Today has been a very productive day. I’ve finished developing a WordPress theme for a client in one sitting. Just now, the client has sent some positive remarks about it. Usually it takes me days to develop a Wordpress theme.

So how did I do it? It’s all about the working environment.

I used to work on my room. And in my room there are a lot of distractions. Things like my phone, my PSP, and my cozy bed. Before today, I used to sit down on my bed with my laptop and start doing my projects. Every once in a while I lie down and make it as an excuse for thinking. Who am I kidding? Only myself. And when I lie down on bed my eyes close and voila! I’m snoring. Although I can’t hear me snore but I know I do because my wife says so. My room is a total mess and very disorganized. You could see lots of wires tangled on the floor and lots of empty bottles of water. I know I should clean it up but when? I don’t think I have time. One of these days I will.

So I woke up this morning and brought my laptop with me in the living room. I left my phone and PSP on my room to free me from distractions. I sat down on the floor, placed the laptop on the table and I was very comfortable. I never turned on the TV and I was listening to music with iTunes. And there it was! I was able to concentrate on doing my projects and the comfort of the environment really helped. Working on a clean and spacious room does really help in improving your work. Good ventilation and lighting will make it better too. From now on, I know what I’ll do if I want to be more productive the easy way.

One month has passed and still I haven’t posted anything new here. Thanks to the dynamic plugins that’s keepin my site dynamic everyday. Like the recent comments, the Last.FM and the del.icio.us plugins, these are the ones that makes sure that my sites being updated whenever a Googlebot crawls my site.

I’m supposed  to be releasing the Coolmo this month but I guess you guys have to wait again. Sorry for that. I’ve been very busy with a lot of projects - freelance, work and personal. And also I’m spending time with my baby. Managing time is really hard for me nowadays. I don’t even play a lot of games on PSP anymore. The last game I played was Brave Story. Brave Story is an RPG. RPG stands for Role Playing Game for the sake of the newbies out there. What you have to do is travel into the land of Vision to rescue your beloved leading lady. I’m still on the beginning part of the game. It’s a turn-based RPG and I really think the graphics are good, well at least for a PSP. The fights are repetitive but that’s what RPG is all about - leveling up and fighting the same monsters all over again. But then again this is just my opinion so don’t take my word for it. Tokobot is also on my list of “to-beat” games. I’m already in the middle of the game the last time I played it. Tokobot is one cool game, in my own opinion at least. So again, don’t take my word for it. I guess you have to play the game and see for yourself.

On the other hand, this theme will experience evolution in the next few days and then when I’m good with it, I’m gonna release it to the public. One of the things to do on my list are of making the sidebar widget ready so anyone can customize it. I’ll also try that on the header but I sure wish it will be easy. I’m no programmer but I sure know the Wordpress codex. Time to get the thinking cap on and stop slacking around.

It’s been almost a month since my last post. It’s not that I’ve ran out of ideas to write but it was because I was busy taking care of my first baby boy and of course busy on work. I go to the office from Mondays to Fridays and at night I work on my freelance projects while I’m looking after the baby. That’s called extreme multitasking.

So what’s my plan right now?

I’m thinking of finishing this Wordpress theme, this one that I’m using right now (Yes this cool blue theme) and I’d release it to the public later. I’m gonna remove the large photo beside the latest post and change the header. You’d also notice that pages and some links are still missing so I’m gonna fix that part too. Hopefully. I can finish it before August ends, release this theme and give the public a neat and cool theme to download.

And yeah, the theme is called Coolmo. Please watch out for it.

It’s time I should be talking about web designing again. What is web design exactly? Web Design is not just about the graphics. In fact the graphics part of a web site isn’t really that important. Websites were meant to provide information. That’s why they called it Information Technology. Of course it’s really cool to place colorful graphics on your website but does this really interest the visitor? In this present times where there are a lot of blogs, the tendency is the visitor will look for content to read and learn about.

Web Design is 95% typography. I came across this very good article and I totally agree with it. Read it if you must but I suggest you do.

What are the Web Designer’s role that apply today anyway? The major role of a Web Designer is to make the website look good for visitors. His role is not limited to designing only. A “real” Web Designer must also know how to code. He should not rely on Fireworks or Imageready’s auto table generator but he must know how to code his design into html. A Web Designer must learn new technologies and not be stuck with what he knows. One important thing the Web Designer should consider is the type of visitors who will come into his website. He must consider many things like usability and accessibility. There are a lot of laws coming out right now like Section 508 and the British Disability Discrimination act and so web designers should act accordingly.

Well that’s it. i’ll rant again later. Back to work.

The Microsoft IE team has just released Internet Explorer 7 which has been waited by a lot of people like me for a long time. IE 7 has been released in English and other languages would follow soon. I haven’t tried it out yet but it has some features like tabbed browsing which isn’t new since Firefox introduced it.

According to the IE Blog, IE 7 has more CSS improvements and a better RSS support. It has new features like shrink to fit printing and easily customizable search box.

Am I supposed to be happy or not? I have been designing the web using CSS for 2 years now and I admit that I have been using a lot of hacks on my code. What I’m worried about is those old websites that I have used hacks on. Will they still work on IE 7? For now, this is still a question to ask but I’ll find a solution for myself.

Grab the latest version of IE now.