This will be the final post of blog.NOVALISTIC before the new site launches. Everything below this that still exists after the post purge will hopefully continue to be relevant (if it’s supposed to be), but by then it’ll be time to look forward to new things. Thanks for the almost 3 years of BoltPress, everyone!

EDIT [3/13]: I won’t be importing comments just yet, but feel free to start leaving new comments for the new blog.NOVALISTIC posts!

This final week will see plenty of preparatory efforts to usher in the launch of the new NOVALISTIC.

One big change you’ll see to blog.NOVALISTIC is the biggest post purge ever, at least for this blog anyway. In fact, it’s so huge that I’ve divided it into three separate phases. I thought of keeping this a secret, but since the last phase will be the most visible bout of change yet won’t take place till the site relaunch, I’ve decided to just share with you how I’ll carry this out.

I estimate about half the posts of this current blog will be completely gone by the end of the purge. That’s a lot, but don’t worry too much: many of my past posts have been tweet-quality crap.

Phase 1

In the first phase, I’ll set up a new WordPress installation elsewhere, along with a fresh new set of database tables. That’s right, my post purge is so huge I have to essentially start over, but not quite from scratch! Once that’s done it’s time to start manually importing posts, by way of copy & paste, from here that I want to keep, and perhaps take a similar opportunity to revise them a little.

As the WordPress installation is a completely separate entity from the current blog.NOVALISTIC, you won’t see anything change.

Phase 2

In the second phase, I’m still in the separate installation but I’ll begin recategorizing the posts I import during the first phase, fixing broken links and all around making sure the blog will work fine by itself once I move it to its permanent place. I’ll also be testing a lot of other new things here!

Phase 3

NOVALISTIC 4.0 “Sarathos” will be launched on Sunday (woohoo!) and this is when the third and final phase of the post purge will come in. The databases will be essentially swapped and you’ll see changes right away, all over this blog.

I’ll also start to fix problems here if any crop up, but other than that this will pretty much finalize the content revamp of the official blog of the new NOVALISTIC.

The most obvious, and probably even most pointless too, change is that all the tags have been lowercased. I just felt I had to do that. I have yet to do the same to the categories and tags @ WordPress.com.

During this cleanup I have also zapped some posts that no longer belong here. I may end up zapping more soon… I dunno.

And with that, per my preparation plans, I’ve released BoltPress 2.1 (complete with a little stamp over the blog title)! It’s been six months since BoltPress’s redesign was launched, and I feel great having graduated to 2.1, heh.

First off, threaded commenting, a new WordPress 2.7 feature, is now present, but I’ve had problems with IE7 handling the placement of the comment form. All other browsers are OK.

Something else you’ll notice besides the introduction of threaded commenting (and the 2.1 branding) is that if you use Windows Vista (or XP with Vista fonts), you’ll find that the theme text is set in Segoe UI and code in Consolas. If you’re using Mac OS X, you’ll see Lucida and Monaco respectively. On Linux, you’ll find DejaVu fonts. This is experimental.

Please don’t report to me about IE7′s problem with the comment form until I’m done fixing it because I know about it already. However, if you find any other problems, feel free to let me know via the comments and I’ll fix it when I can.

blog.NOVALISTIC

No, there will be no revamp of the current design because I simply find it too awesome to be replaced (as yet). However, to harness WordPress 2.7′s new theming features, especially threaded comments, which I myself will take a while to adjust to, I will be substantially refactoring the theme and release blog.NOVALISTIC 2.1 as soon as WordPress 2.7 RC1 is out the door.

I have a feeling this design will live through the launch of NOVALISTIC 4.0 “Sarathos”.

dev.NOVALISTIC and Thistle

Like what will become blog.NOVALISTIC 2.1, Thistle 1.1 will also be worked on to welcome WordPress 2.7 and I suspect Thistle should be out at around the same time frame as when RC1 arrives. Don’t worry though: rest assured that Thistle 1.1 will remain backward compatible with WordPress ≤ 2.6, and you can upgrade painlessly. Of course, dev.NOVALISTIC’s WordPress setup will be upgraded to the release candidate, and the theme will be updated.

Potassium

Potassium will be updated, as Potassium 1.0.6, to go with Sandbox 1.7, the version of Sandbox that should be made for WordPress 2.7.

Phi

Phi is not affected in any way by WordPress 2.7. Although that means Phi is already WordPress 2.7-ready, that doesn’t mean I’ll only support use of it on WordPress 2.7 when I release it. All versions from 2.0 onwards are supported. I believe Phi will be ready for release shortly after 2.7 rolls out.

These screenshots illustrate the stats of BoltPress as of this writing.

In the first screenshot, I’d most probably owe the sudden rise in viewership this month to the launch of the new WordPress theme directory and following release of Thistle 1.0.2.

In the second one, the busiest day, July 28, 2007 (just shy of a full year ago by two days!), probably got that many hits because that was the day I announced Sandbox – Potassium.

As for the rest of the site… really, I’ve just been taking a little break from it. I’ll be writing another post soon, discussing my experience with PHP frameworks and what’s going to happen to NOVALISTIC. I still can’t believe I still don’t have a production PHP site running as of now, and half of 2008 has already gone.

I’ll have quite some stuff to say in that upcoming post, so stay frosty.

About the possibility of NOVALISTIC 4.0… I’m still uncertain. But I’ll tell you this: I’ve been developing a PHP framework, and if I see that it becomes pretty good (at least to me), I might just conceive NOVALISTIC 4.0…

NOVALISTIC 3.0 “Oltanis” hasn’t been deleted, of course. In fact, I can still run it on my PC’s Apache server just fine. I can’t bear to lose the effort I put in in Oltanis (the codename for 3.0!). I just haven’t touched its code largely since my birthday. So there might still be hope…

Last month I wrote about expecting a downtime, and here it is. What I did not expect about it though, was that it’d be this serious. But I’m doing my best to get everything back to shape. Right now the problem is currently largely associated with the domain name still being pointed to the old, now-gone OpenCube name servers. The domain name issue has now been fixed, continue reading to find out why.

I contacted my registrar, sgDomain Networks, on the day of the downtime, after my former host let me know that it was just the name servers that were causing the problem, to let them know of the change in name servers.

Well they haven’t responded yet and it’s been over a week. Contacted my registrar again and they supplied me with the domain account credentials, so I went in and made the change myself. So if you’re seeing this post, that means NOVALISTIC and BoltPress are back!

Anyway, I just moved to a new web host! NOVALISTIC is now hosted at the more-promising Holdfire Network, and that means NOVALISTIC has moved to the United States, which in turn means faster response times for all you Americans! Yes, stats show far more Americans come across this blog than Singaporeans. Personally I don’t mind the slower responses for me. We’re talking about half a relatively small planet, but it is indeed vast on our scale.

Once again, apologies to those who actually read blog.NOVALISTIC. It’s been a really trashy week for us, I know very well.

BoltPress, also the official blog.NOVALISTIC, the blog you’re reading right now, turns one year old since its launch!!!

And with that comes the theme of BoltPress 2.0, a complete revamp with a touch of Tango just for fun, and many more rounded corners than you saw in Potassium (but you won’t get to see all of them unless you’re using Firefox or Safari). This new design is not NOVALISTIC 3.0′s design; that was much greener and glossier than this. Trust me. Neither will this become NOVALISTIC 4.0′s design. If there ends up being a NOVALISTIC 4.0 in the first place. Go speculate.

If you wish to find out more about the new theme, keep reading…

I started designing this theme in Photoshop in January, but worked really slowly. I started working a little harder and faster when I finally began writing my first HTML code for the theme.

If you take a look at the source code now you’ll see a part of it that looks like this (EDIT [6/23]: BoltPress 2.0.14 saw code changes here, updated to reflect that change):

        <!-- Container - conserve space by leaving out some indentation -->
        <div id="container-l" class="container-part">
        <div id="container-r" class="container-part">
        <div id="container-inner-l" class="container-inner-part">
        <div id="container-inner-r" class="container-inner-part">
        <div id="container">

Well, I know that’s not a very good sign but that was my best try in getting a fluid layout with images at the side to define rounded corners and drop shadows and stuff like that. Oh and not to mention the overlay of the gradient background to give a translucent surface effect.

I worked on this on and off instead of full-time (I am finally getting a life), that’s why it took pretty long. But meh. Here it is! Also, I hope the Tango icons spruce things up a bit. I enjoyed using them

Well, that’s about it for my new theme. Enjoy, and of course feel free to say what you may about it and I’ll take a note!

I’ve made my own copy of Potassium’s sidebar split into primary and secondary sidebars, but still kept them packed to the right and rearranged some widgets, and thinned them a little to give the content column as much space as possible. This is to improve readability of the content column (easier on the eyes) and make BoltPress look a tad more hip

Also, since I’ve recently decided to leave the 800 × 600 users in the lurch and move on to 1024 × 768 users for NOVALISTIC 3.0′s layout, I figured it’d be appropriate to do the same for Potassium.

But don’t fret, all you 800 × 600 users, you can enjoy BoltPress in your smaller screen resolution when I’m done with my very first publicly released full WordPress theme. I’m not revealing anything about it yet, you’ll have to wait for it EDIT [6:25 pm]: Right now there’s always Kubrick