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Happy new year!

It looks like there’s less than a month to go before the new NOVALISTIC 4.0 launches! What’s there to expect from such a big thing in, at least, my life?

First of all, no more email signups. There really isn’t a point sending email updates anymore when the launch is so imminent… so instead of the form, you’ll just see a little paragraph of teaser text.

With that aside, while I have a few surprises, I do wish to let you know of some important things about the site relaunch:

Objective of the site

NOVALISTIC will now serve several primary purposes:

• Personal online portfolio of my web development work for myself and clients
• Blog for all things web development & design, as well as some other technologies if I may
• Showcase of other projects I’m working on behind the scenes

If you care about my personal life, there’s a blog for that, and a Twitter account for that.

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The new NOVALISTIC, which I said would launch last month, has now been pushed ahead to January 2010. You can see the change in launch date being reflected in the front page.

What’s on in January 2010?

I previously wanted to launch NOVALISTIC 3.0 on my 16th birthday in 2008. For reasons which I can’t disclose unlike in this post, that never happened. I thought it’d be great to launch version 4.0, and start a freelance career, on the month of my 18th birthday this time.

Why is this happening?

I’ve been presented with a seriously tight schedule of schoolwork, and I have tests the week following when I write this. I’m unfortunately unable to cope with all that load.

Too many other things, some good but mostly bad (i.e. robbed me of at least 2 weeks of development time) have also happened in the month of November, and I need time to recover.

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OK, well, not my person, but this site, NOVALISTIC, has just been featured on the well-known web design blog’s latest article, Designing “Coming Soon” Pages by Cameron Chapman. That’s right, since modern coming soon pages have been getting some buzz in recent years (what was an under construction page again? Oh, that junk…), there have been posts describing guidelines on building good coming soon pages, and examples of sites that implement the concept pretty well.

I’ll be frank here, for a little while my site wasn’t featured. But SM took a look at my site after I @replied to them on Twitter, and apparently decided it was so good it deserved a place in the article.

And I’ll continue on with the truth-telling, I did not expect any of that, although it sounded as if I did. You know how people say such things to tease?

Well no, it’s not that I didn’t want my site on there, but I really just said that to tease, and I really didn’t expect SM to tell me a few minutes later that my site was now featured. It was absolutely flattering!

Thanks for featuring NOVALISTIC, SM! You all rock (Maybe someday I should join the Smashing Network with this blog!)

Well, it turns out that the folks at Holdfire have managed to sort out the server-side FTP issue once and for all. That was on the night of October 22, so, two Thursdays ago. (Oh, and happy belated Windows 7 release I guess…)

My WordPress installations and plugins can now be updated the way they should’ve been. And not only that: the server actually feels new for the first time, because the uploads work faster than before the server migration! That’s truly good news to hear!

Thanks again Holdfire for your tireless (hopefully) work in restoring peace and order in the server-side FTP department. Sorry for all the fuss, but I guess kicking up a fuss is better than keeping quiet about it and leaving it unsolved. But still, thanks, because I’m aware some hosts don’t even bother to look into technical issues reported by customers.

In the afternoon of September 12, 2009, NOVALISTIC and Sanity Derailment, along with many other sites, went down unglamorously (is there even such a word?), spitting a nasty 403 Forbidden error anywhere one went.

We’re back now! So what happened?

Simply put: we went down because our host, Holdfire, was going to perform a server migration that’d affect all customers under one shared hosting server. (Yes, I’m under shared hosting, you can stop laughing now.)

After the sites were safely escorted to the new server, lots of things — undesirable things — happened…

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