A sad case of focus loss

It's been more than a month since I last wrote a post for Sulatang Tapunan. It's been a frustrating October for me, even though that was the month where my birthday sits on. My ability to focus on one task is currently unoperational, as I have been trying to train my mind to multi-task everything. The human mind is not really a multi-threaded machine, and trying to multi-task on it is like telling your dog to do a handstand while he eats his food. It's never easy nor comfortable.

I managed to grab some time to write to Sulatang Tapunan by eagerly anticipating the arrival of my copy of Borderlands: Claptraps Robot Revolution DLC, instead of wasting my time playing Call of Duty: Black Ops (not really implying playing CoD:BO is a complete waste of time, that game is kickass, it's just that I don't really achieve much if I play it). Also, I am trying to fully adapt myself to turn Xubuntu into my primary operating system, and just resort to using Windows 7 if some game could not be run by Wine. As a consequence I wouldn't be able to use Windows Live Writer, a very good blogging tool developed by the folks at Microsoft, which I use frequently to write to Sulatang Tapunan, for its smooth, intuitive interface that is very similar to that of Office's.

Although the smooth ribbon toolbars and aero transparency is visually appealing to the eyes, it is also very, very distracting. When I first encountered the Aero interface I was very dazzled by the incredibly smooth blurring and transparency of the windows, and I would exclaim in my mind, "Holy shit, how did they do that?". My amazement was short-lived, though, as I quickly found ways to replicate the same effect in Windows XP, and more recently in a Linux Desktop Environment.

I wouldn't even dare go back to Blogger's default web editor either. Trying to work in a web browser is very dangerous to your concentration, especially today where my browser has an average of 30 tabs lying around (all sorted cleanly and beautifully by the way), waiting for me to click them, scan them, then maybe use my middle mouse to spawn more of them, until I become so absorbed in clicking that I forgot what I was doing. I came across a post in Lifehacker one day and found some great options for distraction-free writers. Distraction-free, as in, I am not given a beautiful GUI to work on, but rather, a dark (it could also be bright) void, waiting for me to type in my words. I chose TextRoom because, (1) it works on Linux, (2) It's as minimalistic as it could get, (3) It looks like it's based on Q10, another distraction-free writer, which is also great.

My color scheme is light grey on black, my favorite combination of monochrome, as it sorta looks like a xterminal. I don't really need formatting as I work, I can just do that later if I wish. Maybe I could also just lay out the HTML for the whole post and add formatting there, though, I would have prepared the pictures I'm going to include first before I finish up.

Other areas of Focus Loss

I'm also losing focus in physical activites, like how I get to jog less often, because I'm too busy either absorbed in studying, coding, or just playing around. It's horrible. Everything I do everyday now is quite unplanned and if this continues on I would be in serious disorganization. There's plenty of things I should keep up with, like my writing, my exercise, instead of just coding and playing around.

I don't even enjoy social networking, but look at me, I'm probably more disorganized than them. Maybe I should just stop lurking around on the Internet too much.

Ancient Sulatang Tapunan attacked by lazy spambots

I was surprised to see that my already rotting Yahoo Mail account, which I dumped due to the reason that it simply sucks, has received a blitzkrieg of emails in a short succession. About 80 emails with the same subject of “Friendster Blogs: New Trackback on your post “<some post here>” flooded my inbox. The body consisted of the following line:

San diego casinos

And that’s it. Usually another line that says “WIN WIN WIN” follows it. I laughed it off and presumed it was just lazy spambots who managed to penetrate the shitty security of Friendster blogs. I’m really glad I moved out of that shitty excuse for a Blogging platform and moved to Blogger, where it’s much more secure.

I’m thinking of limiting the comments people can post on Sulatang Tapunan’s blog posts, so that I can prevent simple HTML script injection (the one problem unprotected blogs face all day) from trolls. I don’t think I have to worry about SQL injection though, since I don’t own or manage the server Sulatang Tapunan is sitting on, and there are no login forms or whatsoever on the blog.

Thinking of switching to Wordpress

When you ask a web designer, a professional blogger, or a tech geek about a good blogging platform, almost all the time, their answers would be Wordpress. And it’s true, most of it anyway. Wordpress allows great flexibility, its engine is open-source and can be loaded up into your server (some popular websites such as the Cheeseburger Network uses Wordpress technology), if you feel hosting on Wordpress.com is a little sleazy.

I’m thinking of making that switch. As a amateur graphic designer and tech enthusiast I would definitely enjoy the flexibility of Wordpress. However, there are some things in Blogger that I cannot live without, like integration into my Google account. I don’t use any of those “account and password” management softwares, for I don’t trust them at all with my data. So having multiple accounts for e-mail and blogging would be hard to manage. I wouldn’t want that.

Next, Blogger is easy to set up, and even though it does not allow you as much flexibility as Wordpress, you can still make your own Javascript widgets if you would prefer so. Also, Blogger still has a pretty good user database, despite Wordpress overshadowing it. It’s not like people don’t like Blogger; Blogger is in fact, one of the most preferred platform for people when it comes to personal blogs. It’s only when people plan to make professional blogs that they use Wordpress and/or the Wordpress engine.

There are also other blogging platforms available other than Wordpress and Blogger, like Tumblr and LiveJournal. However, I don’t prefer Tumblr and LiveJournal because I don’t want sad people posting unnecessary comments on my posts just because I expressed disgust for Twilight or a lesbian named Justin Bieber or something. I like to keep things civilized.

So there you go. Hopefully I won’t get an aneurysm trying to decide whether to import my blog to Wordpress or not. Google is doing a good job maintaining Blogger, and as long as they keep it up, I’m staying there.

The State of Sulatang Tapunan

Currently I’m knee deep in college. It appears that when they said in the first day that I’m going to get my feet wet, they didn’t mention anything about getting my feet wet on five feet of water. Immediately I was molested by confusing figures, raped by long lines of code and hunted by long lists of homework. It’s crazy, but in a good sort of way.

Endless hours of study appears to have steered me away from the endless hours of gaming it succeeded (thank God), but unfortunately it appears to be steering me away from important things of note, such as running (I can only run three times a week now) and writing.

So it appears I do not have as much spare time on my hands as I had during the Philippine summer. But it’s not over yet. Sure, I don’t have much spare time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have any. Let’s just hope that that spare time I’m talking about will get spent into the better like writing, running, working out or pondering about the fate of humanity instead of crushing people under five-ton buses in Garry’s Mod (and savoring the glorious bloodbath that follows).

Changed the layout again

And so I have changed the blog layout yet again. Call me picky, but I think the last layout was quite getting bland and boring for me and most of my readers. Sure, it’s minimalistic, it doesn’t hurt your eyes because it’s not one of those “bright text on black background” templates, but it was getting boring.

So I switched the template to this nice little one I found on the net, named "Newspaper". Once again, my inability to have motivation to create my own XML templates are apparent, and led me to grab other people's templates from the web. Thankfully, these templates are free for my own personal use, so long as I credit them properly.

I have some problems with this theme apparently. Live Writer does not seem to read its XML properly, and now I have to resort to raw HTML editing, but it's ok, I never liked WYSIWYG editing anyways. However, when I switch to preview mode it appears that my paragraphs are not seperated into seperate paragraph, which leads to weird looking posts. I added approprite < p > tags, by the way.

Hopefully this blog will work well despite the difficulties. I tend to trade performance and reliability for aesthetics. If something goes wrong I'll just revert back to the old template, or go find a new one.

Pictures are worth a thousand words…

…but a thousand words can beat a thousand pictures. What am I trying to imply here? After using a greatly minimal approach on making Sulatang Tapunan look pleasing, I have concluded that pictures are now quite unnecessary for this formal-looking journal. This layout idolizes typography, and pictures only ruin the flow, rather than imply points as they should be. I will now try to use as less photos as possible. Not only will it make my blog look better, it will also teach me to use words to better emphasize my ideas and save the precious 100MB of space Google allotted for photos. I’m not using Photobucket or Imageshack, as photos do not last that long there and will eventually be deleted.

Hacked the entire layout

So, here it is, folks. Sulatang Tapunan has finally gone minimalistic. This is a huge redesign since most of the eye candy that were present in the last layout are now gone. No more of the annoying, common sidebar that most blogs use. That one’s getting old, and it’s a reminder of the web design of the 90’s, no matter what we add on them. Youtube widgets, translucency, Javascript and all other forms of 21st century Internet effects won’t make website sidebars better. That had to go.

Also, this typography style blog template that uses the “Georgia” font family is so elegant, that it feels soothing and relaxing. It helps the reader stay focused on what they are reading on the blog and will not get distracted by any unnecessary element in the website.

The template itself is focused on text. I wonder how it does for images…

 

Ah, it does the picture beautifully, just as I wanted it to. Take note that I am writing this post in the very awesome Windows Live Writer. It automatically adds the subtle shadow effect on every photo that I add while I write my posts. However, I can always choose to use other effects, but WLR does drop shadow by default.

Also, I hate color. Colored blogs hurt my eyes. Black text on colored background makes my eyes watery and tortures them in the process.

Blogger or Wordpress?

It has recently come to my attention that I’m getting tired of using Blogger. I’m a fan of many Google Apps myself but Blogger is just plain awful. Nothing much has changed about it. The interface is still the same. The WYSIWYG editor only underwent an upgrade once.

Why would I want to leave Blogger and head for Wordpress, where the grass is probably greener? Here's why.

The interface is much more intuitive. The white interface of Wordpress is serene, and makes me more relaxed and creative at the same time, unlike the Blogger interface which says nothing buy, "Oh my God, your post is way overdue, get working on it now or else". Excuse me if you think I'm such a picky person, but writing requires a calm and relaxed mind.

There are more tools and widgets there to help out. Blogger has its own widgets, but the only useful ones are those bland ones created by Google, such as Pages, RSS readers and text on the side column, all of which are too common and just necessary for blogs. Wordpress offers more widgets to help me, such as Twitter and Facebook widgets.

I can get more traffic there. Wordpress does a much better job of displaying your blog than Blogger, because the Blogger "Blogs of Note" area features blogs that are handpicked by other people, or you and your recommendations. Wordpress easily lets people view the lesser-viewed blogs that deserve utmost respect and criticism.

All the cool guys are there. Well, not all of them, maybe. But there are a lot of interesting people and awesome blogs which may not host themselves on the Wordpress site, but uses the Wordpress engine. Have you seen The Cheezburger Network? Those guys use the Wordpress engine.

But I wouldn't move my blog to Wordpress right away, since the transition could be difficult. I have to redirect people from the blogspot domain to my wordpress one, which could be inconvenient for many. I'll just wait until Blogger seriously acts up, then I can move my blog somewhere else.

New blog - Running for Freedom

So I've made a new blog today. I named it Running for Freedom because it's about running (who would've guessed) and it needs to complement Sulatang Tapunan well. Another reason for me creating this blog is because adding topics about running in the midst of rants and opinions would be very confusing for the lot of my readers. Writing them in a separate blog would be easier.

Oh, and I'm going to write a bit more frequently now, both in Sulatang Tapunan and Running for Freedom. The end of my high school life gave me a few months of leisure time, I do hope I spend it more on running and writing rather than procrastinating and fiddling with my computers.

More is better

Soon, I'll be posting more and more unintelligent and unfunny shit here on Sulatang Tapunan. I know that most good things are spaced so far apart, but sometimes it just pays to place something horrible between those good things, you know, just to keep it interesting. I'll be posting short posts here on Sulatang Tapunan more often, particularly within the range of "personal" and "shit you shouldn't see" categories. Though, I'll be keeping the "shit you shouldn't see" posts somewhere else instead, preferably on my physical journal, aka the journal I write to everyday which you won't see because it's somewhere up my...room.

Expect Sulatang Tapunan to spawn more posts as the Chinese and Filipino people spawns more and more babies everyday.

Reactions

Google added a new feature into Blogger called "Reactions", where readers can express their reactions through preset expressions given by the blog writer/administrator. To use Reactions, you just tick one of the tickboxes on the bottom of each blog post to conveniently express your reactions. It's easy right? This should help me get some criticism, constructive or not, when people are too lazy to write something on the comments box.

About Sulatang Tapunan

What is Sulatang Tapunan? Most of you think of it as a blog built by dickassery and other forms of underhanded writing techniques, but it's actually more than that.

History

It all started long ago, as a blog built for ranting small stuff not supposed to be shown to general public. The original blog was hosted somewhere around Friendster, because most of Aldo's readers were stationed around Friendster. After being fed up with the shitty blogging interface of Friendster (and its overall shittiness), Aldo moved the blog to his Multiply profile. The ranting went on for two months, until Aldo thought that he won't recieve plenty of viewers that links back to a social-networking site. He decided to move the blog to a full-featured blog host, preferably Blogger or Wordpress. Since he has been using Blogger for quite a while, Aldo decided to take refuge there, bringing his blog with him.

In the beginning, it was a blog for ranting about his everyday mishaps and adventures. After a while, Aldo broadened his horizons and began to write about other topics unrelated to his life, and began to criticize other media with dick articles. The result was awesome articles untouched by regulations of religion, conservatives, and the government.

This space is reserved to add some more unrelated information.

Changed template

I changed the template again since the old one seems to stretch the pictures from the new Blogger post editor. So like a lazy noob I used an awesome template from DeluxeTemplates.net called Paper Wall. Basically, it's got my own special taste, vintage looking paper/notebook feeling that always wins and relaxes your eyes. The theme itself is a conversion of a WordPress theme by Indeziner.com and Smashingmagazine.com. For legal purposes, I did not create this theme, nor own any possessive rights to it. I am simply using it for my blog, which is the purpose of the free template. So enjoy!

Updated blog layout

Since the notebook template was getting old, I updated the blog with a new, and probably better template with an awesome background. As such, I didn't make the template, all credits go to Ray's Creations. Tell me what you think about the new template - is it awesome or does it suck?

Also - I'm trying out the new Blogger post editor - should be better than the old one.