Wouldn’t you want to blog every day for 29 days and be guaranteed a prize at the end? I would, and that is why I’ve accepted Eric Giguere’s One Page A Day challenge. I’m looking forward to getting my hands on his Uncommon AdSense e-book, and hope to be lucky enough to win his PLRSiteBuilder. I’m curious to see how and whether that tool works on a niche web site I’m planning to put up very soon.

Join in the challenge, and sign up by February 8 — not only does every one win, but it will do good for your blog to have not just daily posts, but quality ones at that.

From Through the Eyes of a Recruiter, it basically highlights the following:

1. Listen more than you talk.
2. Network up and down your organization.
3. Be a problem solver.
4. Seek feedback.
5. Don’t curb your enthusiasm.

I’d like to think that I practice all five of them whenever I’m in a new working environment. I’m especially fond of using tactic number 2, where I would even chat up with the cleaning ladies. Oh, the gossips and news you get from them can be really amazing. Not that I’m such a gossip monger or anything, but the info you get from them concerning what’s going on in a company can be dizzyingly accurate. It helps me at least to be alert and take action before any of my colleague would, and takes away the surprise element on any news I get after.

As part of my support for the NoNoFollow movement, I initially decided to use the easiest DoFollow WordPress plugin there is by Semiologic. However, after just learning about bad neighborhood links, I decided on using a different plugin called NoFollow Case by Case so that I have a greater control over the outgoing links in the comments.

So far I only used it on less than 5 of the mere 1000+ comments I get in this blog due to suspicious back linking. Sooner, though, I feel I should have some sort of comment policy to tell people not to take the comment section in my blog too lightly. I know some of you, particularly one or two who are in the Top Commentators section, are taking advantage of the nofollow option to promote your affiliate/product sites. Don’t overdo it, ’cause if you do, don’t come complaining and spamming me. I wouldn’t care, ’cause this is my blog and I do as I very well please.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I thought I would make the WordPress theme I originally created for The Blog of Rugrats publicly available for everyone to download. Hopefully this will make a nice addition to the small collection of themes available for family- and children-oriented blogs.

The Rugrats WordPress Theme is a two-column theme created and distributed for free. Even though the theme does not depend on any plugin, it is widget-ready. Its content column is fluid according to your screen size. The current header can also be modified to suit your need in case you want to replace the whole thing with a transparent GIF image as I have done with my Blog of Rugrats site. It’s also tested with WordPress 2.3.2, and on Firefox, IE7 and Safari.

My only request is that the footer hyperlink to my site at WebGrrrl.net remain intact.

Download

To install the Rugrats theme, download the zipped file below, unzip it, and upload the directory named rugrats-pub to your wp-content/themes folder.

Rugrats WordPress Theme v.1.0 (as of 29 January 2008)
Rugrats Theme 1.0 demo

For the moment, any request for support may be done using the comment form in this post to get support. Once WordPress.net’s Theme Viewer is back up, I’d rather support requests be forwarded to that site’s Reply section.

Screenshots

Limitations

This theme can be used in any types of blogs and web sites except those that has anything to do with p0rn0graphic, s3xist and/or r@cist content.

Q&A

1. How do I modify the header from text to using image like in your blog?
   I’ll do a separate post on that and will even include a PSD file for you to use as starter, but until then, I hope you can do a little trial and error yourself first.
2. Do you accept donations?
   Yes, I would very much appreciate it. You may PayPal me in any amount to my e-mail address at info{at}cybernt{dot}net. Remember that this theme is free though, so you are under no obligation to donate.

Enjoy!

I was looking for a way to test my web site on Mac’s Safari browser without the hassle of installing an emulator, and found this cool online tool at BrowsrCamp. It’s so easy to use, and I got a decent screenshot of The Blog of Rugrats at a resolution of 800×600.

This is pretty useful if you just want to check whether your CSS works well on Macs. There’s an option for you to subscribe to its full service, which checks for almost everything else, even Javascript, DHTML, Ajax and Flash among a few. $3 for a two-day subscription ain’t that bad if you’re desperate for a tool like this, as long as you have a fast connection.

One of the biggest Malaysian music awards gave us (or at least myself) a wonderful shock with the win by Estranged’s Itu Kamu despite their last night’s technical glitch (missing keyboardist?). I was certainly hoping for the best and expecting the worst with these underdogs, who ended up winning for overall Best Song and Best Song in the Pop/Rock category. Competition was stiff for all categories (Pop/Rock, Ethnic Creative, Ballad), but I believe every one of the winner in each category (even Mawi for Best Performance) deserved it.

The 22nd AJL looked to be doomed with the ban of Faizal Tahir and a no-show by Kaer and Rio Fabrian, but the artistes standing in for them — Fiq, Sahri, Bob and Lah — have done wonderfully. Photo gallery and coverage can be found at Gua.com.my.

I see one aspect that’s pretty obvious with this year’s AJL. The fact that a significant number of its performers — four in the winners’ line-up — were once reality show participants, particularly from Akademi Fantasia, goes to prove that Akademi Fantasia specifically is not just a feckless show trying to rob us of our texting/SMS dollars, but is showing its force as a powerful platform to boost careers of talented wanna-be stars. I hope this positive trend by reality shows can continue to spurn out fantastic artistes and give more chance for new composers and writers to impress us. Let’s continue to support our Malaysian music industry, shall we?

I opened my Google News yesterday and what did I find? News on the untimely death of Heath Ledger. And only last week I watched the Dark Knight trailer and was in awe at how startling Ledger’s portrayal was as The Joker, which gave me the impression that this would be the best Batman movie yet.

Not only will he be remembered for the tear-jerking performance in Brokeback Mountain (I cried! I really did, dagnabit!), but we will also miss him for the greatest and most disturbing Joker we would ever see for a long, long time.

Either no one blogged about this, or I must have been living under a rock for not knowing about the existence of Open Source Web Design. Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure I have come across the site, although it never really got my attention until someone I know developed a web site using Multiflex-3, one of the amazing free web templates that are hosted in OSWD. There is a WordPress version of this template ported over, although the WP version doesn’t look as snazzy as the original.

OSWD is an excellent site for free web site templates if you are going for a business- or serious-type look.

For The Blog of Rugrats.

What do you think? Not too shabby I hope. It took me a day or two to complete the whole thing. My biggest challenge was to finish the theme while my 1-year old son attempts to climb on to the table and the computer trying to get his piece of the action.

I’ll be making the Rugrats theme available for public use, as soon as I get a few kinks out of the theme. The CSS part of it isn’t perfect, as the footer gets cut off by the sidebar when a page has a short post in it. Design-wise, though, I’m pretty happy with my first time effort.

If you aspire to create your own theme, I advise you to not only read the recommended tutorials I mentioned previously, but also to use the Classic theme that comes pre-installed with your WordPress blog. Those are great starts for beginners, even for those without any programming knowledge.

Updated 29/Jan/2008: The Rugrats theme can now be downloaded here.

After reading the comments from Ben and PapaJoneh concerning whether or not I should get a new domain for my baby blog, I’ve decided on getting a new domain at BlogOfRugrats.com. Now it’s just a matter of creating a customised theme which I plan to build from scratch. To do so, I’m currently reading the WordPress theme tutorial at WPDesigner.com as well as a little bit of referencing from NeedForContent.com.

The first couple of months may be easy for me in terms of adding content to the Blog of Rugrats, as I plan to copy-and-paste over the content from the old blog in Friendster once every few weeks. I’m still concerned with putting my children’s photos online, although I plan to continue making The Blog of Rugrats as a mix of posts and photoblog. Maybe there’s a WordPress plugin out there somewhere that can limit viewing of uploaded photos to a select few, while still displaying the posts that come with it.

If you have any suggestions as to how I can solve this dilemma, I’d appreciate some feedback.