Duality

… for the third time.

This redesign has taken so long because it is hard to make progress when my free time is chopped up into tiny pieces. Every time I sit down to design, there’s a bit of start-up time when I’m getting into the flow of designing but not making progress. If my particular chunk of free time is small—and more often than not, it is—all I end up doing is exercising Command-O, Command-Q. It’s like effin’ brokerage commissions. I might have sold at $0.10 per share higher than I bought, but if I only traded 100 shares and my broker’s commission is $10, I didn’t actually make any money.

The other two times this design left the Photoshop mock-up phase, I forced it out. Both times, I wasn’t entirely happy with the design. The first time, I got all the way to the templating phase (for reference: mock-up ~> test page ~> templating) before realizing there was no way I could make it work. I scrapped it at the end of July / beginning of August and started over. I worked on its replacement into the test page phase, where I got fed up with how certain parts of it looked.

That was a few weeks ago. Since then, I overhauled the page’s layout and shifted the color scheme to the point where I’m eager to show it off. Sadly, no sneak peeks until I’m done though. =)

If this design had a mantra, it would be “Nothing is sacred.” Over the past year+, I’ve revisited parts of the design several times and scrapped the whole design once in search of a look and feel that I would be happy with. That’s not something I would’ve done in the past. Before, once I finished part of the design, I wouldn’t touch it again. I’ve been regularly taking screenshots, so you’ll all get to see my wanderings. It would make an interesting slideshow, actually.

No sneak peeks today, but here’s what I reveal about the new design:

1. It’s blue. (Sorry to all the fans of pink)
2. It’s 1024×768-optimized.
3. It sports a shiny new logo. New = I designed it in August, but none of you (save Xero) have seen it yet.
4. It has a listing of recent comments (all weblogs which have comments enabled should have it), recent reviews, and links to interesting stuff (like The Diamond Invention).
5. It has curves.
6. It doesn’t use JavaScript.
7. It won’t use cookies if everyone’s cool with 2.0 gamma (between Mac-standard and Windows-standard).
8. It’s another space theme.
9. There might be an iPod drawing.

Their customer service responds very fast—at least in response to what I’ve asked them for so far. I asked for SSH access on a Saturday and they replied back in half an hour. I asked for rsync on a Sunday and they replied back in 12 minutes. I think that’s pretty good. Their responses seem to be all canned though, so I guess that’s how they respond so quickly?

Very little is set up for you by default on their servers. If I remember correctly, there’s pico, vi, de/compression tools, and a few others. No emacs, no rsync, no development tools (gcc/make/etc.). They will grant access to development tools if you ask them. For anything else, you’ll have to compile it from source yourself.

Media Temple’s server performance is very good. I haven’t noticed any slowdowns, unlike at Mesopia/Netbunch where the servers got bogged down every so often. That’s not a completely fair comparison since Media Temple charges more than everyone else for the same space/bandwidth, but you are getting something for the extra cost.

Looks like New Super Mario Bros. will be out before I finish the next design. To be fair, I had a lot less time than I thought I’d have because there was that one week when I was incredibly sick and then the following week I was still sick and then the last week was dominated by apartment hunting and then my free time this past weekend was taken up by reformatting my PB (dual-boot Jaguar/Tiger now)… and some Jump experimentation (new deck: Ichigo/Yoh tag-attack =)).

Well anyway, it’s late already. Better sleep.

If you see this, I either gave you the address directly or the DNS updated. I finally dumped WebHostPlus (formerly known as NetBunch (formerly known as Mesopia (formerly known as Dr2.net))) for Media Temple. Dr2.net was a good host, but with its multiple mergers/ownership changes, the service went downhill. And I’m running out of space anyway (185/200 MB used), so I figured now was the time to change.

I chose Media Temple because it’s a well-known webhost in the web design community and the only bad thing people say about it is that it’s more expensive than other places. But that’s not much of an issue for me, seeing as how their lowest plan is still cheap compared to other things—cable internet + cell phone bills =(.

Anyway, it’s good to be with a decent webhost again. Having 2 GB disk space this time around is nice too!

Let me know if anything doesn’t work.

Btw, Xero, spell checker plug-in is disabled right now. Don’t have time to test it out. (Safari 1.0.3 doesn’t support whatever tech the plug-in uses. It’s already late, so I don’t want to launch Firefox; it’s such a dog anyway)

… I really need to tweak the WP UI. Or replace it with the Tiger one (supposed to be really good?).

N.L.T.

Learn that abbreviation because I might use it again. I’ve decided I won’t launch the new design until it’s ready.

Getting myself to work on the new design this week has been hard. There has been a lot on my mind and a lot—or it feels like a lot—to take care of. This vacation has served its purpose: I’m ready to go back to work, even though this week didn’t feel like a vacation at all. And the blogosphere’s felt dead to me lately. It’s hard to get excited when seemingly nothing else is going on.

Anyway, back to work. It’ll be ready when it’s ready. Though, I probably won’t get everything working before I declare it ready.

Help sate my curiosity while possibly guiding the future of Duality by answering the following questions. Again, no iPod drawing.

Questions

1. Does your computer have the font Gill Sans?
2. Have you changed browsers since May 31st? If so, what browser and version do you use? (ignore if you use Firefox)
3. Is the gamma setting on your monitor closer to the Mac default or Windows default?
4. Do you like blue?
5. Am I the last DS owner that doesn’t have Mario Kart DS?
6. Is the DS Nintendo’s first dual-screen device?

Remember, feedback makes everything better… except noise factor.

Help guide the future of Duality by answering the following questions. Sorry, no iPod drawing.

Questions

1. What browser do you predominantly use? (specify browser, version, and platform)
2. Do you have a broadband connection?
3. Do you have JavaScript enabled?
4. Would you be willing to enable cookies (assuming you have them disabled like me) for alternate designs?
5. Would you prefer a design that is optimized for 800×600 or 1024×768?
6. What is your favorite flavor of ice cream?

The last ques… I mean the second-to-last question is the most important.

Just a heads up: once I have free time again, I’ll be redesigning this place. The big change might be switching from a side-by-side post format to a one-post-after-another format. Or not. Switching would give “above the fold” room to recent post / comment listings and links to the latest reviews. Not switching maintains the balance—visually and structurally (can’t quite put it into words at the moment).

Comments appreciated*.

*as long as the comments are not about adding recent comments listings (it’ll be there) or adding avatars of some sort (those’ll be there). =)

The archive is now functional. I haven’t finished putting everything in its place, but it has enough right now to make it useful. In the process, I also learned some PHP and MySQL. I should put those two on my resumé. =)

As a side note: how come I never get much done over the weekend?

Stuff’s going to look weird for awhile. I’m simultaneously reorganizing the stylesheets and working on the archive. I’ll let you know when it all settles down.

It was quick, so I added in the number of comments next to the links to previous posts. Also increased the number of links to 7 each.

Is it obvious what the numbers stand for? Or should I explicitly state “(2 comments)” or “(comments: 2)”?

Progress on this weblog will come much slower than on my previous weblogs because it’s not just styling data, but also figuring out how to get WordPress to spit the data I want out. A lot of the issues that have come up in the context of this duo-weblog aren’t even an afterthought in traditional weblogs, so the standard WP install doesn’t have the necessary function calls to handle them.

I really want to write my own plug-ins—and I’ll probably start next weekend. I know a lot of the spacing isn’t right and some pages look messed up, but bear with me.

You got it backwards, Lloyd. I too worried that there would be an imbalance. But so far, my side has been the shorter side (he already has his first review too). I know he hasn’t been writing that much lately. It’s probably because he’s busy burning all of his CDs to DVDs (and watching a few, here and there). He also works weekends, handles sound design for the campus theatre, and has to do homework from time to time.

I never talked about Xero on SEASONS because none of my readers knew him (besides Bigi). Xero would’ve been a forgettable, faceless entity. Be honest, can you remember any of the other people I’ve mentioned on my weblog?

My rationale for Duality is that it was the optimal solution given the circumstances:

• Xero wanted to get into weblogging.
• I offered to host him.
• He is one of the few people I share many interests with.
• I needed something to get me excited about weblogging again.
• I’ve always wanted to tackle a team project outside of school.
• Xero has this dream of maintaining a game site with enough cred to get press passes to E3.

So the last one probably won’t ever happen, but Duality nicely handles the rest.

And to address the sluggishness, Atlas, sadly, is not the sprightly, young server it was when I signed up. From time to time, its CPU load gets up there, so it might take a couple tries to get Duality to load.

(reminder for myself: list of recent comments; add # of comments to previous entry links)

“Site Updates” category changed to “Duality.” Will now include posts about Duality that are not necessarily site updates.

I closed my old weblog today. Duality is officially public now. Since I never wrote an intro, today’s post will fill the void.

Welcome to Duality. You can think of this as a duo-weblog. My posts are on the left and Xero’s posts are on the right. For those of you who don’t know him, Xero is a longtime friend of mine (wave to the crowd, Xero). Together, we’ll be bringing you bits of our respective lives as well as reviews and impressions of games, movies, cartoons, anime, and music—or at least, that’s the plan.

I’m feeling quite brain-dead right now. But before I let you explore on your own, a little warning: the nav doesn’t work yet and a lot of stuff is still unfinished. As a general rule, if it doesn’t look right, I haven’t gotten to it yet.

Enjoy. =)

I’m navigating the last twists and turns that stand between me and Duality version-1.0.

Google for “quadoshock wordpress” or “quadoshock duality” and you won’t find anything. Isn’t it strange? If you checked last Saturday, you would’ve found this weblog. But now, nothing. Google has Xero’s old weblog (for the record, I hate the word “blog”)—even has his last post cached. But Duality is nowhere to be found.

I think that since Xero’s old place was the only page that linked to Duality, Google threw out Duality when the Square Root of Xero stopped being updated.

I’ve been watching Google closely because I haven’t officially closed my other weblog yet. I haven’t been posting there, but I haven’t linked to Duality yet. I don’t want any of them seeing Duality just yet. Think of this as a closed beta; and of yourselves as highly-appreciated beta testers. =)

Subcategory structure removed. Similar categories merged.

I added a new category today: Preview. For games, anime, cartoons, and music that we haven’t experienced enough of to make a full review, we’ll just put something in the Preview category.

QSK Edit:  Preview changed to Impressions.