As I had mentioned last week, the first site upgrade was completed nicely. Today I’m announcing to you the 2nd site update, which has been in a private testing phase for around 2 weeks now. I present to you today my new photolog site, Eyeography.

While the Penguin may have been going through a midlife crisis for a while now, the site itself has been acting very calm for a few months now. I’ll be making 3 major changes to the site soon, starting with the first change that will take place this week. I’ll be converting the site into a better backend with more robust code and also have several tweaks around the site to allow for more flexibility in the future.

This is a question that I’ve been wondering for a while. What would you like to see on this site? You could leave a comment here, or if you prefer to be or remain anonymous, you could email me.

Would you like to see different kind of entries? Would you like to see more pictures? Would you like to see more personal stories? Would you like to see more social commentary? Would you like to see more humor? Would you like to see more complaints? Would you like to see more pictures, and if you do, what kind of pictures? Is there anything that you don’t like on this site? Is there anything that you would like to be improved on the site?

Anything that comes to your mind, please let me know. I’ll try to incorporate those changes right away. Thank you for reading and coming to my site. : )

The entry for January 30th, 2006 was supposed to be posted automatically at a certain time yesterday. For some unknown reason, it never was, and instead got deleted. I’m trying to see if I can find the entire text I had written somewhere. Otherwise, I’ll have to summarize the text tomorrow and post it as a late post.

Thank you for understanding.

I saw something on Vixx’s site recently and decided that it was too cool to be kept away from my site. It was a Q&A section; a section with a question and answer script to allow anyone to ask someone a question and then answer that question. Many people ask me different questions from time to time, and I have to respond to them individually and make changes to my site almost every few days to reflect the answers.

It’s time to specify a schedule at which I’ll post on this site. I’ve decided that one post a day, minimum, is what would make me happy, and it should hopefully make you happy.

I’ve seen this work perfectly and without any headaches for the user on Valerie’s site, and loved it; now I’ve put it to good use here also.

If you use IE a lot, you may have experienced some issues viewing this site; the site may have looked strange, or you may have seen some errors on different parts of the site. Everything has been fixed now.

Another small update : I’ve created a section with the last 100 comments. You can find it in the link right above the latest comments on the left hand menu of this site.

It should prove useful for many, including myself, when one wants to see where their last comment was, or what the latest comments have been about. Now, you can browse the last 10 comments directly from the menu on the left, or see the last 100 comments on this page.

Enjoy!

Blanca over at CuteButEvil told me a while ago that she couldn’t find much personal information about me on this site, and I agree. I’ve updated the profile to include the three most requested pieces of information: name [you all probably already know this], gender [again, many of you are aware of this] and age. Though this information isn’t required to read anything on this site, it may give an insight as to who I am [hmmm].

If you know anything you want to see, please let me know.

You can now use smileys [ like or or even ] in your comments, and you will see them in different posts also. This should help in expresssing our views [yours and mine] better in many situations.

I’ve updated the “about” area to include some more personal information. The site also uses less images now, so it should load even faster than before; I converted most of the images to text links. If they’re confusing compared to before, please let me know. I’ve also updated the contact page to include more contact options; I was using online messaging indicators as a test for a while. They’re working great and I’ve decided to include them permanently.

The site now sports a new color theme. This is to reflect the blistering heat. The previous color theme reflected the scorching sun and the heat. Now that we are fed up with heat [finally], here’s a small and indirect tribute to the cool winter. The penguins also reflect my true self, according to some people who are always acting silly. If you have any suggestions or comments about this change, please let me know either by emailing me or posting a comment here.

The new title and the supposed “meme” changed also [meme changed a bit, while the name changed completely], with the previous ones being “Writing about Riyu” and “The Orange Blog : The image of the world from a young gaijin to this world”, which served their purpose. While I do miss the oranges, I am sure I can have them anytime at the local grocerry shop, while penguins are hard to buy [and keep, since my fridge is not big enough to have food and penguins living together]. Thus, the new title reflects this new transportation to reach the same goal.

The previous layout served it’s purpose from November 29th, 2003, till today, July 23rd, 2005. That’s a total running time of 1 year and 237 days [combined total of 602 days]. Goodbye old layout, and goodbye yellow/orange combination. It was nice knowing ya.

Besides the color relation to the season, this new color theme is also easier on the eyes. I received several emails this year alone from users and visitors like you saying that they loved the color combination. While I would hesitate from changing something that people already like, these new colors have taken a long time to test to see how they are compared to the previous yellow and orange shades. So far, I think the new colors are light [obviously] and make it easier and nicer to read the text. I hope all of you like this new combination also.

Previous layout snapshots: