After about nine years into writing webpages (not exactly web programming), I'm still somewhat hesitant in confidently saying that I've finally got the box model; it's apparent that I screwed up the margins and paddings in so many of my past projects. To my defense, it is not nearly as easy to write webpages back then; you see, people were just moving on from MS Frontpage to Dreamweaver and it was the beginning of the switch from tables to divs.

It's also a shame that I have had produced so few presentable projects in the end (maybe one or two) as most of what I've done are little hacks here and there, or modifications on Wordpress themes that will never make it into official packages nor will anyone care, and are too much of a trouble to be kept alive. But nonetheless, let me present you a couple of my works recently recovered from my hard disk: some projects that are abandoned long before and took me quite some efforts in fixing their broken semantics.

Well, first is a set of forum templates which I wrote some years ago, about five to be precise. They are made to provide a "refreshing look" to the phpBB forums which I've been working on at the time. I went so far as to have made real, tangible HTML pages out of their graphical designs. (Click on the pictures to see the real stuff.) They are however thoroughly broken at the time I rediscovered them (elements weren't aligned and so are strange blank spaces lying all around the places), and I was only able to restored it to this current condition with all sorts of hacks one does not want to employ on a production site. On a side note, I wanted to become a designer prior entering college; good thing that I did not.

And then, there's this:

It's the previous iteration of this particular site, which of course again didn't survive long enough to be published. I tried to incorporate some of the "better" approaches in structuring a page, such as using em's instead of good ol' pixels for its magical ability in adapting to page zooms -- it skews the layout if you try it out.

Hello again.

So, I've been playing with QT and trying to create my first ever GUI application (websites and class projects with Java Swing do not count). Here is a screenshot (and click for a compiled app):

It's one of the regular-expression-learning thing that I thought would fit as a small enough project for a novice like me. And, its functionality is rather straight forward: you put your keyword or regular expression in the first box and some text in the second, and the program will try telling you what it finds.

As I'm always having trouble on getting my regex to work without some significantly numerous attempts in debugging it, I find that a realtime feedback like this might be useful, or maybe not. But anyway, you can check it out here on github.

Oh, I actually created an icon for this little piece:

It is about time, I figured, to put together some sort of portfolio website where I can perhaps give a couple of short reviews on what I have accomplished during all this time -- not that there is any per se. But, I thought that it is nonetheless a good opportunity to learn about what all the rage is in the sparklingly new HTML5 specification; it almost feels like the old css+div revolution is coming all over again: we've got many more tags at our disposal providing superficial advantages over the tried and true (or maybe not) div approach and lots of confusion. If you've been late to the party, check out this article.

I am wondering why they are pushing for this seemingly half-baked spec to the public and why it is taking them so long to do even just this. Yes, I just discovered the controversies today, and if you've been carefully enough you may have also noticed that the above referenced article was from two years ago, so maybe it's just that I've missed all the latest and greatest development. It looks to me, however, that we are still having a HTML model that generalizes badly and is neither strict enough to be used like RSS, or Atom. ("It's all about syndication!" -- so I have heard.)

Coming back to the original topic, I bet you have this figured out already (it's screaming for attention), but I'd still want to point out that, my past record very strongly suggests this "yet another website" business would soon become obsolete as my will-power wears out, most likely before the next update. But, if that didn't happen, I have thought about a great plan about this site and more.