Moved!

Posted on October 29, 2007
Filed Under Sidenotes, Internet, Multimedia, Wordpress, Daily Notes, Software | Leave a Comment

Okay, life must go on, right? So with the spirit of Sumpah Pemuda and the recent festive of Pesta Blogger 2007. I officially announce that:

I have moved my blog here!

It’s just around the corner, not very far away.

The reason? Well you can say that I’m getting bored with Wordpress and I want to try something new. But trust me, I won’t move it anywhere else in the future, I will use patvandiest.com as my main blog, always. I promise you that!

So please… please update your bookmark, I will forever graceful if you do that. But if you are reading my blog through my Feedburner account, worry not, I will automatically update the link. That goes to my other social networking related link.

I won’t delete this blog, though. I will keep it as past archives of my writings.

So, sorry for this inconvinience. I hope you don’t mind. See you at my other room.

Sincerely Yours,

Patrick Gerard van Diest
www.patvandiest.com

Safari on Windows: A Rather Brief Review

Posted on August 24, 2007
Filed Under Internet, Wordpress, Software | Leave a Comment

I’ve wanted to write about this for a long time now. Yes, I’ve missed the Safari going Windows hype. I’ve only try this Safari for Windows about two months now. Though the first month I literally neglected it, since it’s just crash randomly on my PC. Last week after they announced another update for the browser, which promises “better stability”, I decided to try it again (yet still in beta).

Okay I had a love at first sight moment to it’s font anti-aliasing feature. I only found this kind of rendering on Mac system. So looking at the beauty on PC is such a joy. But other than that, shame on you Safari.

They claimed that they are faster than on handling JavaScript, but other says different thing. The sudden random crashes were less, but still happen occasionally. Oh yeah, they don’t provide session restoring. So when your Safari crashes when you open five or so of your important webpage, don’t expect it to comeback when you start another instance.

Faster page loading? Yes, if you compare it to Opera. But with Firefox, I don’t see any difference. Back to JavaScript function, I find it very buggy on different websites. Some AJAX features on some website were not working at all, prove for that: JavaScript drop-down menus were off limit.

The proxy setting options is strangely disabled. So it follows the proxy from the Internet Option setting on Control Panel (which clearly set from the Internet Explorer setting)

Well you can read a full-blown review of Safari 3 here. For me the problems are irritating and I won’t use it for a day-to-day production browser yet. Now I use it for reading feeds and blogs since I love the anti-aliasing rendering. Other than that, though I expect a lot from this browser, it’s just not quite ready yet.

PS: Been trying to use Safari for my wordpress wysiwyg editor to write this post but stuck since it doesn’t provide any necessary (important!) text editing button. It just disappear magicly on Safari. Oh well, back to ScribeFire for now

Wordpress Permalink Pagination Problem

Posted on June 18, 2007
Filed Under Internet, Wordpress, Daily Notes | 3 Comments

Had a problem with the Wordpress engine of this blog. Yesterday, I notice that Google Webmaster’s tools report a number of “Page Not Found” errors on my site. After a quick look, I found out that this error related to the malfunction of the Permalink features of Wordpress. It seems that Wordpress would present you a 404 error when you want to navigate through another page in the category archive. The pagination doesn’t seem to work.

I’ve done my research to find a solution, The Codex gave some information on how to deal the bug, but it’s not working. So I try other methods, nope… not quite fixed, I even try to hack the code, but failed, because it differs from the Wordpress version that I used. Furthermore, I have try to deactivate all of the plugins just to find out in the end that it has no effect whatsoever. The problem still persist. Ah well, I’m tired…need to sleep now.

So, anyone had the same problem as I did? and did you find any solutions for it? Please do share it here…

Blog,Upgraded!

Posted on May 25, 2007
Filed Under Wordpress, Daily Notes, Software | Leave a Comment

Finally, after a week of testing I’m quite satisfied with the fact that I’ve upgraded the Wordpress to version 2.2 for this blog. The upgrade went smoothly. I had no problem whatsoever. I’ve installed some plugins to make your visit here more comfortable. And of course, the Adsense, well I had to do it eventually. Somebody has to make a living right? hehe. But don’t worry; it won’t affect the content of my post. I put it there just to fill in the white spaces.

Just some minor glitch with the Popular Post plugin’s list in the sidebar. It seems that it display the same post repeatedly. Somebody had an idea how to fix this?

Moreover, I’m planning to change the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugins to Simple Tagging. Because the UTW plugins had an error where it delete the tags that I have made in some of the posts.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The theme! Yes, I have changed it a little bit. Now the menus are in the sidebar, you don’t have to go to the bottom of the page just to look at the menus. I don’t do an extreme makeover, so the theme name still called “Your Silent Face”

So, enjoy this blog!

Aah..Yes.. A New Theme…

Posted on January 26, 2007
Filed Under Wordpress | 2 Comments

For long, I have plans to change the “Krafty” theme to a new one. Actually, I was only going to change the layout positions, and then I thought why didn’t I change the whole theme? Well okay.

Back in December, I started sketching the layout of the new theme. Then implement it unto HTML and CSS. Bad things happen, the power supply unit on my PC rather blew up. Thank God, I can still manage to save my work to a flash disk.

The incident on my PC was so devastating. There I am, on my annual day-offs, planning to build a new theme then something went wrong, I can’t use my box. I understand that that was the only timeslot that I can use a 100% to develop something. Back in the office, no, I can’t do much of anything regarding to personal work. Nevertheless, sadly it happens.

So okay, I thought. Maybe I can develop it pieces by pieces. But a couple of days ago I notice, Man, this would take a very very very long time to finish.

Then I stumbled upon this theme by Brian Gardner. It has the similar layout that I had in mind. I guess this is the answer to my theme designing problems.

One day to modify it, one day to implement it and testing it (actually, right now it still in the development stage).

Here I present to you all: Your Silent Face, a new theme for my blog. I hope that it will stay here for a long time.

Membuat Asides (sebuah alternatif)

Posted on February 10, 2006
Filed Under Wordpress | Leave a Comment

Asides merupakan sekumpulan daftar link yang disertai dengan keterangan singkat mengenai link tersebut. Banyak pengguna blog menggunakan Asides dengan alasan ingin men-tautkan suatu link dalam suatu entri blog. Namun, dalam entrian tersebut mereka tak perlu menulis keterangan panjang lebar mengenai link-link tersebut. Asides yang pertama kali dicetuskan oleh Matthew Mullenweg ini, merupakan suatu konsep yang diambil dari feature Quicklinks di Movable Type.

Ada dua cara dalam mengimplementasikan Asides di Wordpress. Cara pertama adalah menaruhnya di bagian post. Cara kedua adalah menaruhnya di sidebar. Asides bukan merupakan suatu plugin, namun lebih kepada code modification dari sejumlah template.

Sebenarnya Wordpress sendiri sudah memberikan tutorial tentang bagaimana cara menambahkan Asides di sebuah blog. Namun, ada beberapa kendala dari tutorial tersebut. Pada tutorial itu, mereka menjelaskan dengan asumsi tag the_loop yang dipakai menggunakan code ini: