Today was a bit of a busy day.

started with some discussions on some home design with ju, hijaz and kahar. they shared their websites as follows:

http://www.blogger.com/profile/16807998016910934448
http://bahahouse.blogspot.com/
http://bungalowdesign.blogspot.com/
http://sabrihouse.blogspot.com/
http://zainihouse.blogspot.com/
http://hizalsbungalow.blogspot.com/
http://binarumah.ambok.net/

unfortunately, our ambitions are not for big houses. :)

a lot has been said about web 2.0.

what is it?

in short it is about exploiting the technology of web content and design. it is about connecting people. sharing. collaborating.

what the heck. let Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, Kansas State University explain it.

This site and many of my other website projects are run on the Drupal content management engine.

Therefore, i am excited that the new drupal 5 release is now out. For information, this site and my main "live" website my-kart.org are both using drupal 4.7.

4.7 is a fairly stable release and i am happy with it. however, version 5 comes with additional features (naturally), and productivity improvements such as a better user management system (something very useful for me). the rest of the improvements are contained in the release announcement.

You may be wondering what is all the odd and disjointed components on this website are all about. Certainly it is not intentional the way it currently looks right now. I am experimenting with some techniques on improving the navigation on this website.

One of the techniques is javascript + CSS pulldown menus that you see on the left hand side NavMenu bar. I am taking a few tips from suckerfish and a from css.maxdesign. I'm also visiting the CSS creator forums for discussions and tips. I would like to create a menu which opens up as you hover over selected items. I hope this will improve the usability of the site.

For now, the CSS is all screwed up. So bear with me. I would also suggest that you use Firefox for the best & standards compliant experience.

Been swapping themes on this website, and note some good practices that I'd like to adopt for my default site.

1. vertically aligned search box in the top menu: alternate / lincoln's revenge does it well
2. clean layouts like a printed page: chameleon does this well
3. blockquote techniques - the left bar at the indentation of the quote is good
4. different type face for headline titles - say using Georgia to distinguish headline from body text
5. lines to separate content blocks
6. different block style for "sticky" blocks
7. distinct menu headers like the type used by gworks

I am planning to do a few things:

1. installing a taxanomy access control module

   I did some research on the subject by first visiting http://drupal.org/ and went straight to the drupal module downloads. Read a bit on the taxonomy access module and find that this would require me to patch the existing core taxonomy.module - now I am no expert on unix patching and my linux host only provides me a cpanel access... so I cannot do patching without a shell access to the host. Also read that patching also is a bit of a minefield, so scratch that thought. Let's wait for another solution to come up.

My wandering mind will not ever allow me to be happy with a single layout structure.

I was moderately happy with the previous layout which I named "Tokyo" but that had its limitations in relation to dealing with large size images.

Ok, back a bit.

I just activated the image gallery module in this website. The image gallery will allow authorised users to upload images into a directory, and display them on this website. Unfortunately, the previous right column menu layout was not able to cater for large size images as the image would either run over the menu, or push the menu beyond the limited width. So I had to find another suitable layout.

Gosh I have many stuff going on at the same time.

I have a few blogs going on which potentially overlaps. So I need to thinkof how to segregate the targets / the focus of each blog. I should firstly try to make this blog much more livelier. So this shall be my main blog and should be quite light and fun.

The Mind of Paloque is an interesting blog... it was intended to be philosophical... but how philosophical can one get?? One thing's for sure, I prefer the Wordpress blog engine compared to drupal or blogger.com. To be honest, drupal is not the tool for blogging per se... although it is in my opinion a fantastically versatile tool which does blogging quite capably.

I need to organise myself.

I've been tinkering with all manner of cms, blogs and websites. To date I've got the following up and running - if accessibility on the www counts as "up and running":

• http://www.my-kart.org - which hosts all the my-kart related notices discussions, events and my own karting blog. this is perhaps the most "up & running" website with around 200 registered users.
• this website - thefazz.com: but I may be testing many applications on this website including drupal, civicspace, wordpress and perhaps others like phpBB, mambo and other cms, groupware and BBs. In actual fact this is my test & experimental site, where I can try out several blogging, cms and BB scripts. within thefazz.com, I have the following:
  • "TheFazz.com | share the passion" which uses the powerful open sourced Drupal content management system
  • "the mind of paloque" which is based on the wordpress blogging engine which I really love. I'd like to use this blog for philosophical discussions & thoughts.
  • "8127 Over Drive: Home of The Fazz" which is a static (non script based) website, which I ported from Geocities and Tripod. Basically done in the late 90s when I was learning and experiment with HTML.
• used to have The House of Commons... now defunct... but perhaps need to resurrect it... what do I intend to do with THOC? It is supposed to be a community site. For what, I don't know... I need to find a suitably popular proposition for it. In the meantime I set up klang valley fun & friends as a site for general community stuff