But don’t let the above announcement get to you. I will continue to blog, just not on a regular basis, and not as often as I’d wanted to. Furthermore, the new NOVALISTIC still isn’t feature-complete; remember, I’ve a few things that I want to implement. You can find the entire announcement of the newly-launched site at this post, but here’s just the list of features to come:

• 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

I haven’t been coding much PHP since Is Justin Bieber Trending?, but that’ll change starting in the second week of July, from which period I’ll begin slowly rolling out the aforementioned features over the months.

As for jobs, sorry I’m still not available for work, but if you need help in anything you’re still free to drop me a line.

And, please, I’ve had multiple job request emails that aren’t really job requests at all; do not check the ‘Yes, this is a job’ checkbox unless it really is one! A simple request for tips or advice is not the same as proposing a paid web project to me, and checking that box unnecessarily does nothing to make your message any more or less important!

In any case, thanks for the continued visits despite my lack of content, everyone. For now, I’ve got tests to study for and stuff to design and code, so see you soon!

EDIT [4/3]: So you thought this was an April Fools prank? Let me just say right here that you’re wrong! Who’s the one to laugh now?! (OK, I kid.)

Is Justin Bieber Trending?

You all knew it was gonna happen: somebody would waste some leisure time throwing together a microsite that answers one very simple, burning question:

Is Justin Bieber Trending?

Well, I’ve taken the pleasure (of three nights) to do just that. With a pretty apt URL too: http://isjustinbiebertrending.com

As in the disclaimer (‘why is this?’) at the bottom right of the site, here’s why I even bothered:

Gotta say this so nobody comes after me for the wrong reasons: I have nothing against Justin Bieber.

He can sing, make albums and be famous for all I care, but it’s his obviously immature, prepubescent fangirls (and fangayboys) who are polluting our Twitterverse with useless tweets and a useless trending topic (or sometimes even two or three).

This is my response to the thousands of young girls whose lives seem to consist of nothing but Justin Bieber. And a source of entertainment for the people who are wondering if he ever falls off the trending topics. To answer that, yeah, he does… just not always for long…

You can also follow @ijbt on Twitter if you’re so inclined.

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!)

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.

Introducing Tweetimony, a site where Twitter users can share their testimonies about God’s blessings in their lives (you know I’m a Christian, right?)! To see your testimony, or rather, Tweetimony, all you have to do is just follow @tweetimony, send an @reply to it saying what you wish to thank God for, and there shall it be! It’s that simple

By the way, in case you’re wondering, I didn’t develop the backend. I only themed an existing application, but of course put in extra effort into designing the theme! Here’s how Tweetimony came to be: that Lee guy who made Twessage! decided one day to give away a few free copies. I @replied to him and was one of some people to receive a free copy (I owe you a huge one, Lee!), and the rest, as they say, is history!

Enjoy Tweetimony, and God bless you!

As of this writing, SitePoint has raised over US$140,000 (over AU$200,000)! As a web designer and/or developer, you too can help out. There is a wide selection of books to choose from, so take your time and make your $29.95 worth it! (Then again, helping the Aussies is worth more than enough in itself!)

If you need ideas on what to buy, here’s the list of books I’ve just purchased:

1. The Principles of Beautiful Web Design
2. Everything You Know About CSS Is Wrong!
3. The PHP Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks, 2nd Edition
4. Build Your Own Database Driven Website Using PHP & MySQL, 3rd ed.
5. The Principles Of Successful Freelancing

This is both an awesome bargain and an awesome contribution. Let’s help the world — five PDFs at a time

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

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.

I’m not sure why I’ve never mentioned Aptana Studio in this blog except at the old About page page. It’s the nicest IDE I’ve found, and for web development, I’ve moved from the also-awesome Notepad++ to Aptana.

Anyway, I wanted a dark colorization so I could read my code a little better, so yesterday, I tried to make a colorization based on the Ruby Blue theme for Notepad++, but I was having a bit of trouble and it was really tedious. To add, it was late.

Frustrated, I was looking around the forums, then I caught sight of a post that linked to a colorization, called Green Chaud (direct download link), made by Boris Popoff. Just one screenshot demonstrates its sheer beauty immediately. I downloaded and imported the colorization to my copy of Aptana, and I fell in love! Here’s the screenshot from that page:

Green Chaud displaying PHP syntax highlighting

Weblog Tools Collection has reported on a new Drupal module that integrates Drupal with WordPress.

Yes, WordPress is by itself a great CMS, but since it wasn’t designed to be one, but instead a blog, Drupal is in many aspects more versatile, and with the ability to integrate both together, I can imagine lots of web developers and content managers praying to the god of open source.

I’m not using Drupal, but I just felt like plugging this link just for other would-be Drupal users and webmasters, or WordPress bloggers.

Also worth looking at is the Drupal/phpBB integration module, because I love phpBB.