Surprise!<\/p>\n
Welcome to my new blog.<\/p>\n
Or rather, my blog, reborn.<\/p>\n
After years of sitting on Brinkster<\/a> (since December 2000, using it to test scripts for Xfresh<\/a>), I finally got round to finish coding my blog. Yes, I am not powered by WordPress<\/b>. This programmer ethic was inspired by DJCS<\/a>, the walking-talking-DNS-server and uber geek, who also coded his own blog.<\/p>\n You’ll notice some new features, like categories (I’m not done putting blog entries in categories; I’ll announce when it’s done), a new skin, Cubed<\/a>, that is now default, replacing the 17-month-reigning Trained<\/a>. (Yep, no more staring at people sitting on the LRT.)<\/p>\n Yes, you can still change skins, if you miss looking at people sitting on the LRT.<\/p>\n Or, if you miss me, you can come sit with me on the LRT. If there are seats available, and no more deserving people to sit in them.<\/p>\n What was the idea\/theme\/motif behind Cubed?<\/b><\/p>\n I just wanted to shock people. Make people go, whoa<\/b>. Make people realize that hey, this is not the same site anymore. It does not have a default black background. No, it does not have anything to do with the black metal incident<\/a>; I’ve always wanted to make my next one a colorful one.<\/p>\n As for the left-side image, it’s inspired by my love for Rubik’s Cubes. Somehow, I accidentally made the lines grey instead of black, and that’s where the sketch-like cube came from. The font was picked because it could not be held seriously; same with the colors. The rainbow was a last-minute addition, and the dithered pattern effect was made by saving the image as a 16-color GIF file, not through Photoshop. I liked the effect, as it was reminiscent of good old Windows 3.1 and 640×480 at 16-color VGA displays (or 320×240 at 256-color VGA displays.) Meanwhile, the font was more 70’s retro, making a mishmash that would never have happened in 1993.<\/p>\n The preface text on the sidebar did not need a background; it miraculously could be read across the screen. \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n Yeah, just so you all know I’m not always serious even though I was born with a serious face, yo.<\/p>\n You can still add a comment with your email address, and the email address would come out jumbled to spambots, but clickable to humans. You don’t need to type a subject anymore (well it’s been that way for a while anyway.) There’s also a calendar view at the bottom, where you can view blog entries by the month or year.<\/p>\n As for other horribly-named blog terms like permalink, trackback and pinging, well… experiment with the Replies link at the bottom of each entry.<\/p>\n Give me more life stories!<\/b><\/p>\n I started a website in 1998 under XOOM.COM, as it was known then, to host my Quake 2 plugin-player models<\/a>. My first ever URL? http:\/\/members.xoom.com\/albnok<\/b>. It did not have ads then<\/b>! It was then bought over by NBCi.COM. Around that time too, I registered for a free<\/b> domain name under NameZero.com (it was either that or the only other competitor then).<\/p>\n So, about 5 years before this, I had http:\/\/www.albnok.com\/<\/b>.<\/p>\n That domain died, and I started blogging in December 2001<\/a>. Other than me and DJCS, I haven’t a clue who else has such a long contiguous stretch of blog entries on one server, one system. TV Smith<\/a> perhaps? Paul<\/a> had dozens of subdirectories, subdomains and domains before arriving at his current one, but I am not able to access his archives, so yeah.<\/p>\n