For some reason, it won’t let me upload it to Customize.org, which is the default skin repository for Rainlendar. I’ll try again later on, but for now, DA will do the job XD
I totally have been neglecting this blog, and. . .and well my whole site as a matter of fact. It’s just that with my last year of college, and stage and other hobbies and stuff I didn’t have much time, and. . . well yeah.
I recently updated my computer to Kubuntu Hardy. . . .well actually, I broke my installation of Linux first by installing KDE4 and saying I wanted to use KDM 4 and then I didn’t like it and uninstalled it together with the display manager 
. So I decided I might as well get the newer version. . . well the version of Hardy that comes with KDE 3.
I quite like it. It’s really nice because with every version they make installing hardware better and better. I’ve been using Kubuntu since Edgy and I remember, back then I couldn’t get my printer and scanner working (well, I probably would be able to if I knew complicated command line commands but back then I didn’t understand any of that) and now my scanner is practically plug and play and my printer is right in the list of printers in the settings.
I also redecorated my computer with lovely tango icons that I like so much XD. I dunno, I just was starting to get really bored of crystal. Here’s a screenie:
If you noticed the calendar at the upper left, that’s rainlendar using a tangoish skin I’m currently working on. It should be available shortly, I just need to fix a few things on it before releasing it 
I just discovered a nice little content management system that might solve the problem of “okay, you made my site, now what if I want to change the info in it?” problem. It’s called CMS from Scratch and it’s nice because it doesn’t use any databases, just php includes. Also, it recently went Open Source.
I haven’t really had time to properly learn it, since when I downloaded it two days ago, their website was down, so I didn’t have access to the documentation, but from what I’ve seen it seems easy enough to use. I’m actually thinking of using it for my current client project, although it would probably need translation because my client is french I don’t know if I actually have time to do that. . . anyway, we’ll see.
Hee so I made my own template. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be actually lol. The wordpress template tutorial at wpdesigner.com helped me a lot with it actually, I mean with all the php codes that I had to include and all that. And also to demystify why there were so many .html files that made the template. It really looks confusing at first but once you’re into it it’s just “put up all the include codes, break up into sections, style it up. 
Of course there’s still some little tweaks I have to make here and there but overall I think it’s a nice layout XD.
I was surfing around the internet this week and at one point I told myself “Hey, I really should get a blog”. So today I setup word press and here it is. Yeah this must be the zillionth time I try to make one. I won’t go about with the how and why of it because it’s just not important. I’m past the whole teenage angst phase anyway, so the issues I had in the past shouldn’t be a problem anymore.
Aaanyway, I’m trying to make a template for this. Coding for wordpress is confusing the heck out of me though, maybe I just have to get used to coding for Web2.0.
Which makes me think, they really aren’t teaching us the right things in school. I’m in a program at college called Graphic Communications, which is about graphic design and related stuffs, because I wanted to go into web design, but asside for basic design principles, Flash, and the fact that I’m getting a diploma out of it, it seems really useless. I mean, the first web course they gave us was (X)HTML. This was pretty easy for me because I learned how to code html when I was 14 years old. At the end of the semester I came up with a decent, semantic , css-based site about windows customization. But then the year after, they showed us how to use dreamweaver, and for our final project, we were obliged to use tables for our layout, javascript rollover, image maps, and all those silly frills, just to prove that we could do it. Not to mention that our textbook was still talking about web-safe colours.
Just the other day, one guy in my class was creating a menu for a website that consisted of just boxes containing words that would change colours on rollover. That could easily be done with css, but he was just about to set out using gif images and javascript to do it ! (Had I not told him he could just use CSS, he’d never have thought of it)
And then there’s clients we have in the business center (my program has this course where you work for real clients which is called business center) that keep asking us to do databased-driven websites and all that, and we can’t do it. We try to collaborate with the computer science department (who are the ones who have learned php and all that) but they have no time to do anything with us because they have other stuffs to do. So we never get to design anything for an actual CMS, and have to tell those clients to get their code done elsewhere.
I’m ranting right now, but it’s not like my program is really bad, because we learn about print too and on that subject I know a lot more than I used to. But it’s just. . . I dunno it seems like the web right now is evolving so fast and schools and textbooks aren’t fast enough to keep up.
