture hole”.

I just switched to FireFox 1.5 now(yah I know I’m late) and my “JustBlogIt” and “ScreenGrab” got screwed up so I’m testing this new “Performancing” extension. I’m useing that extension to post this entry.

I was really annoyed first cos’ I’ve just installed the extension and couldn’t find how to make use of it. I mean where in the name to click or set setting or post?

There is no option in the extensions panel to set the blog options and I can’t find any trace of how it works at all on “Performancing.com” site.
May be people are too smart or I’m too stupid that the site doesn’t provide a page explaining how to use it. Not even a single screen shot of things in action.

I took me 3 min to search through the site and I couldn’t find it so I search on my browser for any new icons. Finally I found it.
Boy I was like phheeewwww!! What a place to let people notice.

Ok now the good part about it. I really love the interface, it’s just within your browser and no pop up or new windows. Whichever tabs you switch it’s there.

The only thing I want them to improve it make it collapsiable+resizable instead of only resizable panel. Would be very handy to collapse the panel and open again whenever you want.

It’s compatible for the following blogs:

• Blogger.com
• WordPress.com
• TypePad.com
• LiveJournal
• WordPress Custom
• MoveableType

You just add your blogs in there and the categories and posts history of each blogs will show up. Very fast retrival of categories and posts.

One more thing they should improve is instead of having “Clear Content” button to clear history post that you view before and add new entry, they need to add “Create New Post” button for accessibility and user friendliness.

Clear content button can confuse users whether their old posts got clear away or are they really creating new post entry.
Well it’s abit hard to explain, you got to test it out to see what I mean by that.

Ok now this is gonna be my replacement for “JustBlogIt” and I’m loving it.

I think you’ll like that too.
Get it at Performancing.com.

Oh yah, you got to have firefox 1.5 to use it.

Updated::
Just checked the Performancing site and Jed Brown has posted a nice compilation of HOW TO: Using Performancing for Firefox article with screen shots and a nice spell check firefox extension link. Worth checking out.
I was looking for this kind of article yesterday…abit slow with documentation I guess but still it’s there now and the article is really useful.

Technorati Tags: firefox, extension, technorati, performancing

This is very interesting and hilarious english paper I’ve ever seen.
They got A+ for that and I guess I would give the same if I was the teacher.
You really gotta read it to the end. I bet you like it.

The story started from here:

Remember the book “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus”? Well, here’s
a prime example offered by an English professor at an American University.

“Today we will experiment with a new form of composition called the tandem
story. The process is simple. Each person will pair off with the person
sitting to his or her immediate right. One of you will then write the
first paragraph of a short story. The partner will read the first
paragraph and then add another paragraph to the story. The first person
will then add a third paragraph, and so on back and forth.

Remember to reread what has been written each time in order to keep the
story coherent. There is to be absolutely NO talking and anything you wish
to say must be written on the paper. The story is over when both agree a
conclusion has been reached.”

This totally point out the difference between the She(s) and the He(s) way of thinking and creative writing styles.

Link: He versus She

I was checking out this site design review of Magnitude by CSS Drive and thinking how strangly they created the drop cap effect in their pages. They make use of that effect in almost all the pages and every single time they added an image for the very drop cap letter.
Man, that’s just not right.

I would expect a bit more from web+interactive company like theirs to show more professionalism in their site. After all the first impression sometime counts and in this case the company portfolio site would determine the reputation and skills behind it. Anyway I like the design, very artistic with interesting decay looking text and I like the left menu. The only problem I see is Drop Cap characters.

If I have to do drop cap I would rather use css for that. I’ve tested it and it’s really easy. You need only 3 lines or so.
Well for my own note as well as for you (if you wanna know) the CSS code for Drop Cap effect and implementation as shown below.

#dropcap
{
	float: left;
        font-size:300%;
        font-weight: bold;
        line-height:50px;
}

<p><span id="dropcap">W</span>orem ipsum dolor sit amet,
consectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonummy nibh euismod tincidunt ut laoreet dolore magna aliquam erat volutpat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. </p>

There see short and sweet. No need to create image characters everytime you wanna make that effect. Ok you just have to adjust font size and line height according to your need.
That’s it, I gotta sleep.
Cheers.