The Kick-Off

By the time you read this post, I’m on my flight to Miri, Sarawak, to pursue my studies for 3rd Semester, 1st Year, Applied Geology at Curtin University of Technology, Sarawak Campus. Enjoy reading!

Alhamdulillah.  Thank God, I finish re-design this blog: my first WordPress blog. It tooks me 4 months to start the works, and 2 weeks to finish all those stuff: designing, PSD cutting, HTML coding, CSS styling, and the last part, Debugging all my codes. Some might questioning me, why I stopped blogging at my.opera.com/cola_sced. Well, there were several reasons why I decide to move to my own blog hosting (a subdomain of my company, MZR Solutions). Firstly, I wanted to have my own codes and design, which was not provided by Opera. Secondly, WordPress seems to be a very nice blogging platform as it was crafted for blogging purpose. Im not saying that, other CMS is not good or not suitable for blogging; they do, it is just that, they need a little bit tweaks and adjustment to become a very good blogging platform as they are not mainly develop for blogging. Forth, hehe, peer pressure. Some of my friends and blogs that I always visit are using WordPress .

Ok. Next agenda. How do I come out with this design? A simple,  yet complicated. My design was based on two (2) nice and clean blogs. Both of them were : Aisyahrozi.com by Aisyah Rozi and Teddy-o-ted.com by Terry (teddy). They do really make use the theory of simplicity. These are the few reason why I choose them.

AisyahRozi.com

1. Colourful 
2. Simple 
3. Easy reading 
4. Post-focus 
5. It was like you make them using your own plaster and scissors, cool. 

Teddy-o-ted.com

1. The theme’s colour suits me 
2. The design is not that complicated compared to AisyahRozi.com 
3. Easy Reading 
4. It suits my theme / concept of design 
5. I love his posts 

So, later then, I decided that I can combine their concept to create my own concept for my design. And, tadaa! Here comes my first WP-Theme named “Proof” (not that related to the design, yups). The design consist of a well obvious logo; which was develop based on a logo that I found on Google Image. It represents wings: which means freedom and nature, while the modern looks just represents my self, my interest and my personality : optimistic and perfectionist.

Basically, this theme has two (2) columns: Contents and Sidebar. However, the first column has two (2) significant rows : Post (main text) and Footer. One of the elements within this theme is the talking-cloud or comic-speech-cloud. I use this element to symbolize that each post shouts their own date and comments. “Proof” was build with fully DIV tags, PNGs and none GIF nor JPEG, because I need the transparencies of the image. Therefore, this theme is OFFICIALLY NOT COMPATIBLE with IE6 and below. I did not push any effort to make it compatible with IE6 and below as I’m responding to this post by Teddy (IE6, so this is goodbye!), which presents the percentage of time used by a developer in the process of making a fully cross-browser web-application. So, good bye IE6 and any prior to it. However, this theme has been fully tested on FIREFOX 3 (Mac/Win), Opera 9.5 (Mac/Win), IE 7 (Win) and Safari 3.1.2 (Mac/Win). All of them show excellent results. Not to forget, “Proof” also full XHTML and CSS(2).

Along with this theme, several plugins has been used in order to achieve what was inside my head . The plugins are:

1. CommentLuv by Andy Bailey
2. Simple Recent Comments by GNot
3. StatPress by Daniele Lippi
4. WordPress Thread Comment by 偶爱偶家
5. WP Grins by Alex King – However, later I covert this plugin to be compatible with jQuery Javascript Framework

Some widgets also were activated:

1. Categories
2. StatPress – Online / Today visits / Total visits

Thats all for today. Please report if any of your browser cannot display the page very well.