The New 'Oh for the love of me!'

Finally launched the new template which I've been working on for the past couple of days.

The original template

I took a lot of inspiration from the very-(in)famous blog review site, I talk too much. Many reviewees (is there such a word?) who got their asses kicked by the bitches (whom I LURVE, by the way), would very much love to hate that site, because they certainly know how to call a spade, a spade. But seriously though, even though I sometimes find them a tad harsh, their ideas and comments sure are rivetting, and very useful indeed. Okay, I'm going to stop pimping them now ;)

I definitely do not want to be a stereotyped Malaysian blog with only pictures of food (which, by the way, I totally detest; I do NOT need to see EVERYTHING which you have eaten), and the overuse of 'lah'. For the latter, I do appreciate and enjoy the sporadic smattering of the 'lah' and whatnots in Malaysian/Singaporean blogs from time to time (I AM Malaysian, after all), but it really irks me when I have to strain my brain to simply understand what the hell it was that you were saying, buried under a mountain of intelligible Manglish. Now, I do not claim to have a bombastic command of English, far from it actually, but it'd be nice to be able to have something to read AND understand, y'know?

I shall digress a little and mention something I see in almost every blog I read. "This is my blog, and I shall write whatever I damn well please, so there". Hey, go ahead and write whatever you want to, but when you traffic-whore by submitting your blogs to public blog directories, ping sites, blog review sites, etc, then you're subjecting what you're writing to everyone who is on the Internet. You get to write it, but we've got to read it. Go ahead, write in all the Manglish and broken English as you please, but for pete's sake, don't bother submitting your blogs to INTERNATIONAL blog review sites, when they can't understand a damn thing you were writing! And don't go home crying to Mummy when your ass have been slapped by these reviewers; you asked for it. It's wise to take the review with a pinch of salt, and learn to improve on the subject of critisms you received.

Anyways. Rants aside, and back to the subject at hand. I love flowers and butterflies (okay, okay, you can stop gagging at the girliness of it all now), so I thought I'd use that as a theme to my blog template. Did a fair bit of Photoshop here and there, with the header and the sidebar (I simply LOVE Photoshop, hehe; I've got so much more to learn). I tested the site on IE, Firefox and Opera, and so far, it's been okay. I'm still trying to 'break' my blog by changing the browser resolution, etc, to test the design.

For now, this is a list of criteria which I built my template (and blog content) upon:

1. Dark text on light background; this makes is so much easier to read (I shall not comment on the infamous BTOD - Black Template of Death, as I do have friends and family who use it. By the way, I do have to say, that the BTOD is pretty good for photoblogs. Less words, more photos).
2. Keep the sidebar neat. With a little bit of HTML coding (which I Googled on the Internet; so can you), I finally managed to hide the crap I've been having on my sidebar.
3. No unnecessary photos of food - really, the world doesn't need to know what I've been eating.
4. No auto-playing music - oh good Lord, why do people even HAVE this?!
5. Multi-coloured text - I admit, I'm guilty of this. Will do this as little (if not at all) as possible.
6. No ADS. 'nough said.
   

Anyways, do let me know what you think. And if you manage to 'break' the design, please let me know so that I can fix whatever errors you encountered. Also, there'll be more features added soon (e.g. the Photos - I'm in the midst of selecting and uploading the good stuff ;)), so do stay tuned.

Cheers.

PS: By the way, the criteria bit is MINE, and it's not aimed at any specific person, so if your site happens to fall under the 'bad' bits ... oh well, at the end of the day, it's YOUR blog, right? ;)
PPS: I finally had the guts to submit my site to I talk too much for a review. I'm so going to get my ass kicked, it's not even funny. Oh well. Here goes nothing *grin*.