Happy 10th Anniversary To This Blog
This blog is now 10 years old.
I don't belieeeve it!
That means it nearly time for Vin and Sila's 10-year anniversary.
Hishgraphics Gallery v3.0
If you hadn't noticed, the gallery on this site had been out of commission for many, many months. Any links to it, such as the one at the top of the left column of this blog's index page, points to the DeviantArt gallery instead. It died because of my monkeying around with the v2.0 gallery's Coppermine CMS.
I have now rebuilt the gallery using Zenphoto, and have spent all last night and this morning populating gallery. I've also ensured that there are links to released products.
It's not nearly finished. There are some more customers' gallery to set up and populate. Click here to check it out!
What's v1.0 gallery, you ask? It was the one before the Coppermine gallery, which was made from HTML files that I wrote. I remember at the time being sad I did not have any artwork I could post that anyone paid me to draw. I've been moderately busy since, and so I am very grateful that most of the work in v3.0 are all paid work.
What Happened at the Coral Reef?
I wrote, dedicated and presented this book to baby Eva - currently less than half a year old - at the gathering last week. I hope some day Mei & Andrew will be able to read to Eva, and she will wonder what a crazy nut Uncle Hisham is for writing this book.
Eva Goes to the Beach is now on sale on Lulu.com.
It's a perfect book to vex 4-8 year old young 'uns with a simple storyline involving a trip to the beach, a swim around the coral reef, an undead shark and ice cream.
I asked earlier what happens to the little girl who was diving at the coral reef?
Check out the following image for a continuing image, and click here to purchase Eva Goes to the Beach at Lulu.com.
Believe it or not, the book has a happy ending!
Secret Library Revamped and Re-released
After a long time taken out of the market, I've finally re-released the old The Secret Library children's book as Irfan's Secret Library.
The story is basically the same, with some edits to the body text. There are no new artwork. Everything is from the older version of the book.
It's up on the Products page here. You can see samples of the interior at its Lulu page here.
It's been a while since I worked to create a brand new children's book. I should get back to it. The next one should concern animals or dinosaurs or something.
Tagging The Entire Weblog
I seem to be on a roll this weekend. Yesterday, I spent some hours trying to fix the layout in Internet Explorer, as noted by Sila in the previous article's comments. This morning I've started to activate the Pivot weblog's Tag feature. This should help further categorising the articles herein, and to search them based on the Tags. I find that its more versatile and faster to implement than the Categories feature.
I will leave the Categories feature on the left column for the time being. If it still feels redundant to have it on after some time, I will remove the Categories block.
After tagging the last 80 entries, I have discovered that the tag cloud looks like this:
Click here to see the new Tags page on the weblog.
The Layout Goes South
I've been trying to code the CSS file for the weblog all morning. I woke up and thought, how nice it would be if the site was optimised to a width of 1024 pixels.
So I tinkered. And after altering and jury-rigging a bit of code here and a snippet of script there in the CSS file, I have arrived at a temporary solution before I needed to stop working on it.
Here's how it looks like using three different browser types on a 1200px by 800px screen:
Firefox 2.0.0.14
Safari 3.1
and finally... Internet Explorer 7.0 (sigh)
The left column is still there. It's just overlaid by the centre column. I shall return to fix this for IE users.
Dreadwind Rising: A Blog Upgrade
Many, many months after the latest version of Pivot had been released, and remember that this weblog uses the Pivot content management system to... manage its content, Hishgraphics blog has finally been upgraded.
It was for a very long time running on version 1.30 codenamed "Arcee". As of yesterday, this blog has been upgraded to version 1.40.5 codenamed "Dreadwind".
It feels great performing the upgrade manually - uploading files individually and rebuilding everything - instead of using some automatic upgrade application. After about 4 man hours or so, it's back in business.
Not that it really matters for the regular visitors of the blog, but there you go.
As a behind-the-scenes bonus, here are some pop-up images of the administration interface:
The Gallery Is Upgraded
After a long time of uploading images and hard coding the html (and later php) files into the Hishgraphics Gallery, I've now deleted the old setup and replaced it with a proper Coppermine Gallery CMS. It took some time to get the hang of the system, but I think I have it down enough to get by. There are still a bunch of stuff from the old gallery still not updated to the new place, but I'll fill it up as time goes by.
Sorry, I don't intend for the gallery to be a community site - that's what this blog is for - so comments and ratings are disabled. Just enjoy the stuff I got on there.
Finally Playing with PHP
Referring to some help sites and pulling back the curtain to look at source codes, I finally got the nerve to save some text files which I wrote on a text editor as php files, which I usually always do in html! Not really ground breaking stuff; all I did was to include the navigation and the footer parts into the main files from separate php files. Later I'll see about learning to link the php files to a (gasp) MySQL database!
I should have started to learn this stuff earlier. It would have gone a long way in teaching me stuff that would help me in my project paper for college. But in the meantime, both the Hishgraphics Gallery and the workplace website are now fully php-ized!
Yeah, they look the same from 2 days ago, but the Legos I used to build up those two sites are all different pieces now. Trust me.
This Weblog Is China-Friendly
It's been in the news since last year that China has been censoring internet into the country. So, thanks to a website called greatfirewallofchina.org, I am able to test whether the subject matters of Hishgraphics blog entries are forbidden to be view from within China.
Apparently, we're not blocked! Yay! (Or, who knows, perhaps because of this post we will be before long, heh.)
Greetings to everyone reading from China! Peace, y'all!
Two Views Of The Same Page
Because I've using Firefox on Ubuntu 6.06 LTS to surf the net, here are two different looks of this website's index page. I have no preference on which is better looking, but apart from the fonts, there really isn't much difference, thanks to Ubuntu not being able to display the Trebuchet MS font. The original screen resolution is 1200 x 800.
The top is the WinXP Firefox with the Aluminum Kai 2 theme; and below is the Ubuntu Firefox on Ubuntu with the Ubuntu Tangerine theme.
Click on the thumbnails to view the larger images.
Last night however, the home desktop died a fiery death and I can't reinstall any OS. Not WinXP, not Ubuntu. (Thankfully, God created work laptops.) Thanks to a suggestion from Kris Vanderwater the Atlantean, I'm now downloading Knoppix ISO file to see if I can run the Knoppix Linux-based OS off the CD. However, if the old hard disk drive is physically damaged, I don't think I can install anything into the systems partition of the first hard disk drive... which means desperate measures (translation: money to be spent) will be required.
HaXX0rzed!!!
Many thanks to Fairiz Jafar of EasyNet Interactive, our webhoster, for noticing and monitoring the trouble almost a full day before I contacted him for help. His help on a Sunday was very much appreciated, getting the site back up. Two of the most recent entries were lost, but it's no big deal. The Hishgraphics web journal is back online.
Click here to read a description of what happened in the Pivot Support Forums.
It was a long weekend, needless to say.
But I said it anyway. *sigh*
Random Banner Images
New Blockquote CSS
I noticed that like the old comments style, the blockquote style for this website is just a bunch of indented paragraphs. So, to ensure the blockquotes are easily seen, I've added a bunch of lines to the css file, causing anything in blockquotes to resemble:
Click here to watch the Robot Chicken representation of how Palpatine reacted to Vader after the first Death Star blew up.
Hilarious.
A quote from my recent post from this thread in the Holonet Forums.
Browse by Categories
Edit: Rejoice! For the Pajeri Terong entry is back on the weblog! Many thanks to hansfn and Bob from the Pivot Support Forum for their suggestions.
Holy Crap... I Broke Something!
New Comments CSS Code
I hope it would not only look aesthetically pleasant, but differentiating individual comments would be much easier now.
Comments for the comments in the form of kudos, critiques and exploding toilets would be most welcome.
And by the way...
Second Hishgraphics Book In The Works
Many moons after the release of The Secret Library, I've now finished writing a 12 page children's book, a much simpler one this time. It's about a child that imagines camping out on his or her bed with a blanket. There will be rhyming. There will be animals. And the best part is the idea hit me after playing make-believe campout on the bed with a blanket.
Still have to revise the text and proofread before I start illustrating and laying out the book.
So.... anyone knows what rhymes with "sasquatch"?
This Blog Is Worth...
My blog is worth $4,516.32.
How much is your blog worth?
Now show me the money! Show me the money!!!!!
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