also.known.as “spvn”

Unfortunately it seems I’ve lost interest in blogging here any longer. It’s almost impossible to gain any form of exposure for a small, simple blog like mine, meaning most of what I post won’t get read anyway. Yes, I know there are ways to spread word about my blog, but besides spamming the link all over the Internet (something which I’m definitely not going to do), I don’t see any other way. Sure, the stuff here ain’t particularly exciting or interesting, but it’s partly because I simply don’t have the incentive to write much here, seeing as how nobody will read it anyway.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to let this blog die. I have a feeling it’ll come in handy one day. Even if it means I gotta pay US$35 or so per year just to maintain the server and domain, I think I’ll do it. However, the future of this blog remains uncertain.
*sad face*

So, being busy with setting up my third blog and maintaining all three blogs of mine, I haven’t had much time to write more on this blog, thus a drop in the number of readers would hardly be surprising. Still, I was quite shocked when I logged into my admin panel and was greeted with this graph:

Seriously? A steady drop in number of hits? I mean sure I haven’t been updating as much as before, but I never expected that to reflect in a steady drop in number of hits to this blog. In fact, at the “peak” of 8 views on 6 feb, I hadn’t posted anything, but I did do so on 8th Feb, when I got like 4 views the entire day. Sure I’m used to having pretty low number of hits on my blog, even though I have had sudden spike at times, but I’ve never seen anything like this before. My graph usually fluctuates like mad, as can be seen in the darkened part.

It seems like I really need to put more effort into this blog, if I want to get anywhere with it at all. Still, I don’t think I’m ever going to close down this blog willingly, no matter how many (or rather how few) readers I have.

I recently finished a 2000+ word post (I’m not going to reveal what it’s about for now), and was adding pictures to it to post it up on this blog when I realised it just wouldn’t do. That post was unreadable with this current blog theme.

You see, the problem is that I prefer to have pictures aligned right next to the content of my post instead of above it (as can be seen in this post). When I align it as such, what happens is that the text itself gets squeezed so that it only covers half of what it would originally cover. This makes for very difficult reading because 1) my sidebar is so wide and 2) this theme has a fixed width and it’s pretty narrow in general as compared to other themes. Furthermore, with 2000 words, I like to sprinkle images throughout the article so that it doesn’t get too boring. However, when I do it to this article with this theme, it becomes too much of an eyesore. Paragraphs are so crammed together that it makes it extremely difficult to read and the images become more of a hindrance than anything else.

Hence, reading a 2000+ word article in such a narrow space will make anyone’s eyes bleed (as I discovered when I previewed the post). Thus, I am now in search of a new theme that 1) has a fluid width (ie. it adjusts according to the resolution of the reader’s monitor at that time) and 2) has a narrower sidebar, so that the content will take up a considerable portion of the screen for users with traditional 1024 by 768 screens.

Surprisingly, it’s actually quite hard to find such a theme. Fixed width themes seem much more popular (probably because they’re a lot easier to code) and for some reason, people seem to adore wide sidebars. Why in the world do bloggers like sidebars that take up so much space till the point where it makes it harder for the reader to actually read the content.

Thus my search begins, I’ll be playing around with a few themes on this blog to see how they look.

For years before wordpress became so popular (ie. before wordpress.COM), most of the people I knew had one favourite blogging platform: Blogger (or blogspot as it was known then). There was much to love about blogger, chief among them being the ability to add your own piece of code and edit it however you like (unlike in wordpress.com). With that ability, people started coding the equivalent of wordpress plugins, which were really just chunks of code that you downloaded in a .txt file and copied into the correct portion of your blog site.

One of the most common addons you found on blogspot sites? A shoutbox. For those who don’t know, basically it was an addon in the sidebar which let people submit short messages and have them instantly appear one after another, kind of like having an ongoing chat in the side bar or a mini guestbook of sorts.

Being one of the first few among my friends to move to WordPress, everyone kept asking “Where’s the shoubox?!”, and when I replied “WordPress doesn’t support them”, many people immediately got turned off from it. We were just so accustomed to shoutbox-es.

I know most of you will be saying “Just get a WordPress plugin!” Well, thing is, just a year or two ago, there was no such wordpress plugin for some strange reason. No one ever bothered to code one, I know because I searched high and low for one.

Thankfully, those days are now over and I found this plugin called the WP Wall, which is basically a shoutbox with Facebook lingo in the title. What’s even better is that it’s an AJAX plugin, meaning it has fluid animation and refreshes on the fly. It doesn’t look as flashy as the good old blogspot ones, which has its pros and cons, but I’ll take its simplistic style.

Heck, I’m just glad I’ve got a shoutbox again.

So after looking around for awhile, I’ve settled on iNove as my default theme for now. I must say there weren’t themes like this in the past, or maybe I just wasn’t lucky enough to find such themes (or maybe I just wasn’t searching hard enough). I feel that iNove captures the perfect balance between style and substance.

For one, it certainly looks cool and sleek, I’ve always wanted a theme like that. I wish my desktop could have the same look and feel of this theme in fact, though I’m much too lazy to continue searching for another theme now. However, something about the way my sidebar’s currently organised really feels very cluttered. I’ll try to play around with it later on, though I’m not quite sure what’s giving it that weird feel right now. Maybe I just don’t have a long enough archive yet.

I’ve always found cool themes in the past, but plenty of them compromised on the actual visibility of words. For example, white words on a black background on a blog is a definite no-no. The section of the page showing my blog posts has a very clean and sleek feel and just looks pleasing to the eye for some reason or another. But, like I said earlier, the moment my eye wanders over to the sidebar… something’s just not right.

Guess I’ll go play around with the widgets in the sidebar later or even meddle with the CSS code if need be.