jono.blog

First off, happy new years to everyone that actually reads this blog! 2008 was a great year, but how can we make 2009 the best year yet? Well, things don’t look good economy right now. Major players and analysts are predicting worse times than the great depression. Look it up on youtube - you’ll find hordes of videos. It’s depressing to see, but don’t focus to much on it. You need to live your life in the present and work your ass off now to ensure you can eat tomorrow! Nobody but yourself is going to make you rich but you. I’m only saying this because I find myself down when I see these kind of videos. It’s better to put your valuable time into work than feeling sad about the situation.
Read The Rest

As promised, I got off my lazy ass and took some pictures of my new apartment located in Manila, Philippines. Exciting huh? Well, not really, but this post is more for my family and friends. The apartment is 23 stories up and in the heart of the city. All amenities and services are within walking distance, which means no more cabs. Laundry service is in building (they’ll pick up, wash, fold and bring back). Only thing that sucks is we don’t have a massage service in this building, but I can’t complain because it’s just a phone call away and they will show up at your door. The cost for that is $10-20 CAD depending on how generous you are. We have a new maid which will clean for 3-4 hours a few times a week, all for the price of about $3.50 CAD per day. Oh, how I love the Philippines. Read The Rest

Since wordpress 2.7 was released, I’m going to be updating the LifeStreaming White wordpress theme. I have overhauled jono.blog (using the lifestreaming white template), but made many adjustments which haven’t been implemented in the lifestream theme yet. To name a few adjustments: the post slider was changed (width of selected post auto adjusts with jQuery), threaded comments now supported (introduced in 2.7), various type face changes (line heights, font sizes, etc), and the list goes on. I hope to have an updated release before Christmas. Stay tuned!

I’m going to write a tutorial for the horizontal scroller used on this website. You can scour the web, and I pretty much gaurantee you will not find this anywhere (yet). I spent hours digging around, because people have done similar things like the apple store product slider, but this type of jQuery slider is quite a bit different than that. Stay tuned for an upcoming freebie!

I mentioned in my previous post how life was about to drastically change, and said I couldn’t go into much details. Well now I can, so I’ll give a you a quick rundown. Basically I got laid off and will be finished with the company end of December 08. On top of that we had to find a new place to live, so me and my buddy Vik were desperately searching to find a place before the end of the month. We did, and just yesterday we moved into a Condo in downtown Ortigas, which is the business district in Manila.

I still don’t have a job yet, but I’m totally cool with this because now I can freelance full-time, and work a lot more on my personal projects. I will be going on vacation too at some point in January to a place called Boracay. Lifes about get to crazy, but I’m excited. If you ever have web or graphic work, don’t hesitate to drop me a line. Check the photos page soon for pics of the new place.
Read The Rest

I decided to use my lifestreaming white wordpress theme and revamp it to a black version for my personal blog. At this point in time, I’m not going to release the black version but I plan on releasing my old blog theme to the public.

I’ve also rethought the lifestreaming white theme, and decided to make it more widget compatible with the lifestream plugin. Instead of putting posts in the timeline slider, it’d be good to have the option of using the widget on the right hand side. This would separate your posts content from you lifestream content. I plan on doing that with this site, so you can get a better idea of what I’m talking about.

I am proud to present to you the free lifestreaming wordpress theme: LifeStreaming White. I know, not a very creative name, but hey it’s free! This theme utilizes jQuery to display recent updates in a  horizontal scrolling fashion, kind of like a timeline. You can watch your life go by, and scroll through your updates! Without further ado, here is LifeStreaming White.
Read The Rest

I see a big problem with the semantic web and social networks. We have all these great tools like twitter, last.fm, youtube, etc, but it becomes time consuming and unmanageable to update them all. For instance, you want tweet on twitter, you have to login in and post your update. You then update your facebook status, same thing - login and post your update. The process repeats. As soon as your list of social services grows, this can take quite some time. Wouldn’t it be easier if this was streamlined from your desktop or mobile devices? In my opinion, yes! There are a handful of apps already developed to do so, and many more to come in the future. Here’s a list of some tools to help you streamline your social updates.

Read The Rest

I haven’t been posting much lately, but I promise I’ve been working hard on the tools mentioned in the previous post. Life is about to really change for me now. I can’t go into much details at this moment, but trust me when I say its drastic. I’m excited, scared, nervous, and anxious, all at the same time.I’m gonna start blogging a lot more when things settle a lit bit more.

Read The Rest

To get ‘viral’ aka spread around like a disease on the net (meaning lots of traffic), you gotta come up with something people are interested in and provides some value. This value can be in the form of entertainment, the form of something free, something informative, anything really. The key is that its interesting or useful. I will be pumping out some ‘viral’ tools / products shortly, but don’t want to spoil the suprise before I do. It’s really about experimentation and finding a formula that works. After my experiment, I will post a follow up and let you know the exact details of what I did, and what kind of traffic it generated. Stay tuned!