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!

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?

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.

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!

Now, I know I’ve been pushing the launch date back many, many times:

1. I’d originally intended to launch in early-to-mid-November 2009;
2. Then I had to push it back to the end of the month;
3. In early December I decided to launch on my birthday;
4. But then things just had to mess up again at such coincidental timings and you could probably say the site was indefinitely delayed for a while;
5. I decided to go ahead and try for February, but quickly realized that was a wrong decision right from the start;
6. So it finally comes to today’s post, a decision made at the very beginning of the month, a decision I will definitely honor when the time comes.

I’d bet that a good number of people might have been completely turned off by all the postponements building up nothing but suspense. I understand how frustrating it feels, so I’d really like to offer all the apology that I can. I’m deeply sorry to keep you all waiting, especially since I was featured on Smashing Magazine, which by the way is still awesome. I promise that my new site will be a refreshing experience for everyone!

So, development hell aside, following are some important things I’d like you to know of before the site launches for real (yes, these are adapted from an older post…):

Main objectives of the site

• Personal online portfolio of my web development work for myself and clients
• Blog for all things web development & design, as well as some other technologies if I may
• Showcase of other projects I’m working on behind the scenes

If you care about my personal life, remember that there’s a blog for that, and a Twitter account for that. I’ve also recently returned to updating my personal blog!

Availability for jobs and projects

I still can’t say for sure that I’m ready for work, since even now that school’s out, I’ve got a lot to think about and work on. However, please feel free to contact me regarding web design work you may want me to do and I’ll think about it and get back to you once I have an answer.

Just remember that I’m still putting schoolwork first!

blog.NOVALISTIC

I will be performing the biggest post purge ever. I’m not too sure yet how I’m going to do it, but you will soon start to see posts disappearing from blog.NOVALISTIC on a very large scale. It’s sad, but I have to do it. It’s because I wish to keep my content fresh, on-topic and of good quality. The past few years of posts have been irrelevant, too short to belong on a full-fledged blog, doing/teaching things wrong, or just generally poorly-written. Therefore they shall be subjected to a very vicious, merciless purge.

Of course, I’ll make up for the disappearance of old posts, now that the site’s relaunching. It’ll be a challenge because I have so many other things to take care of, but I’ll do my best. After all, this blog has been stale for long enough…

Browser compatibility

For prospective clients: this means, ‘will your site look OK in my Internet Explorer?’

If you’re using one that doesn’t have something called tabs, I’m sorry. You’ll probably not see what I designed and expected people to see, but you should still be able to find what you’re looking for.

If you’re on Windows Vista or Windows 7, or not using Internet Explorer at all, the above doesn’t apply.

For fellow web designers: this means, ‘hell yeah, CSS3!’

I know! I’m quite excited to take my design skills to stellar heights There’s no HTML5 though, maybe next time when it’s more mainstream.

The new NOVALISTIC has been tested and found to work correctly (but not always perfectly) on:

• IE7+
• Firefox 3.0+
• Opera 9.50+
• Safari 3.2+
• Google Chrome 2.0+

And I guess that’s about it. See you on March 15! It’s going to be a great month ahead and you can wager that I’m really, really excited for my new site finally coming to life.

The new NOVALISTIC, which I said would launch last month, has now been pushed ahead to January 2010. You can see the change in launch date being reflected in the front page.

What’s on in January 2010?

I previously wanted to launch NOVALISTIC 3.0 on my 16th birthday in 2008. For reasons which I can’t disclose unlike in this post, that never happened. I thought it’d be great to launch version 4.0, and start a freelance career, on the month of my 18th birthday this time.

Why is this happening?

I’ve been presented with a seriously tight schedule of schoolwork, and I have tests the week following when I write this. I’m unfortunately unable to cope with all that load.

Too many other things, some good but mostly bad (i.e. robbed me of at least 2 weeks of development time) have also happened in the month of November, and I need time to recover.

I’m not working on NOVALISTIC full-time. While it is one of my primary projects (after all, it’s my online identity), there are several things we need to bear in mind:

• I’m in polytechnic, which means school projects are aplenty, and I’ll need to devote a good amount of time to schoolwork.
• Although I’m really passionate in web design & development (why else would I want to freelance in this field?), doing paid work is a very new experience for me.

None of that will make a difference to the quality of the work I’ll deliver, however! No matter the constraint, the work I produce will be work that I put in as much effort as I can into, and I’m sure it’ll be a delight working with you, if you’re reading this post as a prospective client.

That’s about it. Thanks for your understanding on this situation, and I’m sure working with NOVALISTIC in the near future will be a great experience for you as a client, and me as a developer!

Don’t hesitate to subscribe to email updates, subscribe to blog.NOVALISTIC’s RSS feed and follow @NOVALISTIC on Twitter to keep up to date!

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!)

My WordPress installations and plugins can now be updated the way they should’ve been. And not only that: the server actually feels new for the first time, because the uploads work faster than before the server migration! That’s truly good news to hear!

Thanks again Holdfire for your tireless (hopefully) work in restoring peace and order in the server-side FTP department. Sorry for all the fuss, but I guess kicking up a fuss is better than keeping quiet about it and leaving it unsolved. But still, thanks, because I’m aware some hosts don’t even bother to look into technical issues reported by customers.

We’re back now! So what happened?

Simply put: we went down because our host, Holdfire, was going to perform a server migration that’d affect all customers under one shared hosting server. (Yes, I’m under shared hosting, you can stop laughing now.)

After the sites were safely escorted to the new server, lots of things — undesirable things — happened…

Because a server migration is a very long process which requires a lot of care (imagine tens if not hundreds of customers hanging on to a single shared server for dear life, that’s a lot of home folders!), data loss is a very big issue. To prevent any changes to files which would present that kind of risk of corrupted and/or missing data, every single area of the server was 403′d, including HTTP.

That means nobody could see my sites. That means neither could Googlebot. A while after the site came back up, on September 20th, I did a quick Google search for NOVALISTIC.

The domain NOVALISTIC.com was gone from the results. dev.NOVALISTIC, blog.NOVALISTIC and the Twitter account were all there, as well as a bunch of irrelevant sites, but the main, second-level domain itself wasn’t!

Google Webmaster Tools is a nifty tool for you to monitor such things as Googlebot crawl statistics. It’s even more useful when used alongside Google Analytics. Webmaster Tools reported to me a whole big bunch of 403 errors coming from many, many parts of the domain, so I began to find all sorts of ways to determine the cause. As this was only one of several problems to have surfaced since the server migration (the rest of which I write about following this), to be frank I actually began to put the blame on that. I remained faithful to Holdfire, though, and never held any grudges — they were just doing their job.

I even got a direct message on Twitter from Kim Sherrell offering some advice. Thanks Kim! But it looks like the 403s were indeed a very probable cause, as just almost 3 days later, the site came back up on Google’s indexes — indicating that Googlebot had just gone back to take another look at the site, then receiving a thumbs-up, 200!

Another major issue I’m having, which remains unresolved, is PHP having serious trouble with FTP, causing WordPress plugin management (installing, updating) to break. Previously things worked normally, and plugins would install and update in a flash.

Now that these processes either take ages or even fail prematurely (leaving a few megabytes of core dump too!), I imagine I’ll have a really hard time updating WordPress itself too.

EDIT [10/22]: Holdfire has just fixed the FTP problem!

Other issues I faced were Apache forgetting to pass PHP scripts to PHP, as well as some minor mail errors (these turned out to be due to my ignorance and not by Holdfire). These problems were pretty minor though, and therefore easily solved, leaving me to close tickets happily. Thanks for lending a hand, Holdfire.

Anyway, now that I’m on a new server, I can continue working on the new NOVALISTIC, and at the same time figure out anymore trivial issues I encounter, one-by-one.

Thanks for your patience the past week

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!