Aja Lapus

Author: Aja

  • Musing #0003

    Why do some people tell their haters to click the red X button on the upper right corner of your screen?

  • A Different Kind of Easter Bunny

    First of all: Happy Easter, everyone! I seemed to have forgotten to greet you on my last entry because of certain excitement and happiness — proves Easter is a happy season. Well, I actually didn’t go right to happy mode when I woke up on Easter Sunday, I could not sleep for hours rolling on my bed trying to get the best sleeping position [or it may be because of something else]. All I know is I haven’t got sufficient sleep.

    As celebrities and other families celebrate their Holy Weeks on trips and vacations, our family usually spends it on fasting, abstinence, and heavy exercise. 😆

    This is the heavy exercise: Since our house was extended, I didn’t have time and space to arrange and clean up my things the best way I could. I ended up having the dirtiest room in the house or possibly the neighborhood. Ehehe … Anyway, since my room is the farthest from outside [or the facade of] our house besides from being the dirtiest, it was the first one we cleaned up. Now I have the cleanest room of the house! Yeah! And that’s not all. We moved my computer and television here from the library–et-cetera room beside mine. Again: my computer is in my room!

    But, I still haven’t finished tidying up everything that was left in the living room since we put everything there to be sorted out. About two days of cleaning still unfinished. Ehehe … I told you it was really a mess! My Easter bunny is a dust bunny. 😆

    Well, let us get out of that thought now. I’ve got a lot of plans for this website. I think it’s time for a redesign and restructure since my site info and about pages are becoming bloated and I am starting my web development career. I still haven’t got ideas for the design but I’ve finished the blueprint for the structure of the new version of this website.

    Oh, I’ve thought of an idea for a domain name but I’ve asked only from a handful of my friends. I still want some ideas for it so I will be putting off publicizing my idea a little later.

  • On Freelancing

    Everyone has to start somewhere, right? I know I started markup programming since I was 14 years old. Now, I think I have the skills and knowledge to make money from it. Well, actually, I knew months back that I could start making money with my work but I really do not know where to start. One major thing that stopped me was my lack of skills in image manipulation and design — I just do my XHTML really good. And since I thought possible customers were more into design than markup, I stopped a while until I have the skills — the skills that I still do not have that much even right now.

    Then I have encountered XHTMLized. There I saw an opportunity that I could just make the XHTML out of the customers’ designs that they can’t turn into beautiful markup. I have done this for a volunteer work with TomWeb on the UST Nursing website and with my friends’ blogs, and now I know I could do this for a fee.

    XHTMLized starts their service at $149 — that is PhP7600 on the average! Wow! I can not make that money even with my 4 months’ allowance! Now I am definitely starting my career!

    Well, I still won’t stop volunteer work for my school [TomWeb] and for my college [ESC WebTeam] and for my close friends, but for other people that need me: I am going to think about how much it would cost first. 🙂

    I know I’ve done free service a lot in the past few years but please consider that I am in dire need of finances right now. And, if I am not going to start making this as a career, I may not be able to start making this as one in the future. I need support for this from you [my friends and readers], maybe you could refer me to anyone who wants to build a business out of a website [those are usually the ones willing to pay for good design and markup] or someone who has just a lot of money and wants a good XHTML+CSS design.

    Here are my specifications about my work that may be of interest to those who are thinking of availing my services:

    • I use XHTML 1.0 Strict, unless the design restricts me to do so then I’d use the Transitional DTD.
    • I use XHTML purely for content, using CSS for design.
    • I would accept designs in almost any image format [JPEG, GIF, PNG, preferably PSD for Adobe Photoshop].
    • I would also accept designs in HTML or XHTML that the owner wants to be cleaned up for better Search Engine Optimization and accessibility [for text-only browsers and screen readers].
    • I would make the XHTML look similar [there is no same in rendering between different browsers] in major browsers — Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Mozilla Suite, Netscape Browser; and if possible, Camino and Safari.

    I do not intend to compete with those people at XHTMLized. I just want to start my career. Besides, I’ve linked them twice already — my thank-you’s for giving me the idea.

    Here are my details if ever you wanted to contact me privately; or just post a comment below if you don’t mind telling it in public.

    Thank you!
    — Aja Lorenzo Lapus, freelance programmer.

  • Musing #0002

    Why do some people believe in the power of spam chain mails or messages?

  • Cross-browser testing, yet again

    I have read about Internet Explorer 7: Beta 2 Preview the day after it was released [20th of March]. The developers say it is rendering-behavior complete so I downloaded it to test my pages for rendering issues but it seemed to be having trouble detecting my Internet connection that I ditched it immediately hoping it to be better on the final release. Also, my father always had trouble dealing with new software, especially web browsers, so I really did not consider it staying installed in my PC because he still uses IE6 instead of the system’s default Firefox browser [which is also because of his lack of adaptive skills on browsers] that if IE7 was installed it will technically be a new browser to get used to.

    I have just discovered earlier this morning a way to use IE7 as a standalone browser. I was happy that I would not have to install it again to replace IE6, therefore, enabling me to cross-browser test with four different browsers — four different rendering engines [i.e., Firefox, Opera, IE6 and IE7].

    But, now that I have the new MSIE7 [prefixed for unambiguity] with improved native rendering features, testing it on my web site proved it still doesn’t come near to what Dean Edwards has done with JavaScript on his IE7 “plugin” for browsers prior to the real MSIE7. Needless to say, I still have to hack my CSS or at least get Dean’s IE7’s content-generating module to work on MSIE7 for this web site uses a lot of content-generation from CSS to improve readability especially with lists.

    *sigh* So much for a hack-free Web every standards advocate dreams to come very soon.

    elliptical trainer