First, I have admittedly been busy with my personal life. Don’t get me started on school. Actually, I’ve kinda had it good, what with having been directly admitted into a polytechnic, thereby alleviating quite a bit of exam stress. That said, I’ll still be busy with my personal life, yet won’t be neglecting too much of my online presence.

Next, let me announce now that when NOVALISTIC launches, it will be version 4.0, codenamed Sarathos. Sarathos is the name of the swampy planet in Ratchet: Deadlocked (my least favorite game in the series, actually).

I’ve kinda changed a few of my plans for 2008. In fact, now that I think of it, there are apparently many big changes to be seen…

NOVALISTIC 3.0 “Oltanis”

Oltanis is now obsolete. I don’t plan to release its source, and don’t ask why not, because I don’t know either.

I might come up with some screenshots, and continue coding that site for a little while more just so I can take more screenshots. But one thing is for certain and it’s that Oltanis won’t ever be online.

NOVALISTIC 4.0 “Sarathos”

One similarity between Oltanis and Sarathos is that the NOVALISTIC logo will remain unchanged through these two versions.

One difference between them, however, and conceivably the biggest difference, is the framework on which each site is being built upon. As I’ve said numerous times, Oltanis was built on CodeIgniter. And as I’ve said a couple of times (lol), Sarathos is being developed on my own PHP web application framework.

To be honest, I’m developing my framework really almost absolutely for my own learning purposes. However, I should be releasing it under the GPL shortly after NOVALISTIC 4.0′s launch.

blog.NOVALISTIC

I’m uncertain what the fate of BoltPress will be when NOVALISTIC 4.0 is launched. I could either archive all the posts that have been here and start afresh or something. Or, I could retain all the content here. Or, I could go on another post purge, except instead of liquidating irrelevant posts, archive them. Somewhere. I love this theme though, so I’ll probably keep it.

Other

I have some other plans too. I mentioned way back in October 2007 that I had a crazy idea of starting a webcomic. Well, although my webcomic won’t be about pet rocks, my idea might just come to light someday in the near future… I have no comments, because I seriously have not planned anything at all, other than its web design and how it’s going to work.

novalistTag may have to wait. I have no current plans for it as of now. In fact, I’d admit that it’s really low in my to-do list.

What about me? I have mentioned and ranted about IE6 so many times and have already maintained an anti-IE6 attitude for over six months, but ultimately… shall I forsake IE6 for real? Or shall I just wait a while more?

Let’s see now, searching this blog for the term ie6 brings up a whole bunch of posts ranting about Internet Explorer 6. Just so you know, the new theme happens to work very well (though of course not perfectly) on IE6, and it’s all thanks to the magic Holly hack:

/*\*/
* html #div-to-apply-hack {
    height: 1%;
}
/* */

But I continued to spend an hour or two, just on IE6, just to fix only a couple of display bugs. I had to go through about six or seven minor revisions of the theme to accommodate IE6. I’m honestly uncertain how much that was worth at all.

The following sentence from this post announcing Potassium eleven months ago perfectly sums up my attitude toward IE6 during the course of designing NOVALISTIC 3.0:

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.

Now, I’m still as of now deciding on either carrying on with finishing up NOVALISTIC 3.0 “Oltanis” or just starting afresh with a new NOVALISTIC 4.0. You know, perhaps I should come up with some Oltanis screenshots for good measure since I’ve been like 60% done with it for over six months. It doesn’t look good in IE6, but of course I don’t care.

Here are BoltPress’s statistics from its launch on May 31, 2007 according to Google Analytics, click for full view:

Browser statistics for BoltPress in Google Analytics

22.94% of all visitors used IE, and within that percentage, 37.69% used IE6. Or, 536 out of 6200 total visitors used IE6. Do your math, and you’ll get 8.65%. That’s not really a lot. Besides, IE6 usage is fast declining, with the adoption of both IE7 as well as Firefox 3 coming up (31.4 million downloads so far!), so I honestly doubt it to be a long wait before IE6 no longer matters in my life.

Whenever IE6 comes into play when I’m developing a web design, it will definitely rob me of between two and six hours, depending on the design itself. It’s not very nice, especially when your efforts end up only in vain (i.e. IE6 simply refusing to cooperate, etc).

In any case, whether I’m going to continue Oltanis or start over from scratch, I simply can’t find a reason that will really convince me to maintain support for IE6 in my future designs and applications. I simply can’t.

I think I’m about done ranting. What’s your say on this whole should-we-continue-considering-IE6 thing? It’s happening and ongoing — and we all know it. For me, I’m ready. And I’ve been ready for more than half a year. To say goodbye to IE6. I salute 37signals. They must’ve had a hard time working with that pile of trash.

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…

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!

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!

I was messing around with Photoshop and NOVALISTIC’s Novalgen Logo a few days ago, which looks like so:

And got this within 15 minutes:

And found it so nice I decided on the same day that this would be the first candidate for NOVALISTIC 3.0′s new logo. I wanted to continue calling it Novalgen, but now that the electronic shells are gone it isn’t exactly an apt name anymore, so I’ll just call it the NOVALISTIC Logo or N Logo.

Yes, it’s official.

As mentioned in the first paragraph, the Color Schemer (yes it will be in the final design too because so many of my friends want it) will not affect the logo’s color and only a bit of the reflection’s for obvious reasons. The reflection may look funny to some by being cut off by the above image, but I don’t think it’ll be an official part of the logo.

Most people who commented on the candidate complained about the glow. Please tell me what you think about it, and please not just the glow! Be constructive as well, I will not hesitate to delete flammatory or spam comments kthxbai. And say as much as you can

About NOVALISTIC 3.0′s first layout, I will keep some of the interface graphics and effects because I love them so much, and it will remain Valid XHTML 1.0 and Valid CSS, and of course by default green <3

On a side note… happy July 4 to all Americans!