Recently I have been initiating several personal projects on my own that there’s just a lot of hustle and bustle as I zoom from one work to the other. It has been a while I was this jacked up in getting something done, so actually I enjoyed what I’m experiencing at the moment even there are extremely frustrating times.

Anyway, two things that I have been working on for the past month and am still working on them:

1. MutualTracker.com is a Malaysian Unit Trust/Mutual Fund tracking website, which at the moment only let you check historical prices and play with interactive price charts of Public Mutual funds. Eventually I’ll be keeping track of more unit trust funds in Malaysia and come up with tools and calculators that would let you see whether fund performance are really good (as the company claims) or completely sucks (like friends and family who felt completely cheated)
2. A complete face lift of this blog – Wee! For one thing it’s way more colourful and it now doesn’t look fugly on Internet Explorer like the previous one did. Knocked out the whole theme for the whole day and it’s still a work-in-progress. Planning to shell out the details as I go along (and hope nothing breaks in the procress )

Now despite having two on-going projects (not including the ones at work ), my brain’s still on an overdrive and actually wanting to work on other project ideas (Uh-oh…). And there are quite a number of big life-decisions that I have to attend recently, which all came to me at once (talk about unexpected timing) – pretty overwhelmed myself, to be honest. Not to mention that it’s so scary that I’m actually actively deferring the few potentially life-changing ones.

Ah well…

Hopefully I’ll still be able to do regular post-ups on my latest card-art. I actually had them piling in my file actually.

And lo and behold, the new look is already up and running - though at the time of writing (27 June 2009) Internet Explorer users may end up seeing a less optimal site, since I haven’t got around fixing the theme yet (looking forward to making it work this weekend though).

The original conceptual design for A Day in Life ver.2

Developing this theme has been quite a feat to me, which I style it with pure CSS with minimal cruft and I also experimented with CSS3 text-shadows (to view the full effect, do use Firefox 3.5, Google Chrome or Safari 4). And I made very sure that the theme will fall back quite nicely for older browsers, which I plan to achieve with my weekend work on improving this.

Conceptually, this theme really reflects who I am in many ways. I really striven for a simplistic look but would give an impression of fullness and richness through the use of colours. I opted for a more hand-drawn look for this one, which I go as far as finding hand-drawn icons that matches with the theme (luckily I stumbled on a feature of icons in Smashing Magazine, that’s where I came to find all the cute hand-drawn icons of social networking sites). And I’m quite happy with the first vector cartoon that I had came up with for the logo – it’s pretty much me in essense, really (for the most part I’m quite a geek myself :p).

The hardest part would definitely be the colour scheme: laying out the base colours are quite trivial, but trying to paint my “canvas” and blend it with other colours with different contrast and utilizing the correct shades of colour was really hard. I mean, doing typography and layout is much easier without needing much guesswork. Personally feel that the link colours for the sidebar may need some work… feeling that it doesn’t have enough contrast to make the text more legiable. If you have come up with a better colour scheme for the sidebar, do let me know .

Anyway, giving credit where credit is due, my heartfelt thanks to the following who are kind enough to contribute stuff with a Creative Commons license, making it freely accessible to novice web designers like myself:

• Sandbox WordPress theme, which I used as the based in developing the theme
• TheG-Force, for the large RSS image and Twitter logo on the sidebar
• Janko’s Handycons 2, which I used as the small contact iconbar at the footer of the page
• led24.de, for the miscellaneous icons used

Really looking forward to start my journal anew and hopefully I’d be able to share more of my insights and thoughts as I experience more in life.

Saying so, I still need to do some minor tweaks – hopefully completing them by today and continue with my other personal projects soon .

It’s been about four years (if not more) that my personal homepage had been stagnant and have seen it moving hosts at various point of time. Having finally converted in a WordPress format, by all means, notes a brand new beginning.

By all means, the “PEDAGOGIES” (that’s the title of my previous website) era had came to an end and the purpose of the site had changed from a purely manga drawing tutorial site into something yet unknown. And yup, you read “unknown” right: as I have yet to come up with a clear goal what this site shall achieve (mainly also due to the fact that the myraid of services that I used did their job very well, be it LiveJournal, DeviantArt or Twitter).

So by all means, this site shall be my experimentation grounds of trying out new content and let it take its own shape at its own accord. So hopefully I’ll be able to put on my creative thinking cap and come up with something original this time round.

By the way, I’ll be posting the old manga tutorials back up again sometime later (mainly for archiving purposes). Would really need some time to clean the HTML up to suit this new platform .