Xatal

So I’ve finally managed to make a few beta designs for Xatal. I’m definitely not a designer — and the designs definitely reflect this — but I am still semi-proud of them.

Like anything else that a person works on for a long time, I have a hard time seeing fundamental flaws with things, since I’m so accustomed to seeing it. That’s why I’d love to have some opinions from readers and other bloggers about the designs.

All of these are beta designs. I just want a general idea of which one to focus on. For whichever design is chosen, I would definitely spruce it up more than it is — adding better graphics, better logos, and so forth. I just don’t want to pour a lot of time into something that might not even go through. I just want a starting point. The content is all sample content, things would change on a real design of course.

Also worth considering is the option of keeping the current design, or modifying it in some way.

Personally, I don’t have any preference to anything at this point. So without further ado…

Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to both increase my design skills and (hopefully) make this site look better, I’m aiming for a new look to the site.

I’m not exactly unhappy with the current style, but I would like a layout that grants me more space and is a little more flexible than the current layout.

I can’t say for sure if a new design is going to definitely come soon — I still have to come up with something — but it may be in the works.

If you have any suggestions or tips, I’d love to hear them.

Sorry about the downtime we had over the past few days. One of the servers that hosted this site had to be completely replaced, so it took a couple of days for that to happen. On the plus side, the server should be faster than ever now, which is always nice :)

Hope everybody had a great Thanksgiving!

I realize I haven’t been updating much lately. For the most part, I’ve just been rather busy with school work and other things.

Mainly, I have a nasty habit of procrastinating, so when it’s the night before I plan to make a post and I have to choose between writing out a post or doing the homework that I put off, I end up choosing the homework and don’t have enough time to write out a decent post. Of course, my lack of time management is my fault and I do apologize for the infrequent updates. Hopefully soon I’ll be able to have a regular schedule.

That and I’ve been playing Fallout 3. A lot, actually. Fun game!

In my ongoing effort to organize this blog better, I’ve decided to add a Similar Posts section at the bottom of every post. My hope is that this, along with the list of most popular posts, can help readers to better find posts that they might be interested in.

Originally I was going to use the Similar Posts plugin and place the results in the sidebar, but the results really weren’t what I was looking for… in fact, they didn’t seem to be similar at all. I instead decided to use the WordPress Related Posts plugin, and the list seems much better.

I’ve decided to make a few changes to the sidebar. As of yesterday, Xatal now has 50 posts, so I think it’s finally reasonable to start highlighting the more popular ones. That way, anyone who is new and is interested in reading something else that’s interesting can find the best-liked posts.

From now on, there will be a nice list of the site’s ten most popular posts on the sidebar. They might be worth checking out, if you haven’t already. :)

I don’t feel that the sidebar should contain a bunch of content, so I decided to remove the archive links from the sidebar. Looking at my site stats, I noticed that the sidebar’s links to the archive were barely being used. The Archives link up top was being used far more, so I figure it won’t matter too much if I eliminate the archive links from the sidebar.

Normally I like to post quite frequently, but these past few weeks have been a bit busy!

I’ve been trying to take care of a lot of odds and ends around my house, including cleaning and rearranging my room. I’ve been doing some of my summer reading for college, and I’ve been spending a lot of time with friends. I leave in about two weeks, and I’m trying to make the most out of the opportunities I have to see these people while I can. Who knows how much I’ll see them next year.

My host went down for a bit on Thursday, and my traffic took a fall from that. Oh well.

I intend to write some good posts these upcoming days, hopefully one (or more!) will tickle your fancy!

If you haven’t noticed before, you might notice now that there are a few badges on the sidebar at the bottom of the list of stuff.

They used to be at the very bottom, but after adding one or two more it ended up taking a second line and that just looked awful, so I decided to move them onto the sidebar. I may move them once again, I’m still not sure.

I haven’t taken any time to explain them so I figure it would be nice if I did. If you’re a blogger, one or more might appeal to you too. Read the rest of this entry »

So I decided to use the weekend to make a significant change around here: the theme!

I loved the old theme, but to me it’s always extremely important to use things I’ve made myself. When it comes to something as important as a website’s appearance, I feel awful when I’m not using something I made myself.

I’m not an expert designer at all, but I like what I managed to put together enough to stick with it. It’s not perfect, but it’s something I’m glad I can at least call my own.

You’ll notice that a lot of the layout is basically the same. A lot of my inspiration came from the old theme, and I want to keep things at least a little bit similar to how they were.

Please see my Blog Information page where I give credit where it’s due for all of the various things I used in this theme that weren’t my creation. A huge thank you to everyone who created anything that used or inspired this theme!

Does anyone have any comments/thoughts/opinions on the design?

You may have noticed those new little buttons at the bottom-right corner of the screen. Or you may not.

I’d like to draw your attention to this little bugger:

"You Comment, I Follow" badge

(Thanks goes to Randa Clay for the awesome badge)

To give a basic description, by default WordPress sets links people provide in comments to “nofollow”. This means search engines don’t give any weight to that link, which is sort of like saying “The blog author does not endorse this website.” The original purpose of this is to cut back on spam, but if someone provides a link to his or her website, the only good it will do is if someone clicks it.

While I dislike spam as much as the next guy, I also want to thank those that take the time to comment me. So I’ve installed the WordPress plugin NoFollow Free to try to give at least something back. If you post a couple of comments, the rel=”nofollow” will be removed from your link. All I ask is for meaningful comments, not just some hoohah in order to take advantage of this and steal perfectly good linkjuice :]

I’d like to encourage other bloggers to do the same as well. Commenters should be appreciated.

For more information about the other badges this site uses, check out this post.

I’d just like to draw everyone’s attention to the Contact page for a bit.

With this blog, I’m trying to help answer any questions that students might have. I’m going by things I used to wonder and things I asked for help about from other people. I have a nice list of things I eventually wish to address, but that list definitely isn’t set in stone.

If you’re reading this and you have any questions, please, don’t hesitate to use that page to ask me. The other day I noticed someone found this site by searching for “half day senior year colleges look down”. Obviously, they were curious whether or not colleges look down on shorter days in their senior year. So I decided to give that a post yesterday.

If you have questions, by all means, ask. Some things I’m planning to write about at more appropriate times of the year, but I wouldn’t mind addressing them early if people are interested. You might ask me something I never thought of.

“Xatal” used to be used to host my webscripts, but now I’ve transformed it into this blog about school.

If you’re directed here looking for webscripts, go check out XatalProjects, where I’ve moved them to. I’ve updated my links on HotScripts, but it hasn’t gone through yet I guess.

Sorry about the inconvenience!

So as we all know, the World Wide Web already has tons of blogs that are really similar, but on a brief search around Google I noticed that there weren’t really very many that help high school students out when it comes to having helpful information from a student. I remember having to randomly ask older friends what they had done about tests, applying for schools, etc. because the Internet wasn’t entirely that helpful.

I’m freshly out of high school and I know what it’s like. To help other people who are in the same situation that I once was, I’ve dedicated this blog to providing information about high school’s questions. If you have a question, feel free to ask me and I’ll do what I can to answer it for you.

As I enter university next year (I’ll be attending UC Santa Cruz), I’ll be doing what I can to help provide information about college basics as well. From time to time I may use this blog for other random posts regarding my other interests — web design and music — or whatever else I feel like. But as a whole, I intend to focus on school issues.