Category Archives: Announcements

Spring Cleaning

2006 Style.

It’s spring, which is traditionally known as a good time for cleaning. In our digital age, it’s only natural that a proportional amount of time be dedicated to the cleaning of digital things, i.e. internet blogs. After someone special suggested it to me, I decided to merge my old blog – which contains the pictures I took in Japan in 2006 – with this site.

While that blog was hosted on this server, I didn’t really have full creative control – I made it using Blogger, which is a Google company nowadays (surprise!), and they had changed tons of things since I last logged in. Not to mention that I had forgotten the password long since. 😛

So after the usual administrative stuff was done (WordPress update, plugin updates, database backups), and I had found a way to organize the pictures properly, I spent the last few hours with replicating the old posts. The result is quite nice in my opinion. If you feel like revisiting (my) Japan, feel free to do so here, at the first post in the series.

Also, this is not an April fool’s joke.

Relaunch

Another year has passed, I’m returning again to look after my website… and boy, this doesn’t look good at all. Literally. After running to get confirmation from my girlfriend, the verdict is clear: this website’s style has aged, and it hasn’t aged well. Not only is it green, it also looks totally 2007. Which, coincidentally, was when I designed it.

It's the Hulk!

So I decided to overhaul everything, starting from scratch. First, some backend maintenance needed to be done though. Since update 3.2, WordPress doesn’t support MySQL4 databases anymore. I think I already had had the choice to use a MySQL5 database when I started this, but I can’t for the life of me remember why I chose to make do with the older version. Hence, I had to migrate the old database to a new version before I’d be able to do any design work.

That done, I really did start from scratch. The current version of WordPress comes with the theme Twenty Eleven 1.2, and I used that as a basis for what you can see now. So far I’ve only modified some of the PHP templates and fiddled a bit with the CSS. I’m sure I’ll do a lot more before I fall into the next hiatus which’ll surely last until next year’s summer. 😉

Stay tuned.

It’s That Time of the Year Again…

…when I decide to post an update to my website, which I have shamefully neglected for the past twelve months. Despite promising regular updates every time I do this, I never actually do it. Oh well…

However, there’s actually something to report. I added a linkroll for my Delicious bookmarks to the Links page, replacing the text that stated that I would, at some undetermined point in the future, add some actual links to the page. Tadaa! The linkroll will always display the most recent bookmarks I save to Delicious, and I might even play around with the CSS to style them properly. Might. Might not.

In other news, I jumped on the Twitter bandwagon. As with other fancy Web 2.0 stuff, I’m one of the first to know about it, and one of the last to adopt it. So, if you feel like following my more or less regular tweets, go to my Twitter page.

So long!

Updating WordPress

Since I’ve never really done much here since I built the original site, the WordPress version I was using was pretty old already. Today I finally got ’round to taking care of that, and it seems I was successful: the “news” page is now running the latest WordPress version, 2.8.2, and thanks to the new update routine, upgrading should be much easier in the future.

On the administrative side, there’s the new WordPress content management system/dashboard which makes quite a few tasks more convenient to handle for me. On the visitor’s side, there’s not much new at the first glance. However, you might notice the overhauled sidebar, which is now widget-enabled for more compatibility if I decide to add new sidebar items in the future.

2nd Anniversary

There we go again. It’s been another year of zero contributions by me to my own website. *sigh*

Now, I never wrote this here, but I’ve been playing the infamous MMORPG World of Warcraft almost since the game was released in Europe. There, it’s done, I said it. Admittedly, the excitement wore off after a while, and now I rarely log on to the game anymore if there isn’t a big new content patch or something similar going on. I do, however, still enjoy designing and re-designing my user interface for the game. Blizzard has been very open to the question of UI customisation, and nowadays there is a wide range of AddOns developed by enthusiastic players all over the world. While I lack the skill to write AddOns myself (which requires in-depth knowledge of LUA coding), I use many of them to build my own UI, and sometimes I even modify the .lua files to change some small things in them.

So, while I don’t have anything really exciting to post here, I’ll show off a screenshot of my current WoW UI… here it is:

This is what my UI looks like while fighting.

See you next year! 😛

omuraisu

extracurricular activities