Welcome to the new NOVALISTIC 4.0, codenamed “Sarathos”!

NOVALISTIC N Logo

Finally, after going through numerous on/off periods of development spanning over a year but being worth only a few months of actual work, I am officially relaunching my web development & design site!

It’s been over two years since I was about to launch NOVALISTIC 3.0 “Oltanis”, which failed miserably in the end. But that’s over, because now, here is version 4.0, and with it comes a whole new start.

You might have noticed by now that the site started off really small, despite me having taken so long to develop it. Don’t worry! I intended to start small to let everyone have a feel for the brand new site first, before I start to add, or switch on, the following site-wide features:

• More color schemes for various sections of the site
• A new section altogether at that
• A Mobile Safari-optimized interface for iPhone and iPod touch users (like myself)
• More portfolio features such as filtering, tagging and screenshot galleries
• Inclusion of blog posts in site-wide search
• Other nifty little interface effects

And of course, over the months and years I’ll be adding new stuff to my portfolio as I avail myself for client work and such, so that means more to see.

Not only that, but you’ll start to see new posts here at blog.NOVALISTIC as well. Finally, I’d say, after having lain dormant for months. Articles about web development, more detailed case studies than what you’ll see at my portfolio, new tutorials, and more!

Thank you, everyone who’s been offering me moral support all this while as I pulled through the development of the new NOVALISTIC. You guys rock!

Enjoy the new NOVALISTIC!

In collaboration with my great friend Nicole, today we’re launching our very own webcomic, Sanity Derailment! By the way, yes, Sanity Derailment is yet another WordPress-powered site. Isn’t WordPress just awesome? I know! Also, Sanity Derailment was launched at 5 pm because 5 is my favorite number, lol.

There isn’t much more to say, except that I’m extremely happy today

Firefox 3 now holds a Guinness World Record for most downloaded software in 24 hours, at

8,002,530 downloads!

Congratulations to everyone all over the world who participated in the Download Day mega-event!

Mary Colvig of Mozilla reports.

8,002,530 downloads

IN 24 HOURS! Good job everyone!

Singapore attained over 30 thousand downloads in total, beating Malaysia at around 11 o’clock. Awesome work, I knew I could count on my own country to do at least a significant part in all of this.

EDIT [6/21]: So I guess that Singaporeans found this a good time to slacken and Malaysia has overtaken us once again. Oh well, blame us for being practically invisible on the Download Day map at the lowest zoom level.

Mozilla loves everyone. We love Mozilla too.

Mozilla Firefox 3.

Firefox 3 is finally on the shelves, and now we can celebrate Download Day in a bid for a Guinness World Record!!!

Firefox has come a long way since the good ol’ days of Mosaic and Netscape. It is now the second most popular browser today to that pile of trash that is Internet Explorer. And now, version 3 of it is here!

What are you waiting for? DOWNLOAD it now and help Mozilla achieve a Guinness World Record!

Remember, don’t update Firefox 2 as it will NOT count in the Guinness World Record attempt! Download it fresh from the oven and install it over Firefox 2!

I have officially halted development of NOVALISTIC 3.0. Yes, the entire site. Why is this happening?

Why is 3.0 being halted?

It’s a really long story. It all boils down to stress and school, really. I’ll probably explain this in some future post in my life blog.

What will become of NOVALISTIC?

I’m not sure. I think I’ll start from scratch again and work on perhaps NOVALISTIC 4.0. Or I can finish what’s left of 3.0. Who knows? Announcing NOVALISTIC 4.0 “Sarathos”.

How about dev.NOVALISTIC and blog.NOVALISTIC?

Of course, I’ll keep dev.NOVALISTIC and blog.NOVALISTIC going. In fact, I might consider turning a part of dev.NOVALISTIC into a bleeding-edge site testing facility of sorts.

What will you be doing this year?

One of my 2008 resolutions is to be a better student. I have to do my best to fulfill this resolution, so a bit less time and effort will be put into this site.

Even though I don’t think many would know/care about NOVALISTIC, I’d just like to apologize. RIP NOVALISTIC 3.0 – Because you’re trapped in the Net.

Now, I certainly feel really terrible having to do this even for my own site, but I have done so due to unfortunately unforeseen circumstances:

• I fell ill yesterday, and rest had eaten at least two hours of potential development time.
• I might have been dismissed from school pretty early today (half past noon) but transport was being a bitch and I couldn’t get home till about two in the afternoon.

And since the site is being launched today, it is obvious that it’s also my sixteenth birthday today!

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.

BoltPress is the continuation of my series of blogs which have faded and resurfaced and faded yet again and… you get the idea. Basically I’m moving to WordPress and staying here as of today.

I’ve been getting myself used to the sexy open source blogging platform for quite some time now, and it’s pretty much about time I get a WordPress blog up and running. No, I don’t hate Google.

My Blogger blogs are still up on the Net, just not updated anymore. Their latest posts should link to this one.

You can find my Blogger blogs at my blogroll, or right here: NovaBlog! and BoltChronicles

OK, I’ve decided that while NOVALISTIC 3.0 is being under development I’ll store my tutorials right here. Once NOVALISTIC 3.0 is done I’ll be stuffing all the tutorials here to its Tutorials section. I’ll keep copies of them here, but won’t really blog any more new tutorials.

Anyway, you might be reading this blog a little early but I’m still organizing all the posts I imported from both my Blogger blogs. I still gotta restore some that I salvaged from NovaBlog! which weren’t meant to be there. It’s hard work but I’m enjoying every second of it

Hey guys, if you find any XHTML, CSS or link inconsistencies in my posts, please tell me! You can reach me by heading to Contact for info.