This will be the final post of blog.NOVALISTIC before the new site launches. Everything below this that still exists after the post purge will hopefully continue to be relevant (if it’s supposed to be), but by then it’ll be time to look forward to new things. Thanks for the almost 3 years of BoltPress, everyone!

EDIT [3/13]: I won’t be importing comments just yet, but feel free to start leaving new comments for the new blog.NOVALISTIC posts!

This final week will see plenty of preparatory efforts to usher in the launch of the new NOVALISTIC.

One big change you’ll see to blog.NOVALISTIC is the biggest post purge ever, at least for this blog anyway. In fact, it’s so huge that I’ve divided it into three separate phases. I thought of keeping this a secret, but since the last phase will be the most visible bout of change yet won’t take place till the site relaunch, I’ve decided to just share with you how I’ll carry this out.

I estimate about half the posts of this current blog will be completely gone by the end of the purge. That’s a lot, but don’t worry too much: many of my past posts have been tweet-quality crap.

Phase 1

In the first phase, I’ll set up a new WordPress installation elsewhere, along with a fresh new set of database tables. That’s right, my post purge is so huge I have to essentially start over, but not quite from scratch! Once that’s done it’s time to start manually importing posts, by way of copy & paste, from here that I want to keep, and perhaps take a similar opportunity to revise them a little.

As the WordPress installation is a completely separate entity from the current blog.NOVALISTIC, you won’t see anything change.

Phase 2

In the second phase, I’m still in the separate installation but I’ll begin recategorizing the posts I import during the first phase, fixing broken links and all around making sure the blog will work fine by itself once I move it to its permanent place. I’ll also be testing a lot of other new things here!

Phase 3

NOVALISTIC 4.0 “Sarathos” will be launched on Sunday (woohoo!) and this is when the third and final phase of the post purge will come in. The databases will be essentially swapped and you’ll see changes right away, all over this blog.

I’ll also start to fix problems here if any crop up, but other than that this will pretty much finalize the content revamp of the official blog of the new NOVALISTIC.

The most obvious, and probably even most pointless too, change is that all the tags have been lowercased. I just felt I had to do that. I have yet to do the same to the categories and tags @ WordPress.com.

During this cleanup I have also zapped some posts that no longer belong here. I may end up zapping more soon… I dunno.

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.

As for the rest of the site… really, I’ve just been taking a little break from it. I’ll be writing another post soon, discussing my experience with PHP frameworks and what’s going to happen to NOVALISTIC. I still can’t believe I still don’t have a production PHP site running as of now, and half of 2008 has already gone.

I’ll have quite some stuff to say in that upcoming post, so stay frosty.

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…