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Saturday, 01/28/2012

The Obligatory Blog Redesign Post

I know, the last design was only, like, two posts away, but I felt ready for some colour this grey albeit mild winter but was too lazy to come up with a new design from scratch. I checked out collections after collections of free WordPress themes but they all seemed to have this “slap a gigantic image on top and put a slider on it” attitude that I detest. Solution? Spend money on a premium theme that I really like! I didn’t even spend that much money. I didn’t buy from one of those design studios that offer a lot of themes with a premium subscription fee. I’m allergic enough to commitment not to want to subscribe to anything willingly. Sorry, web design studios, I just want to pay for one theme that I like without having to subscribe because I might not want another design from you ever again.

So yeah, I paid for a theme I came across that I really liked and had all the features I wanted, especially the ability to post multiple format entries a la Tumblr. The only thing I didn’t like about the theme out of the box was the colour scheme, but it was easy to change. One child theme and a few lines of CSS later, I got it to look just the way I want it. I’m still not sure about the header image that I made with a graphic from a CD that comes with an art deco book I bought last month from a reduced price bookstore in St. Catharines, but I’m sure it’ll grow on me. If not, all I have to do is come up with another one that I like better and slap it on. Easy peasy.

Resources I found useful this n-th blog redesign (don’t really remember how many times I’ve redesigned this blog in the last 12 years):

My god, this post is so boring I’m falling asleep writing it. Next post shall be more interesting, promise!

PS. Please send me a haiku?

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Tuesday, 01/10/2012

Here We Go Again!

Foggy Field

And suddenly, it’s 2012! How long has it been since my last update? Let’s see… Oh, only 3 months. I’ve done worse. What can I say, I’m a crappy blogger. I should’ve stuck to posting stupid links to my blog instead of trying to be all deep and thoughtful and write journally entries that no one gives a crap about. Even I don’t give a crap. But why am I writing this? Um, out of guilt, I guess? The two or three people who are still reading this blog deserve to find something new here every once in a while.

So, since this is my first post of 2012, I should probably write about the highlights of 2011. Well, I became a full-fledged Canadian citizen in March and voted in my first federal election in May. Sadly the Conservatives won a majority government this time. And later in the provincial election, the Conservatives won in our riding so now we’re represented by a Tory in the parliament. Sigh. PEOPLE, Y U NO VOTE?!?

In June, we made it to Newfoundland and back. Did a fair amount of hiking, ate a lot of fish. I even had a moose burger once (good but kind of dry) as well as iceberg tea (iced tea with chunks of iceberg in it). I found out that iceberg doesn’t melt very quickly in your mouth (it’s so dense). It was an amazing trip with a lot of moose and some iceberg sightings. Words can’t do it justice. Go there if you can! Don’t wait until you’re old and retired and not fit enough to do a lot of hiking! I would love to go back there again someday.

Right after the trip to Newfoundland, we took up a new hobby, which is geocaching. Soon I decided that I prefer hiding geocaches to trying to find them because I’m not a big fan of beating around the bush. When we go geocaching, I usually just observe the area around the ground zero and try to figure out where the geocache would be with my mind’s eye. If there are bushes to beat around, I’ll just summon Troy to do the dirty work. Yes, I’m a princess. But Troy actually enjoys beating around the bush so I don’t feel too bad about it.

And the last but not the least highlight is, I finally got an Etsy shop up and running. Not only that, I even got people buying the stuff I was selling! Craziness! I’d thought it would never happen! I sell vintage cameras (mostly Polaroids) and expired film on Etsy. It’s enjoyable. I like selling stuff that I actually care about and getting to meet customers who love cameras and film photography as much as I do, if not more. Having a shop also makes our weekend thrifting rounds more exciting because I have something specific to find as opposed to just thrifting for whatever, and when I do find cool cameras, I just can’t wait to list them at my shop. Except, of course, I have to procrastinate and now I have a big pile of cameras waiting to be listed. Such is my life.

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Thursday, 10/20/2011

Cars

Morris Minor

Our first car was an army green Willys Jeep with a tarp roof that leaks in the rain. If we went out for a drive and it started to rain, then we were SOOL. The leak was always the worst on the back side of the car so we poor kids always got soaked. “Hang in there, kids! We’re almost home!” were the magic words my parents would say to us. No patches could fix the leak on the roof, and it was well-patched up all right. The car wasn’t exactly ours. It was my dad’s work vehicle. But it will always be our first car to me.

Our second car was a brown Daihatsu Taft. Another jeep-type vehicle from dad’s work. It was a replacement for the old Willys. He eventually bought it off from work. He had it painted Ferrari red when he was having a mid-life identity crisis (he was always in the middle of a mid-life identity crisis in one form or another for as long as I can remember). He sold the car to a relative after my mother died and I left for Canada, to help my older brother pay off his credit card debts.

Our third car was my mum’s car. It was the only car we ever bought brand new from a dealership. It was a maroon Toyota Kijang (a family van, very popular in Indonesia). I have a lot of good memories of my mum and I in that car. I used to like to go to her office after school (as in university) so we could drive home together and chat abut anything and everything along the way. It was the same vehicle that took my mum to the hospital, never to come home again. My older brother sold the car after my mum passed away and I left for Canada, to pay for his wife’s hospital bills.

I learned to drive on the Daihatsu Taft. I never went to get my license because Indonesian drivers are crazy and I’m not that brave. But at the very least, I know how to drive stick.

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Wednesday, 09/07/2011

Refreshed, Rejuvenated, Redesigned

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After trying on more WordPress themes than I care to admit, I decided to settle with the Typominima theme. Granted that I had to add a bunch of features and modified a bunch of things to it to fit my need, but I liked the bold typography and the layout so much, I didn’t mind having to do some extra work. In fact, I quite enjoyed the extra work as it helped me learn the inner working of WordPress. So much so that I think I’m ready to tackle my next project, which is to create a WordPress theme from scratch.

Here’s a list of modifications and additions I did to the theme that I could remember:

  1. Moved the search bar and subscription link from the top of the page to above the footer, just because I thought they looked out of place up there.
  2. Changed the markup of the blog title from div to H1 for better SEO.
  3. Changed the web font replacement service from Cufon (Typo Slab Serif) to Google Web Fonts (Vidaloka), mostly because I wasn’t sure of the search engine-friendliness of Cufon.
  4. Changed the colour scheme. I’ve always been a fan of “black and white and red all over.”
  5. Made threaded comment work with the theme. Kind of.
  6. Added “Edit” link to posts and comments.
  7. Added “Reply” link to comments.
  8. Added next and previous post navigation links to every post.

Um, what else? I’m sure there are more. I just can’t remember. Or maybe it just feels like there should be more because it took me two days worth of tinkering before I’m close to being happy with it.

One thing I would still like to do is add a comment link to the bottom of every post on the main page, which I already know how to do, but I don’t want it to show on main page posts with a “Read More” link. I don’t know if that sentence makes any sense, but if it does to you, and you know where I can find the script, I’d appreciate it if you could let me know. Also any feedback as to readability and browser compatibility would be much appreciated.

On a sort of related note, the importer script I used to migrate the posts from Movable Type to WordPress didn’t translate the Markdown markups on the original posts (I had Markdown on by default on Movable Type) on import so some of the posts are still looking pretty ugly, but I’m gradually rendering the markups, one post at a time. Hopefully they’ll all be looking pretty in, say, 3 years from now. Heh.

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Sunday, 09/04/2011

Time For A Change

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Well, I finally caved in and abandoned my long-time blogging partner, Movable Type, for WordPress, for a few good reasons:

  1. The company that created Movable Type was sold to another company that doesn’t seem to be interested in its development.
  2. I’ve become too lazy to come up with a blog design from scratch for my blog and there are so many ready-to-use WordPress themes out there I could use.
  3. WordPress seems to be so much better than it was the last time I decided to switch to it, which was 6 years ago. That switch didn’t last very long. But this time, I think I’m keeping it.
  4. It would be nice to get myself familiarized with the way WordPress works in case I feel like going back to the blog design business again some day. Most bloggers seem to be using WordPress these days.

There is a pretty steep learning curve, which was expected, but I’m eager to learn. It’s a lot like having a new toy. Every time I figure out how to do something with it, I have to cheer a little. :) What I didn’t expect was how difficult it was going to be to find a simple but interesting two-column theme with nice typography considering the number of themes available out there. Maybe I’m just too picky.

I’m still trying to customize the blog a little more, trying to do some learning by doing. There’s still some wonkiness in the archive pages that I need to fix and my RSS feed is also very much wonky and need fixing (sorry for all the old entries showing up on your feed readers multiple times). Please bear with me while WordPress and I are learning to become BFF. :)

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