Christina Sng dot com

I confess it has been a long time since I have had to edit someone else’s code. Admittedly these days it is easier to build a site with customisable templates (themes, here on Wordpress) but it takes time to understand what another developer has written and immerse your vision into their code.

If it is straightforward HTML, it is quite easy. Remember, I’m a dinosaur. I use tables. Even on my Blogdrive blogs, I had handwritten my own code since they run from 3 files only. Now that I am on Wordpress, running on someone else’s CMS has forced me to adopt more CSS edits amidst a varied file structure with each theme which may contain numerous files.

Still it is a fun challenge. I’ve been fiddling with the pixel sizes in the padding, font sizes, margins, and letter-spacings. But ultimately, when all fails to nudge that text into alignment, the easiest solution is to reword the text. And so I have. Two windows open (stylesheet and header, in my case), click save twice, and press F5 to refresh the blog. Repeat till it looks right. (See “about” in top right header for final product.)

Deciphering a code written by another is almost like getting to know someone and learning to understand them. You click until you figure out the file structure, then you stare at the code till you get which tag represents which item.

Finally, when you’re ready, you move some lines around such that it makes more sense to you, neaten the code so that it is easier for you to edit, and finally tweak the code such that it represents what you had in mind. Hmm… that sounds like a relationship indeed.

When I first acquired my Lenovo v100, my 100GB went from 70GB free to 0.5GB free in a matter of weeks. This never happened on XP, 98SE, or any other system I had. Only with Vista.

Initially I thought the problem was just system restore. I’d managed to free 13GB by deleting all the old restore points (but the most recent will be retained) but still wondered how Vista and friends could take up 60GB!

Today I found out why.

Lenovo comes with its own Rescue and Recovery program and it makes scheduled backups. I found 3 and deleted all of them and disabled the scheduled backups. Now I have 54GB free, which is really more like it. 40GB was assigned to 3 backups! Imagine that.

If you have a space problem, wondering where the heck all your GB went, check out not only System Restore but also your manufacturer’s proprietary backup software that comes with your computer. Very likely it is sucking up most of your GB too.

On the upside, I now have a habit of backing up everything to my several portable hard drives (redundancy is so important) as well as to DVDs. It is a better way of backing up your important data and keeping your computer space free for important things. Like running WoW or Elder Scrolls III.

Thursday. Thursday is the day I bought this phone. At 3.30pm to be exact. The salesman was telling me that the black version had just come in and there were only 7 remaining. I said, yeah I know. Your colleague from the other branch I came from had reserved one for me.

Anyway, I couldn’t wait. When I got home, I opened the box, read all the printed literature twice while nursing Jack for his nap, and when asleep, began to play with the phone.

By dinner time I was in love. The first photo I took had me at hello. The subsequent ones (taken in the dark no less) had my son staring perplexed at the flash with a grinning mom at the helm.

My husband was bored at the raves I gave the phone all through dinner. “I’m glad you love it dear,” he said, looking at his spider handroll with more interest than warranted.

So I have raved enough and here are the 10 things I love about this phone in just 2 days of using it.

1. The Amazing Camera

5MP, Carl Zeiss lens, Xenon flash, in-built lens cover, the amazing ability to take beautiful pictures in the dark (I’ll post some that don’t feature a 2 year-old peering at the phone with a frown). It rocks better than my old Pentax Optio S (yes, it is ancient) and my Panasonic FX5 (ancient too). The beauty is that it works like a camera. It autofocuses, shows a green box when focused, snaps quickly with a fast shutter (1/1000 max, I recall reading). The camera is reason enough for buying it. Note: The N82 also comes with a 2GB MicroSD card.

2. Fast Surfing

Thanks to my previous experience setting up the WLAN on the Nokia e61i, I went back to the WLAN Advanced Settings (despite the warning) - Tools -> Settings -> Connection -> WLAN -> Options -> Advanced Settings -> TX power level = 10 mW. That speeded up my connection a lot and it was close to surfing on my Lenovo v100. Compared to the turtly Nokia e61i, this is the hare.

3. Rotating Screen

While surfing, this rocks. My concern before buying this or any other phone was that it would be losing that big screen (although the Nokia e61i has the same resolution). Rotating the screen to landscape increases the font and makes surfing much breezier.

And I haven’t even watched any videos yet.

4. Sleek Black Body

While I thought before handling it closely that the body would feel plasticky, the N82 surprised me. It actually feels both light and solid and sits perfectly in my hand.

The numbers on the keypad look tiny but work well even with my medium-sized fingers. The menu button is appropriately placed and although the green and red buttons took a while to get used to, with the amount of fondling I was doing, I got accustomed to their placing pretty fast.

I’ll be frank in saying it won’t win any awards for stand-out beauty but its subtle elegance makes it a winner in my eyes.

5. Seamless Integration to the Web

One-click to the web. Just click the globe button and you’re in. No more searching for wifi anymore. This one does it all for you.

And if you’re a Flickr user, you’ll love this function. Share Online promises a 3-click upload of photos and videos to the web. It even logs your progress. Success or failure. Useful for retries.

6. Does Not Overheat

I surf for hours. Okay. 2 hours. Play music for an hour here and there. But it doesn’t burn my hand like the e61i does. Probably because the e61i is metal and this one is plastic. Neither is very comforting though.

7. Cool Search Function

While this one looks ripped from Apple, the slide-out search looks cool and is very useful. It is a universal search that allows you to search the Internet or your own content, neatly categorised into every logical section you might keep content in, ranging from Notes to Bookmarks. I just love how the info is displayed. It is literally another way of navigating the phone.

8. The Gallery

It is remarkable how the Gallery loaded my son’s entire life from the day he was born to the last picture I snapped of him sleeping (the Flash woke him though - sorry baby! Note the pic of my annoyed baby on the right on why you shouldn’t snap photos too close to animals and children.) just twenty minutes ago. The smooth scrolling of the Gallery is reminiscent of Picasa’s fluidity. A pleasure to scroll through the pictures on any given day.

9. Fast Everything!

Coming from the turtly e61i and reading about how slow the Nokia N95 and the Nokia N95 8GB are, I wondered how this lower-priced version would be. Surprisingly it is very fast.

It loads quickly, flips through menu pages quickly, and loads applications quickly. None of that dreadful lag that haunts the e61i. *shudder*

10. That Sensible Time Turner

I’ll admit reading how the N82 runs apps in the background (unlike older models that close automatically when you press the red button) worried me some, since I am lazy with my phone and tend to impatiently press the red button to close apps when they load too slow or I just want to close them. And I hate wasting battery.

That combo is enough to stress even the non-neurotic. Fortunately here is where good design comes into play. If you scroll through your menu, you’ll see a small blue turning circle at the edge of an app if it is still running in the background. So you can just open it, shut it down properly and breathe again.

Conclusion: Mind you, there’s more. But these are the ones that cause me to look upon it tenderly and give that silly smile. There are also minor annoyances that may nag me to blog about them in due course. But for now, I am rather buggered since it is 3.56am and I really should sleep. Never mind. I say that all the time. And if you’re already dribbling drool at the thought of touching that N82 (and you need a phone with a good camera, wifi, and music features), just go buy it already.

Update: Here’s an 11th. The smart predictive text. It remembers any new words I add and displays them first. Even the symbols have a display list of last used symbols for quick access. Writing html on your phone has never been easier! A definite subtle but fabulous usability improvement.

Want more opinions? Check out The Nokia Blog on the cam, The Nokia Blog on the look and feel, and IntoMobile’s review.

Picasa rocks because it is an offline photo album, photo editor, and online photo sharing service. The usability is amazing.

The good:

There’s seamless integration from the time you download your pics from your SD card, fast and intuitive sorting into albums, one-touch (or two if you’re fussy) editing where it also saves your original in an embedded folder within your folder, and a speedy and easy uploading within the same program with SSI (single sign in).

I love that you can make collages with one click, resize your pictures, and automate batch edits. There’s an option to keep your photos private or public, both of which you can embed in a blog or email. You can also link to your friends who have Picasa Web.

While you can do the basic and it is quite easily done, arrange photos, name them, and share them with your friends, there is much lacking in comparison to other photo sharing services out there.

The bad:

What it is lacking is a way to see which friends you emailed have viewed your pictures, a photo view that offers you a url to click right away to copy and paste into your blog, there are no communities right now, and no html or Flash widgets to add to your site.

Still, it is one of the best photo sharing services out there and best of all, it’s free. Get it today at http://picasa.google.com.

If you, like me, upgraded to New Blogger and realised you attached the wrong Gmail account to your Blogger account, don’t worry. Here’s a solution.

1. Create a new Blogger account with your preferred Gmail account and give it the same profile name as your original one.

2. Go to Settings -> Permissions.

3. Add your preferred Gmail account to your Blog Authors.

4. Set it to admin.

You’ll have all the rights as your original Blogger account and with the same name (e.g. with Five Cats Blog, it is set to 5 Cats now since the cats are doing most of the blogging), visitors won’t even notice it is a different account. You’ll see Settings and Template and will be able to work from this account from now.

And there you go, a great single sign in (SSI) for Gmail and Google.

Currently I have installed 4 programs on my laptop which is on Windows Vista Business, with one program running for each of the 4 blogs I have (to test them and to ensure there’s some redundancy in case there’s a bug in one of them, plus I like testing new programs).

CONTROLS:

Expectation: Programs should back up blogs to their own local folders in html format so they can be viewed independent of the programs.

Test conditions: I’ll be running one test on each program with one blog assigned unless otherwise specified. Interface is experienced without referring to the manuals to test for intuitiveness and usability. Tests were run at off peak period over 2 hours.

TEST RESULTS:

Backstreet Browser 3.1: Strange Machines appeared to have completed its download after 1 hour but the message panel was a little unclear. It said Done but also had 500 files queued. A bit of clicking to see what happened froze the program so I closed it.

Checking the folder, which was located within the Backstreet Browser folder under Data, the files looked good. Downloading 745 posts in 1 hour was no easy feat but the links were copied live so there was no smooth offline browsing for this blog!

I checked back on the program to see if I could set the links to link locally but I couldn’t find it. Moreover, my Workspace for this blog was gone after it crashed so I could not load it again since it doesn’t autosave.

Tried to download Five Cats Blog on it but it queued the blog, froze, and I had to force shut it down.

Conclusion: *** 3 stars for doing the job despite not much flexibility and being generous with the capacity on the trial version. * for stability *** for doing the job ** for interface design ** for usability

QuadSucker/Web: Despite downloading for a long time and never completing, the 5 year-old Five Cats Blog was not found in my computer after and it was hard to discern what was going on while the downloading was going on. Clicking the list of downloaded files in the program itself showed only unavailable pages.

Conclusion: * Poor interface, unclear navigation, failure to do the job.

PageNest: Started downloading an old blog which had one year worth of blog entries. Not very much, so I thought I would add Strange Machines but it seemed to be able to handle one blog at a time only.

Removed Strange Machines and stopped the first which shouldn’t have taken longer than Strange Machines on the BackStreet Browser.

Checking the files inside the Document folder, I don’t understand why all the files were saved as temp files and also why the program was saving files dated to the future. I had manually stopped the downloading but only because the file names were getting illogically far into the future (2011!).

Conclusion: * Files useless as temp files. Does not accomplish the job. Takes too long to download and places them in a queue.

Teleport Pro: Downloaded the newest TechBot quickly in a flourish (76 posts) with just enough space to spare on its trial version. Can’t use it for another.

However, opening the files was a breeze, it even links perfectly so you can browse and search as if online (that’s the purpose, isn’t it?). Two thumbs up for this program.

Conclusion: **** Very configurable, intuitive and easy to use, does the job pretty well. Pity the trial limits based on size, not time period. I’d love to test it more before buying although the way the others are going I might do that.

You can find all 4 programs on Download.com.

With every move, invariably one thinks of (or rather remembers to) backing up one’s blog. I have been tardy in this respect but now I set my mind to backing up all the years of blogging to my rather trusty Lenovo v100 laptop.

Unfortunately, HTTrack, which I’d used successfully before, does not like Vista. It starts collecting data, then pouts and stops the program, claiming it has finishing the mirroring. As if.

So I have no choice but to uninstall the dang thing and look for another solution to backup my blogs. I have downloaded 4 programs and will run them shortly to test them.

Despite an absence of marketed blog backup programs, offline browsers do the same job quickly and efficiently. It’s way better than copy and pasting each entry to back them up.

In Wordpress, you’ll need to find an alternative to the usual hspace and vspace tags.

Here’s a great suggestion from the Wordpress Codex. In the stylesheet, paste this:

img.left { padding: 4px; margin: 0 7px 2px 0; display: inline; }

And in your markup code in whichever file you’re editing, e.g. About, in my case, code it like this:

<img src=http://www.whereveryourpicis.com/pic.gif class=left>

Tweak the padding and margins till they align nicely. And you’re done!

I must compliment the developers of Wordpress for a logical and immensely intuitive user interface addition.

I have consulted no manuals or codexes. Just good old-fashioned tinkering around with, like how people in the 1950s loved to tinker with their cars.

Understanding the compulsion of people to test theme after theme, they have made it possible for any modifications to a theme to be saved in your blog system while you test others.

This, as far as I know, isn’t possible with other blogs. You lose the edits you make in the CSS when you change themes. Of course, you can save the main templates but this one does it for you.

Kudos, designers.

Aside from your branding, your design (and in this case for Wordpress, theme) is the most important part of your blog.

Your brand, and I may cite John Chow, who successfully marketed himself as a “dot com mogul” alluding to wealth and prosperity, is the most important thing about your blog. That makes people come back. At one glance they recognise what you stand for, and if that resonates with you, you will most likely go.

And what is my brand? It is:

1. Good, clean, usable information design from a programmer/information architect/producer who has worked in the industry for over 8 years, rode the boom and the bust and stayed till I decided to quit my job to stay home and raise my son (and that’s another blog).

2. Straight-talking advice and reviews from real user testing in real life situations.

3. Some fun and entertainment (from a pro writer too - that’s my other specialty so I never starve) while we’re at it.

The second, your design. Because that is the first thing a first time visitor to your site sees. And that is what I am having trouble with today.

Because we are still in beta, and I’ll confess, I am still pondering the branding since this idea to go domainy was sparked during a very recent late night convo with my best friend Shen. As with the best travel plans, the most exciting way to embark on any adventure is to plunge right into it without much notice. Improvising is a real high and to be honest, it is safer than skydiving into a jungle on a moment’s notice. But I digress.

I am not a designer. I’ll state that much. I used to architect how content was to be laid out in a page and what sort of information, and how that information should be categorised and accessed and through how many paths. So all websites I designed myself are simple, clean, load quickly (for the lowest common denominator - and this is before mobile web took off), and contain very few, if any, images.

While choosing a theme, I seem to be veering toward the same, although I must say I enjoy the super high tech ones that have come my way. Still. If you like any I have chosen, feel free to say so. Meanwhile, the search continues.