EDIT [8/9]: Thanks for all your encouraging words, guys, I feel way much better and more motivated now. I think too much.

EDIT [8/8]: I can’t believe I forgot to plug a link to the results post. OK there you go.

You might think that Potassium only didn’t win anything. Well, worse. It received absolutely NO points at all!

Here are the winners:

1. SandPress by Arpit Jacob was the champion, scoring 26 points in total.
2. Moo-Point by Will Wilkins placed second, with 23 points.
3. Prima by Sunaryo Hadi came in third, with 19 points.

My utmost congratulations to the three of you. You did well.

Alright, if you don’t mind reading what I have to say for myself:

I’m just so disappointed with myself because it feels so much like I’m representing Singapore for the SDC, but Potassium scored zero. I never expected myself to win anything anyway, but I’m exasperated at my score.

I still feel I’ve let the rest of Singapore down. And besides, National Day’s in just a couple days. Plus, coupling all that with the fact that there aren’t exactly many Singaporean WordPress or free software advocates (or are there really many? AFAIK there aren’t many PHP developers here), I just feel overwhelmingly terrible… *sigh*

Also, I’ve just gotten dismissed from school *points to the post time*, but I checked for the scores during English class. Miss Law had brought us to the school library so I decided to seek permission from her to use the computers. And yes, my book report is only half-complete. Or a little bit more than that. Whatever, it’s still incomplete anyway.

I’m lucky I wasn’t after the money or I would’ve stopped blogging once and for all, srsly.

I’m sorry, Singapore. Happy early 42nd birthday. And I’m not in the mood for any Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy jokes.

If you’d like to console me, sure, just leave a reply right below. I’ll be glad to reply, just don’t expect me to be friendly if you aren’t.

Yes that’s right, the Live Preview only switches between stylesheets. Nothing else. None of the markup is changed AT ALL. I feel so belittled, but simplicity and primitivity are still some of the best design types right? Heh.

Potassium kinda messed up the About Us part, gah. That sucks, I don’t know whether I’ll get points cut off for that. Ah well, we’ll see. I don’t think I’ll win, looking at those such well-CSSed designs!

EDIT [10/23]: If you came from some other WordPress site, please head on to Potassium’s page to get the latest release (1.0.2 as of this writing).

EDIT [7/30]: If any of you had been thrown at with a parse error by my site, I’m really, really sorry that I didn’t notice the typo. The link should definitely work right now. There is no need for any link changes.

Well, the SDC closed submissions just under four hours ago.

A little off-topic paragraph: I slept last night past one, and magically managed to be driven out of my sleep at 7:50 am! I didn’t want Mum screaming at me again though; so I figured I’d let the SDC’s deadline slip since I’d submitted it last night.

MD5 (.zip) ecf5e3dbd15bf1bf49dfefbaeee61ef7
MD5 (.tar.gz) 47dcdf79ef2a0569f2b749eaf762921c

Potassium will be available for download from the SDC’s site only on August 2, so I figured I’d put it up for download over here too.

I mentioned earlier that you’d have to watch the previous Potassium post for the download link. Well since I felt this post was worth posting, it looks like I’ll post the link in this post then.

EDIT [9/21]: Also, the URL that the above button links to will remain almost the same after NOVALISTIC 3.0 is launched. See how well I categorize my downloads?

It’s just CSS, so you can just unzip it, stick the single folder into your Sandbox theme folder (so you get /path/to/wp-content/themes/sandbox/sandbox-potassium), then comment everything in Sandbox’s style.css and replace it with:

@import url('sandbox-potassium/style.css');

If Sandbox was activated earlier, you should see the effect kick in immediately. And there you have it, Potassium. No, it won’t explode when you splash on it; the hard drive in your server that keeps it will

I know it’s an extremely simple theme, but my encephalous juices weren’t flowing enough, and my CSS skills aren’t that great so yeah. I promise NOVALISTIC 3.0 will look much sexier, complete with abused Ajax.

EDIT [7/29]: Attention, especially to the judges, Potassium can be downloaded from this post instead.

EDIT: It’s now called Potassium because I find it more suitable (light grey/silver) and Silver Solemnity was a wee bit too long.

Yes, that’s right, I’m 98% done with my Sandbox Designs Competition entry. You may take a look around and report to me any CSS inconsistencies. Any!

This is also my very first WordPress theme I’m offering for download. Because it’s based on Sandbox, Potassium will be licensed under the GNU GPLv2. I’m choosing version 2 because I’m not too familiar with the GPLv3 yet so I don’t wanna end up in any trouble. Yeah.

Some of the files have been customized here, but all Sandbox files will remain untouched in my public ZIP release.

Due to the SDC’s rules and regulations I will only release Potassium for download tomorrow (the link will appear in this post, below the first paragraph). The deadline is tomorrow at 8:00 am in my timezone, so yeah.

Oh and by the way, I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned it before so I’ll say it right here: NOVALISTIC 3.0 and Potassium will not display properly in Internet Explorer 6. Even more so for NOVALISTIC because I’m sick and tired of wasting time and typing for that pile of shit. About 20% of my SDC entry’s CSS (which is 1100 lines long… about 800 lines without comments and blank lines) is made up of star-html hacks and these:

selector {
    /*
    This takes advantage of IE6's expanding box bug
    and the fact that it doesn't understand min-height.
    */
    height: auto !important;
    height: 100px;
    min-height: 100px;
    /* Other properties... */
}

It’s pissing me off. I may include a couple more star-html hacks just to have NOVALISTIC display sanely in IE6, but I won’t spend any other effort on it. There are so many alternatives:

• Firefox, duh.
• Safari (no, not the world’s best browser)
• Opera suite; fastest ever, you can’t deny!
• Camino for Mac
• SeaMonkey (suite)
• If you’re such a crazed Microsoft worshiper, fine, at least upgrade to IE7 because it’s more standards-compliant though still not quite.

The Sandbox competition is a test of your CSS and design skills. You have to style the WordPress Sandbox theme as creatively and elegantly as you can. I heard about it while at the Admin Dashboard a couple days ago (<3 you Ajax)

The Sandbox theme is completely XHTML, a little bit of CSS and absolutely nothing else. It makes use of microformats which are elements that describe communication and share content. It’s all about web semantics and the beauty of WordPress and of course PHP. It promotes web standards and provides very broad flexibility and that’s what the Web is supposed to be about.

I can’t say I’m a hero with CSS, and I know I’m too young for a PayPal account (winners will collect their cash prizes via PayPal), but I’ll just partake for the fun of it. Hell I might even be designing BoltPress 2.0! That’s if I ever plan it

I’ve already asked the forum admin, and yes I’m allowed to participate. Anyone is allowed to, but under-13s need parental consent and all that COPPA shit that I don’t have to care about.

Well, I think I might join more web design competitions like these. I just love web standards and design. It makes me glow. You know, I’m probably the only blogger among me and my friends (ha!) with a blog made of valid XHTML and CSS *cough IE6 cough*

Also, I’ll not be putting my entry up for live preview here at BoltPress, unless you so wish to see it. I dunno what the judges and rules say.

Go WordPress! Go open source!