To be frank, I kinda forgot about the event until Christian Heilmann tweeted about it:

Christian Heilmann's tweet

I didn’t forget about it while developing the new NOVALISTIC though, so if you were browsing the site while it was still CSS Naked Day, I’m sure you saw it in all its black-text-over-white-background glory!

During the event I even noticed some display issues, mostly caused by two things:

• Inline elements being crunched together
• JavaScript-injected CSS

Those were fixed in a matter of hours, really. I was busy with some other stuff so I didn’t do much else but bug-fixing. Sorry about it.

Another thing: the effect lasts on my web site from April 8, 2010 at noon to April 10, 2010 at noon. This is to keep with the international spirit of CSS Naked Day:

CSS Naked Day lasts for one international day. Technically speaking, it will be “April 9th” somewhere in the world for 48 hours. This is to ensure that everyone’s website will be publicly nude for the entire world to see at any given time during April 9.

What about you? How many of you celebrated by stripping your sites of all CSS styles too?

NOVALISTIC 4.0 "Sarathos", beaming down November 2009

The new NOVALISTIC, version 4.0 codenamed “Sarathos”, will be launching this November! I’ve finally come up with a real Coming Soon design for the home page to adorn, complete with RSS and Twitter (@NOVALISTIC) links, and of course an email subscription form. As with my other web projects of 2009, including Tweetimony and the new dev.NOVALISTIC, this new design comes chock full of CSS3 and jQuery Ajax bling!

And yes, you’re absolutely right, the new site will be space-themed. I’ve always been fascinated by the scientific realm outside our home planet, and since it’s so vast, it’s all up to my imagination to design my site around outer space. I think you can imagine by now what the new NOVALISTIC will roughly look like! And for those who are wondering, I do realize the apparently contradiction between the phrase beaming down and the word launching… but that’s not very relevant

I’ve actually already decided on an exact launch date rather than just the month of November, but I won’t reveal it yet. Sign up for email updates now, and I’ll let you know once the launch date is nearing

Thank you so much for your support!

The new dev.NOVALISTIC

The new dev.NOVALISTIC is now up! At long last, some real progress with the site is now visible. At this rate, the new NOVALISTIC will be up in no time (read: a few months’ time)!

I’m sorry it took me so long to develop such a simple site; in fact, I only really got down to it 2 weeks ago since I had absolutely no inspiration of what kind of design to give the development-centric area of my site.

But now it’s here! As you can see, I haven’t been lazing around at all. This is the first time I’m employing certain advanced CSS3 techniques such as @font-face and text-shadow, and I’ve also thrown in a pinch of jQuery goodness!

For now, you can check out some projects I’m working on and view demos of my work. The new development site is pretty small right now, but hopefully I’ll get enough work to expand its content even more!

Just a little note: the WordPress demo blog has now been relocated to the demos section of dev.NOVALISTIC (kinda appropriate, don’t you think?). Don’t worry: http://dev.NOVALISTIC.com/wordpress and all permalinks will canonically redirect to the new URL http://dev.NOVALISTIC.com/demos/wordpress respectively.

dev.NOVALISTIC – Because testing is awesome.

All you have to do is follow SitePoint on Twitter to get the book! But if you don’t have a Twitter account, well, they saw it coming; just visit their Twitaway site for more!

One thing I like about SitePoint is when they occasionally release books for free for a limited time. A few months back, there was a giveaway for The Photoshop Anthology whose PDF I grabbed as well.

They write some of the greatest books I’ve read, and I’m glad to have known the site.

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!

Like Potassium, Bromine will be a variable-width design. Unlike either the distributed Potassium or Thistle, Bromine will consist of three columns, and I will be using NO images, only CSS for it! Interesting, eh? As well as having no images, I’ll also be going for a darker color scheme this time, so the orange and brown bromine-like hues will be a bit darker as well.

At Sandbox’s home page, Scott quotes Andy (both are Sandbox’s creators) as follows:

Given straightforward markup with plenty of selectors, there isn’t much that can’t be accomplished with CSS and a decent browser.

Bromine sets out to prove just that. Oh, and speaking of decent browsers, be reminded that Bromine will not support IE6. Neither will any more WordPress themes I make. There may be minute effort to get themes to display reasonably and perhaps up to the point of readability, but I guess that’s about it. I even almost called that too much. That’s how much I detest IE6.

I decided to bump the version up to 1.0.0 despite problems with Internet Explorer and me saying I’ll continue supporting IE6 till the end of the year, because I simply couldn’t wait to release the theme any longer.

Since I’m still new to WordPress themes, if you encounter any issues with Thistle that I don’t already know of please let me know via comments or something else.

Download and enjoy my new theme!

The new theme I’m thinking of starting designing should look a little more modern (Web 2.0). As with my previous idea, I’ll be sure to design it so it’ll be portable to Blogger, for which I’ll code the layout after everything seems fine with WordPress.

Unfortunately, no Web 2.0 goodness yet. Well, somewhat but not entirely Web 2.0. This theme will be entirely white, lavender and purple (purple’s my fourth favorite color), two-columned, fixed (for 1024 by 768 monitors and up only) and, well, for WordPress and a bit of Blogger as promised. I shan’t reveal anymore.

But I’ll need opinions from you. Unless you need a little preview of NOVALISTIC 3.0 which I can’t provide just yet.

Also, the old BoltPress design (the more colorful, fixed-width, complete with orb logo design) has been dropped (wait, I mentioned it in the previous aside) because that was my very first attempt at WordPress theme design and it sucked anyway.

For now, you can admire Potassium, right here on BoltPress, or get it for your own Sandbox!

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!