blog theme

A new era of pinkness

- Sheylara 21 Comments

First post on my new blog theme!

So far, the feedback on this garish pink spectacle is positive.

Well, I think the colour is garish, but at the same time it fits with all the elements very harmoniously and delightfully. So I’m really pleased with it.

Vegimeeples!

Most of the credit goes to Lionel and his team of designers at RippleWerkz for doing such a grand job on my new theme and putting up with my fuss for perfection.

Some of the credit goes to Nuffnang for being part sponsor and for introducing me to Lionel.

(As a side note, a lot of credit goes to Nuffnang for helping take my blog to new heights and giving me the opportunity to make a decent living through blogging!)

And a tiny pea of credit goes to me for hounding Lionel every time he shows me a new draft, making him change this and code that to accommodate my crazy requirements.

Lionel was awesome and didn’t strangle me once!

Well, so it’s really more his credit than mine.

Cake!

Finally, mountains of credit to you, my reader, for helping me make my blog a success by reading and commenting, thereby warranting a new blog theme to celebrate a new era of blogs and blogging!

This new theme will motivate me to blog more often so that I don’t disappear for a week again like I did last week.

In any case, I’ve added a new feature (top right) called Post-it Notes (for want of a better title).

It will allow me to make short little posts on the go, which I’ve always wanted to but could never on the old theme. I didn’t want little posts to push down the longer ones which take me hours to write.

I used to collate all my short posts and publish them five or six at a time as “Bite-Size Sheylara”. Remember?

Bite-Size Sheylara

Anyway, this all just means that there will be more content for you to read more frequently!

Awesomeness, yes? So go tell all your friends to come gawk at all this newness and awesomeness!

And happy new year again!

Mozilla Firefox vs. Internet Explorer

- Sheylara 38 Comments

For years, Firefox users have been crowing at me for being a dinosaur and still using IE for surfing the Internet.

“Ditch IE,” they say. “Firefox is the only way to go.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Tabbed browsing.”

“I can live without it.”

“Not after you’ve tried it.”

“I’m happy without it.”

“Firefox is more stable and efficient.”

“But IE is doing well enough for me.”

Actually, the truth was that I just didn’t feel like adapting to a new interface. It’s like changing your phone from Nokia to Sony Ericsson. Suddenly you’re all thumbs and you have to relearn everything. It’s annoying.

And then IE came up with tabbed browsing and I thought that was the end of it. One fewer reason for Firefox fanatics to rave at me.

Until two days ago.

Suddenly, IE kept crashing on me for no reason. Every few minutes, it would freeze while loading a page (mostly when I try to scroll down before the page is fully loaded) and the cursor would freeze in its hourglass-icon state. All buttons and links dead. The only clickable thing is the little red cross on the top right corner.

At first I thought it was my computer. But my other applications were working fine and it was only IE that kept crashing.

So I got fed up and downloaded Firefox.

Like magic! I visited all the same websites on Firefox and it didn’t crash a single time.

Now, I’m forced to become a Firefox user. You fanatics should be happy.

But I have complaints about it. Text in Firefox looks lame. Here’s an example:

Internet Explorer sample:

Mozilla Firefox sample:

Can you see how the text looks stronger in IE? Firefox’s text looks like the printer ran out of ink.

If I’m going to read anything at length on my monitor, I’d rather read on IE because it looks easier on the eyes.

Also, see how, in Firefox, my links are hardly noticeable.

I wonder if you Firefox users have even noticed that I have links on my blog. *lol*

After two days of using Firefox, I want to go back to IE.

The IE interface is prettier and more sleek.

IE allows you to open a new tab with just one click because it has that little tab corner sticking out.

On Firefox, you need to right click first, then select New Tab.

I suppose I could just do a Ctrl-T, but that’s different.

And, most irritating of all, I changed my blog password last night and now Firefox refuses to let me log into my blog admin. It keeps telling me that my password is wrong. And I’ve tried typing it like 20 times, very carefully. So now I have to blog from IE and risk it crashing on me.

How annoying.

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By the way, you might have noticed that I’ve just installed a new plugin called Similar Posts. It gives you a bunch of links at the bottom of each post in order to entice you to stay on my blog longer. Nothing new. Just something I wanted to add since time immemorial but kept putting off.

I’m also thinking of changing my blog skin. My side bar is getting ridiculously cluttered and I want a three-column blog theme so I can have two side bars to organise my nonsense.

I’m thinking of this one:

I want something very clean and simple and neat. This looks like it. What to do you think? I might attempt to change the blue to pink. Heh.

If you visit my blog over the next week and see any weird stuff going on, please bear with me. I’ll be experimenting with themes and plugins and widgets.

Other than that, it’s business as usual.