I have finally taken the action to design my own drupal theme for this site. I want to design one because I would like to have more control over it. What I want for my theme is simple but not too simple:

• Look neat and simple. Special thanks to Jia for many contructive suggestions. :) I think she has more artistic and common sense than me.
• Good XHTML and CSS Practices. One very important thing I concern about is the compliance with the XHTML and CSS standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium. I have also tried to follow some recommended practices such as avoiding tables for formatting page layout. The page currently complies with XHTML 1.0 and CSS2.1. I would like to upgrade it to XHTML 1.1, which requires only the omission of the lang attribute (in favor of xml:lang) for language selection. Unfortunately, it seems that many browsers including firefox are not ready for it yet.
• Won't compromise with Internet Explorer! Although Internet Explorer is the most popular browser as of this writing, it is unfortunately not a good browser. It does not support the XHTML and CSS standards correctly, has poor support for PNG images with transparent layers, and suffers from many other problems. This page may not look nice under IE, but I can't care much. So far, I have only done two things for IE: (a) Make sure that the page content is still readable; (b) Issue a warning to the IE users about some issues surfing with IE.
• Easy maintenance. Since I'm using Drupal, I made use of its default theme engine PHPTemplate to code the theme for easy upward compatibility. I also tried to make use of the default templates for various components.

Hope that now you have a better surfing experience here. I will still continue to fine-tune the page layout and the CSS a bit—it's a tedious job as there are too many things CSS needs to control. Constructive suggestions are welcomed!

I have been quite involved in my job and some programming stuffs (for my hobbies). It seems that I have too many things to do within too little time. No choice, still have to complete them one by one.

I have finally done a few things for my website within these few weeks:

• Studied and written a quick guide on using rsync. I have also written some scripts for backing up my web site and important data on my harddisks. No worry about losing important data now. :)
• Revised and moved some old posts from b2evolution to this new site. I feel sad to abandon b2evolution, as it's one of the best blogging engines you can get. However, I need a more general-purpose CMS for my website. So I use Drupal now.
• Fixed some minor bugs of the chessboard renderer module.
• Installed DruTeX and improved it a bit driven by my own use. (Have reported the improvements.)

I note down a few things I'm going to do in the right sidebar. If you know what I'm talking about and can help me, please tell me!

Glad that the tarball for the chessboard module has been generated correctly. I'll put the module aside for some time unless some critical bugs are found. (Touch Wood!)

There are many things that I would like to learn for my usage. To remind myself, I've created a column "Things I'm busy with..." to list some of them. The harddisks of my own PC don't seem to perform correctly sometimes, so I'm looking into how I can use rsync to do efficient incremental backups. (Update: I've written a quick guide which is now available here.) In particular, I will backup some important directories to my external 40GB harddisk (via USB). If possible, I'll write a quick guide and post it here later. Oh, I think I should backup this homepage too.

I have restructured my site content so that the pages are properly organized. Hope that I would be able to update my blog more frequently now.

Finally have wrapped up a version of chessboard module for Drupal that works satisfactorily. Making the online help to be XHTML-compliant took me some time. Making the output to work with the CSS strict mode took me some time too. (I think I should document this CSS stuff in another post soon. The workaround I found may not be good enough.) Here's how it shows a typical smothered mate:

I'm still a bit confused with the CVS's branching and merging. Need to study more. Anyway I've made a branch to be released for Drupal 4.7.x. The tarball is not updated (automatically) yet at the moment. Hopefully I have done the correct things and the latest tarball will be ready soon.

While my site is now powered with Drupal, I'm still very new to it. Personally, I feel that its framework is very modular. However, it's too flexible that sometimes those features and options confuse me. Besides, I'm still customizing the layout so that it looks better, hopefully.

Have been busy these days. Let me try to include a photo here for the first time with Drupal. It's taken in Chiang Mai where I just visited recently.

A delicious dish of pineapple rice!

Welcome! I have finally renovated my site!

Why the change/renovation? Lately I have been thinking how I can organize my home page more systematically. Before this, I have set up my site using the fantastic b2evolution blogging engine. I have since written several posts with it and am still happy with it.

However, I find lately that a general-purpose web engine probably suit my need better. For example, some posts are rather technical, and I hope to organize these posts in a more systematic way. This requires a feature that is beyond a pure blogging engine. So I digged into the world of CMS (content management system), tried out a few, and finally decided to use Drupal! Drupal is well-maintained, flexible, modular, and easily extensible. I have even learnt how to write a module for Drupal and I'm really satisfied with its modularity and maintainability. (Well, probably only computer programmers care about this aspect...)

By the way, don't get me wrong: b2evolution is still one of the best blogging engines around. It's difficult to compare b2evolution and Drupal as they focus on different aspects. I personally recommend both systems for different purposes.