I designed this theme with a ladybug after my cute ladybug phone charm. I’m not really fond of real-life ladybugs, but I find their illustrated versions adorable. <3

I also moved my blog from taintedsong.com to this “personal” domain. I purchased joniang.com some years back but have never really decided what to use it for. So I resolved to just transition away from my naive ideals from four years ago, and focus on building my online portfolio (whut?). After all, my full-time job could be taken away from me anytime, and my only emergency fall-back is my freelance work.

So this is my obligatory “I just installed a new theme! Hope you like it!” post. It’s a good thing that having a blog redesign provides an excuse to actually blog, isn’t it? I used to blog a lot two or three years back but things changed since I dealt with some major transitions in my life last year. As a result, blogging frequency has gone down to once a month or once in two months. Now that I’m starting to organize my life again, from furnishing my new (and permanent!) home to revamping my site, I’m hoping to regain the zest I lost and get back to blogging. But I’m not promising myself anything. Cos, most of the time, sharing thoughts in 140 characters or less is just more convenient than composing an entry.

So here’s to hoping I’d be blogging more often beginning June 1st!

I’ve finally updated my blog’s design. Hurrah for sudden bursts of inspiration! I wanted to achieve a design that screams “CRAZZEHH!”, but I don’t think I was able to achieve that. Lol. The photoshop-ing part only took a few hours, but the CSS, XHTML, WordPress coding took longer than I hoped. And if it wasn’t for Mae Paulino, who helped me solve the PNG transparency problem, I just might have thrown this one out with the rest of my rotting, unfinished layouts. Happens to me a lot.

Thank you, Mae!

You have to excuse the pinkness, though. I actually wanted this to be purplish rather than pinkish (excuses, excuses). It just so happened that the design I’m working on right now for a client has a lot of pink and purple that I got a bit carried away. The last time I used this kind of color scheme was when I was still on Tabulas. I miss Tabulas. Heh.

Bear with me, I’m still fixing this theme.

***

I went to attend the iBlog4 in UP Diliman last Saturday, but that was after I got lost driving somewhere in C5-Marikina-Katipunan area. Don’t ask me how! LOL. Thank God for kind strangers who pointed me in the right direction. Yeah, I should have just taken the EDSA route from Pasig — lesson learned. I arrived late and didn’t stay long enough to listen to the afternoon speakers, but I did get to hear the talks of Charo Nuguid, Juan Karlo Licudine, Juned Sonido, and Jonas Diego, and I did tune in to the live iBlog4 podcast when I got home. Congratulations, Janette Toral!

I also wasn’t able to make it to the 88db party. Now I feel left out just reading everybody’s posts (and tweets) about it. Boohoo. Here’s the only photo I got last Saturday:

This is Mae being interviewed for a GMA show. I’m not sure which one.

I’m not completely sure if everything is in order here. Please let me know if you encounter a bug!

***

Globelines has sent the units for the Wireless Broadband plan I signed up for via Air 21. I was able to set up the LAN by myself but it just wouldn’t connect to the Internet, and the woman who prepared my application is not responding to my text messages. So am I supposed to handle this all by myself? Is nobody from their staff coming to help me with this? Way to go, Globe! Awesome job! A couple more days and your customer service rep is definitely going to get an earful. Heh. Good thing I wasn’t required to make an initial payment for this one.

***

The SEMCON 2007 was concluded three days ago. Despite the negative comments I’ve been hearing about it from the other delegates, I honestly think that the conference was great. Two days of pure SEM talk? How often does someone as geeky as me get to experience that? I learned a lot, and if you can believe it, my conference notes reached up to four (8 x 11) pages, front and back. lol.

I still can’t get over this comment I read made by someone somewhere: “Mag-SEO ka na lang!” Lang?? Di nga, Ate? Haha. I know some people associate SEO with just spamming, and even though I sometimes think that way too, I also think that SEM (which is different from SEO in so many ways) is more than just off-page optimization or link building. There’s on-page optimization (of course), proper web copywriting (this is obviously different from print), pay-per-click advertising, affiliate marketing, website ad partnerships, landing page optimization, and more. These are all part of what I’m doing at work and the cause of my headache for the past few months. So, really, an SEM job is not an easy one. I guess what I’m saying is, if you really don’t know much about something, it’s better if you just keep your comments to yourself. (I can see Riz and Romz rolling their eyes at me, hehe!)

Congrats to Bossing Marc for a successful first SEM conference! Sana next year si Rand Fishkin naman.

***

Anyway, despite this site update, I am still sad. And I just wanted you to know that. But what’s important is that you‘re happy… and everybody else is happy. That’s all that matters to me now. Goodnight.

Incompatible Plugins

My decision to go ahead without testing it was obviously a bad one as there were errors that appeared in my blog the moment I upgraded it. But it was only for about 10 minutes, nothing too complicated that I couldn’t fix. Besides, WordPress 2.3 has an update notification, so there’s really no need to panic. The update notification is found in the Plugins menu in your WP 2.3 dashboard. If there’s a plugin that needs updating, you will see a note and a link just below the outdated plugin that says: “There is a new version of [Plugin Name] available. Download [latest version link] here.” Just click on those links, download the latest version of your favorite plugins, delete the old plugins via FTP, upload the new ones, and activate them in your admin panel.

Here’s the list of plugins that I needed to upgrade:

1. Full Text Feed by Cavemonkey
2. Get Recent Comments by Krischan Jodies
3. Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold – The previous version of this caused an error in my blog and in my dashboard. Make sure you deactivate yours first.
4. Another WordPress Meta Plugin by uberdose – Although this one had an updated plugin, I decided to switch to All-in-one SEO Pack instead.
5. Sideblog WordPress Plugin by Kates Gasis
6. WP-PostViews and WP-UserOnline by Lester ‘GaMerZ’ Chan.
7. Subscribe to Comments by Mark Jaquith
8. Headlines Images by Brian “ColdForged” Dupuis – This one doesn’t have an updated version so I had to get rid of it. I hated to see it go, but it’s not like it played a vital role in my blog layout. I’ll just replace it with the same kind of plugin next time.

It’s a must that you deactivate all your plugins first before you upgrade to WP 2.3 as what those pros have been mentioning in their blogs over and over again. But I also know that there are cases when the deactivation of a plugin is the one that’s causing an error. This is where the “If” PHP statement before your plugin command tags comes in handy. To be safe, make sure all the plugin tags in your blog layout are within these conditional tags:

<?php if (function_exists('insert-plugin-name-here')) { ?>
insert-plugin-php-tag-here
<?php } ?>


or simply:

<?php if(function_exists('insert-plugin-name-here')) { insert-plugin-command-tag-here(); } ?>

Here’s a working example with plugin the_views:

<?php if (function_exists('the_views')) { ?>
<?php the_views(); ?>
<?php } ?>

or simply:

<?php if(function_exists('the_views')) { the_views(); } ?>

Hopefully, once you’ve got all your plugin command tags covered, there will be no error when you deactivate all your plugins and do the upgrade.

Adding WordPress 2.3 Tags to your Theme

One of the features of WP 2.3 that I was looking forward to try was the built-in tagging function. I honestly thought it makes use of Technorati tags, but I was wrong. Apparently, the developers of WP have moved away from favoring Technorati that even the “Incoming Links” feed in the admin panel is no longer supplied by Technorati, but Google Blog Search. In my opinion, Google Blog Search is more efficient in fetching my blog’s trackbacks or pingbacks, but I still find Technorati’s listing of all my blog’s backlinks (and not just pingbacks) useful. But OK – whatever. I don’t really need to see Technorati feeds in my dashboard. I can just go directly to their website.

Anyway, in order for you to make your WordPress 2.3 tags appear within your posts (I have mine at the bottom of this post), you need to modify your current theme’s index.php and/or single.php, depending on where you want the tags to show up. The PHP command tag is just a one-liner, and it should be placed inside The Loop. This is the format I used:

<?php the_tags(); ?>


After you’ve placed that one line inside The Loop, you can then make use of the tag feature whenever you write a post. You will find the “Tags” field just below your WYSIWYG or code editor. To learn more about adding and customizing your WordPress 2.3 tags, go here and here.

Good luck!

HostingPH (aka Pinoyhosting), my former web host, was just okay. I didn’t have problems with them in general and they did respond immediately to my inquiries but what I don’t like about them is their not-so-friendly staff. I hated those times when I was in a panic mode needed them to help me with something and they would just reply with a one-liner e-mail. Mostly with just a “phrase” too. I mean, it wouldn’t hurt them to show a little – but genuine – concern, would it?

Anywho, that’s all in the past! It’s time to move on. There were plenty of errors around here yesterday (e.g. images embedded in entries were nowhere to be found, and some of the plugins weren’t working), but I got them all fixed today. I think.

If you’re planning to move your WordPress blog from one web host to another, there’s a lot of tips out there that you might want to read first. To put it simply though, you must make sure you backup your files, transfer them to your new host, and modify the nameservers of your domain first before you cancel your account with your current host. Do it the other way around and you just might be forced to say goodbye to all the blog posts, comments, images, and other data you’ve collected over the past years! Or less. Whatever.

***

To those who enjoyed the funny photos I embedded in my previous post, I forgot to include one more photo that you might want to see! How could I have neglected this guy? I mean, he clearly has the hardest job among the group, not to mention, the greasiest. I’m sure the fumes aren’t doing him any good in there too. Poor guy. I wouldn’t smoke in there if I were him though!

Yes, I’m sure there are still errors around here somewhere. If you happen to encounter one, please please let me know. I wouldn’t know what to do first hand, but maybe I can google it or consult some experts. LOL. Or if you are a WordPress aficionado, I would wholeheartedly accept comments, suggestions, and tutorials from you.

My Brother
Good news! To those of who you have read my rant a while back about this brother of mine who’s been unemployed for months, I’m happy to let you know that he’s finally found a job! We’ve been praying so hard for him and last Friday he finally nailed his interview. I can’t be more happy for him! And I’m glad to see him thrilled of his accomplishment too. All we gotta to do now is wish that he passes his 6-week training and eventually be a certified Technical Support Representative. Yeah baby!

For love of Murakami
Last Friday, Bheng asked me if I could join her buy a book at National Bookstore. Like she really had to ask! Bookstores are my haven. When we got there, I was fortunate to get my hands on the last copies of the two Murakami books that I didn’t have yet. — Please don’t judge me. In my defense, the last day of the 20% sale was nearing, the books I bought were the last copies, and I just received my half-month’s salary, so I think I’m entitled to this kind of splurge. lol. And it’s not like I’m shopping for other stuff too. Just books, I swear. I haven’t even bought a shirt, pants or shoes in months! As of today, I have in my possession 8 books by Haruki Murakami, 4 of which I haven’t read yet. I’ll be over my Murakami marathon soon.. It’s time to move on to other authors. Recommendations please.

Homeward Bound
I’m also pleased to say that I’m going home next month for a 10-day vacay. It’s time to put those rotting Vacation Leaves to good use. I already bought my tickets last Wednesday and at such a discount too. The usual two-way domestic flight tickets cost almost 6,000 Php, but I bought mine at 2,700 Php only. Pretty good bargain huh? I love the way these airline carriers are competing head-on against each other these days. The stunts they’re pulling are greatly beneficial to someone like me who hails from way down South. I can’t wait to see my mom and dad. I haven’t seen them in almost a year, can you believe that? I miss them so much. <3 I’m also gonna schedule meet-ups with old friends, churchmates, and high school classmates which I failed to do last year. This is gonna be fun.

Thank you, God, for all your blessings. You’re the best!

Wishful Thinking — that’s what I do day in and day out. I wish for a lot of things, and even though I know they are far from happening, I incessantly hold my breath and say them over and over everyday. I know what you’re thinking though.. there is another word for someone like me who keeps wishing in vain.. a “fool”.

Moving On -

I lost my cellphone last week. Don’t ask me how, I don’t know myself. When I got home after seeing a movie at the mall, I rummaged through my bag to find my phone. I didn’t panic at first because that sort of thing always happens to me. I usually misplace it inside the house and I have to have someone ring it for me so I’ll know where it is. But that night, I looked into my bag and walked to and fro inside the house a few times, but it was nowhere to be found. Deej tried to call my number but it was already out of coverage area. It was confirmed. My phone is gone.. for good!

I had a hard time sleeping that night since I kept thinking how and where I lost my phone.. It was either someone stole it from inside my bag or I dropped it and I was too careless to even notice. Finally, I decided to stop torturing myself by thinking about the possibilities since it’s not gonna bring my phone back anyway and damn I was already close to tears!

That phone was a gift from an uncle and I lost it. I hardly care about its worth money-wise since it was an old phone and it malfunctions occasionally (sometimes it shuts off by itself!). But it was just so dear and precious because of all the memories it holds for me. Stored in its internal memory are text messages from a special someone and photos of my family, relatives, former colleagues, and friends back home. It was an access to my memories of the previous year and it’s all gone. Now I only have my “actual” memory but we all know how that can be even more dysfunctional and inaccurate. Lol.

I’ve put up posters of my Nokia 6610i.. maybe someone will find it and return it to me…

Hehe. Of course I know that’s not at all possible. And of course I didn’t really put up posters. Lol! I just miss the little thing so much! Deej had a picture of my cellphone from a while back which I’ve already forgotten about. So when he showed it to me a few days ago I honestly felt my heart skip a beat! Waah. So pathetic.

Today, I have to deal with letting go and moving on.. It was my cellphone’s fate and now I have to face it.

Goodbye, old friend! I’ll never forget you..