The blog just got relinked yesterday before the power tripped (yet again). Everything’s back with a bit of trouble from snapdrive and help from fileden. I have a lot more free time now compared to the last 12 months (excluding last month =x) So yeah, this blog will be back to waste more web space like half the other blogs around the world. Hopefully it will stay that way when my university days return again.
Snapdrive used to be good… Recently, it ran into problems again and I can’t seem to upload my files. Before, my backup plan was to switch to hotlinkfiles until I saw that it’s files is expirable. It used to be there forever but they’ve change the criteria to deletion upon 30 days of inactivity. fileden also used to be non-expirable. Taking up the trend of recent free file hosting services, they’ve also changed the criteria to file deletion upon 60 days of account inactivity. Pretty annoying… I don’t like the possibility of deletion hanging above me no matter how unlikely. Especially since I know my blog is virtually dead or subjected to blogging mood swings. The other sites I listed also had the familiar time bombs but provided much lesser space/bandwidth that I would have liked and are therefore, marked out from my list-to-consider.
Between hotlinkfiles and fileden, I did not manage to find batch upload features so far in my account while fileden provided this feature and worked similarly to snapdrive.net (via uploading a .zip file) Furthermore, the deletion criteria between fileden and hotlinkfiles have a difference of 30 days.
I shall sign up for fileden and if it proves to be alright, I may move out all the files from snapdrive over to fileden and hope it’ll continue to do well.
It’s getting to be a nuisance, moving files here and there, backing up every little single thing -sigh-
edit: I found out why snapdrive wasn’t working. They don’t host .css files >.< forgot about that. Been a while since I uploaded anything to snapdrive. Fileden and hotlinkfiles do host them though. .js or .php are also accepted!
Sickening… There was a corruption of my files or account or something, I can’t remember the exact email. Snapdrive reset everything for me. As per their TOS, I’m supposed to keep a backup of the images which… I did not…
Well I did for most but now I gotta rename them again exactly. I’m so lazy! And there’s no freaking time!
Those that I don’t have anymore… I guess I’ll delete the posts :S I don’t like the idea of that. Maybe I should just leave the links and save those I can. Even if it uglifies the blog. I don’t think I have the time to continually maintain old posts like that in the future anyway. I can’t possibly redo everything for everytime something crops up be it images or something else.
Snapdrive aside, I realise I haven’t been posting my stuff up because I am just -that- busy. Good news is that Kingston’s lessons are coming to an end so I’ll be receiving all my past works back. Kingston has a total of 24 drawings of which, about 5 or 6 are tests that are to be completed in class which I never fail to screw up simply because I draw like a sloth and can never finish.
Also, since next Monday is the last lesson, after I get my stuff back, I’ll get the office to scan in the images for me so I can post them all.
Which means I’ll repost all the old ones again haha… So far I skipped some ugly ones I didn’t like and I’d prefer them to be in chronological order in this blog. The quality should be better if they really could scan an A3 for me. No stupid shadows of my arm or camera. No crappy reflection. Yay!
I launched dreamweaver the morning before I head off to Malaysia and worked without sleep for over 24 hours till the very last minute where I had to turn off the computer and carry the luggage to the taxi. Still I could not finish it in time. Just this morning, I finally completed "Blue Not Here"; christened with the inability to think of a good name at 5am other than stating the obvious.
I’ve never done clean corporate looks before. I thought this one looks cleaner than the old ones but on second looks, maybe not. Having 3 columns makes it difficult to beat 2 columns in terms of simplicity and I have been doing 2 column layouts all along. Admittedly, this is still a little too messy and is hardly corporate. But hey, at least I’m managed to stay away from pasting a wallpaper and working the site around it. Still, someone would not be pleased and this would probably burn holes in his eyes. At least I’m trying so give credit for that! Plus, this layout is the one that made me read the Float Theory which I have been resisting the need to read.
It was a difficult site to build thanks to blogsome’s smarty templating system that isn’t all that smart afterall. It is simple for beginners to use but so inflexible. I really hate the way it generates the html code. It’s so restrictive, it’s like a mother hen smacking my hand saying "No you can not" to everything I want. One good smack is how my date looks like now. By right, this post’s datestamp is supposed to have "Dec" written under the 20 but noooo, they generate the date all in one line, enclosed within a <h2> tag. It now looks awful but there’s no other way to do it and I’m getting lazy from having to go back to the drawing board each time it gives a smack so I left it with just the number.
Enough of smarty rant. I’m done with this layout and it shall stay this way. End of story.
Nifflheim layout is now complete!!! All the bugs are fixed up, music player has been added, everything is working properly except for one irritating tombstone that I can’t do anything about because of how blogsome works.
If you think the music player is lame, I’ve never done Flash before in my life. I’ve only launched the program before, click on some things, get thoroughly confused and closed it after 2 minutes. And a load of other excuses.
Either way, the music player isn’t coded the way I wanted it to. I spent 12 hours since yesterday after school till 5am today reading and reading so much about Flash and I couldn’t do it "the right way". There are no good beginner ActionScript 3.0 books in the library, or rather none at all. They are for advanced and so few in number at that. I only grab a book for AS2 and found that they made a lot of changes to the point that I can only follow to a certain point, and then I’m told to use a bunch features available in Flash 8 only a.k.a I’m stuck.
Online means isn’t helpful either. There are so few tutorials specific to what I want and I read them for so many hours and things still do not work. In the end, I found a simple tutorial for AS2 which did the simple music player is such a cheating way, I felt embarassed using it. And then converted it to a AS3 equivalent.
The method consisted of using two layers, one for the UI and one for the actions. And two keyframes each. Set either one of the frame to have the background music played, and the other frame to stop the music. Add codes for the play and stop button in the respective frame using goToAndStop(); What a cheat. The entire day I’ve been reading about how people did it all using only Frame 1 and I didn’t manage to do it for so many hours I gave up.
Maybe in the next layout I’ll try again. And when they have better books. For now, this player is enough.
Yes it looks ugly and out of place. I used to default buttons available because I was too lazy and frustrated in the end to construct my own from scratch. They said I could skin it but I didn’t manage to find out how to. Bleh… So much for wasting 12 hours of my life.
