TheAkiba » Theme

TheAkiba Redesign Completed: Forth Version

YoU — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 20:57:38 +0000

Finally the redesign of TheAkiba is completed. Currently running on the new V4 theme. Guess I am just tired. Have studied tons of websites before the idea coming out. Thanks to Tutsplus network, the main development of the code was done and I was able to finish coding in time. Although not many new ideas came to the theme while the features were increased. This is not an original design but an redesign based on the framework and layout of Tutsplus Network. Will continue digging into the detail and furnishing the look in the coming days. Right now just enjoy the feeling of satisfaction.

What’s New in this Version?

The most exciting part of the new theme is the improved user browsing experience. The old theme is not very friendly at this point and may cause trouble when reading.

Improved user experience. This is the best part of the redesign. The layout is optimized for different width now. If you have a wide screen browser you may have already noticed. And what’s more, I’d love to say that the site is no more compatible to IE 6.0 or under. We HATE IE6.0 and would love to dump this evil.
Comment system was restore back to default. The Disqus Comment System has been remove and the comment system was set back to the default of WordPress. Disqus has many great features but the last thing I want from this comment system is the delay of the synchronization. You have to wait for a period (guess due to queue) before the comments show up in the back end and this is really frustrating. Though the default WordPress comment system is simple it does the job well. And the best part is I can style the whole system to fit the site theme.
Related post can now be found under each post. Had removed this function since the V3 theme but now it was back. You can now find post related to the current topic.
New ways of browsing the category pages, tag pages, archives and search pages. You can now find three ways of browsing the page which are according to date, alphabet and number of comments simply by selecting from the button on the right hand of the category title.
Image loading more user friendly. Thanks to the great Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery by Mika Tuupola, the site is now able to load images when scrolling. This reduces the loading time when opening a page with tons of images.
Improved social networking and visitor interacting. Better social media integration is done together with the theme. You can find Retweet, Facebook and Google Buzz at the bottom of each post. Simply click and share your favorite posts around your friends. Check out out Facebook Fan Page or follow us on Twitter.
The iPhone theme is still under development and will not come up in a short time. Basically because I am lazy
XHTML 1.0 Passed; and tons more…

Become One of Us!

Last but not least, I would love to have new friends joining our editor team. Currently the main content of the site is still written by me. Thanks to our new editor Snow who has joined in recently, the site is able to cover a lot more topics. We also welcome guest writers who have their own blog or not. Hope this will enrich the content of the site and put energy into the community.

Currently trying to think up a new name for the site. Any feedback or suggestions are welcomed!

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TheAkiba v3 Starts!

YoU — Fri, 19 Jun 2009 12:11:17 +0000

Regular visitors may have noticed that the site updated not very often these days. The point is that I’ve been busy working on the application of my graduated study program in US and finally got the offers. Still working on the visa part but it seems that I finally got a chance to go to US and try things that is totally different from my past life. Would very much like your advices on studying aboard and how to survive in cold weather (the school of one of my offers is located in Ohio) ^^

Back to our topice. This release is a little bit behind the schedule due to three times of redesign. But whatsoever, it eventually comes to the screen.

What’s new in this version?

First of all, the complete new design of the interface. Getting ideas from various websites and reading all kinds of posts written by those talent designers really help me a lot in forming the overall layout of the site. As you may notice about the change of the title description, which is now “all about life, Japan and bloggers”. Although “Japan” is still a focus, it’s not the only one now ^^. I’d like to bring different topic to the site and make it more social orientated. Topic such as social media and lifestyle, gadgets and gears, design and ideas will be taken into consideration.

The use of DISQUS has extended the possibility of being sociable. The new DISQUS will be able to fetch responses, tweets from different sources and put them together with your comments. The function is extremely helpful when you want to build a social media site. What’s more, it reduce your work on coding for the CSS for the comment part ^^

I myself satisfied most with the footer part of the layout. It contains all the information including RSS feeds, blogroll and more important, a social part of being a blogger, social media and twitter. In all, maybe I’m just a minimalist.

About the fourth theme, well, due to the coming semester and new environment, I will not mention it in the following one year and will focus more on the blogging part. For sure, I’d still like to blog about Japan and Anime, life in US as a foreigner, and just blogging as a blogger Please tell me how you feel about the new theme, would very much appreciate your comments ^^

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TheAkiba v3 Ready to Start

YoU — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 15:22:38 +0000

Some regular visitors may notice that the thumbnails of the site is much smaller than before. Just received an E-mail and a call from my hosting provider informing that the script used to generate thumbnails using up too much resources and the server suffers. Still fixing the problem and it appears to be some errors in the caching process. Anyway, am using custom fields to display post thumbnails which were used as thumbnails in the Dannychoo Theme.

I’m not a coder and fixing the script seems unacceptable to me. So I’d like to put forward a new theme. I’ve been thinking about the v3 theme for a while but still don’t have many ideas on this one. The design work will start right away and is scheduled to complete around early June.

BTW, just finished watching the old Anime named Ultra Maniac. Guess few of you watched this series (Shoujo Manga) and the quality is low compared with new Anime. But it’s quiet good in the story and can enjoy the series when you’re free.

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TheAkiba v2 Starts

YoU — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 01:34:38 +0000

After a couple of weeks on the theme, the second version of TheAkiba is launched. The blog of TheAkiba was set up September 2008 and among these several months I have switched several different themes which now I consider as inadequate for the coming design work. Inspired by Dannychoo’s theme (old version, new layout), I created a WordPress theme and used it for a few months. Everything seems fine but friends keep on talking about the lack of an identity of a website and to me, a lack of a sense of recognition. For sure, building things basing on other people’s work rarely seems fine to me, and that’s why I hurried for the second theme which aim to discover my own sense of design and aesthetics.

Of course, at first, the new design still inspired by lots of websites which I considered to be a mixture of bubbles and textures. After some time spending on the polishing work, things turned out to be fine and I think I’ve found something that is useful for my own taste of design.

Some highlights of the new design. One thing you may noticed before is the navigation menu. In the website performance survey, many friend complain about the poor navigation system and they rarely find things they need and confused by the structure of the site. And that’s how the directory of sitemap was introduced. Scrolling down to the bottom of the page or simply clicking on the “Categories” in the menu and it will take you to the directory/sitemap of the website. In the directory, you can have a clear view of where you’re standing at and what’s next for you. Basically every contents and links are included in the directory. You may also notice a “Project” column on the right side. This is some experiment projects/scripts TheAkiba is using and these projects don’t have direct relation with the blog, maybe cancel some day, maybe not, just for more entertainment. The project will continued to grow and you can always find something new here^^

You may notice the new selection “Random Post” in the navigation menu. Click it and it will redirect you to a random post of the site. If you can’t find what you need or simply poking around finding nothing to do here, have it a shot!

The most remarkable change of the new design, to me, is the structure of the page view. In the previous theme (which is the Dannychoo one), I can post a max 750px image in the post. This is really cool, but leaving only a small portion of space for relevant contents on the sidebar (used to be ads and blogroll only). With the redesign of the theme, we can now only post a max 640px image in the post (larger size will be auto-scaled using JQuery that coded by Mike Wittmann) but leave a larger space for more sidebar contents. The space can be very useful and I’m considering put lots of information on.

The next change is the top carousel I used for recommendation of products. But the layout is not ideal for me thus there might be some change later. The site uses many JQuery and I think it may delay the speed, tell me if this bothers you.

I’m still polishing the theme and many works still left undone. Any comment is welcomed.

Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.

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Idea of a New Theme

YoU — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 08:59:28 +0000

Friends may notice that the site keeps on changing from time to time. This is because I’m doing some experiments. Remember several friends mentioned in the comment about the identity and style of one’s own, and I’d like to think it over and over. And it’s about time to jump out of the box labeled “Dannychoo” ^^.

I’d like to create a new theme for TheAkiba and at the same time make the website focus more on Anime, even considering remove the unrelated categories. As for the theme, I haven’t started to design the layout but I’m keeping searching on the net and browsing different kinds of sites and tried to get inspired. Will add some new elements to the new theme and remove the unrelated contents.

After the new theme is done, I’d like to release the theme I’m currently using, of course, under the permission of Danny in the first place. The project will start at the end of April since I have two important exams in the coming two months. I’m currently preparing for GMAT and will take the test at the end of this month. Probably I’ll post something when I get to US, or probably I failed and never show up again ^^. Well, that’s a joke, but I’m doing my best, not only to keep TheAkiba alive at least for the rest of my life, but bring fresh blood and new ideas to everything I’m passionate in.

Just post to remind myself of the word I’ve said, because I’m just lazy ^^

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Category Layout Update

YoU — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:35:16 +0000

Oops, I guess some of you might have noticed the layout change of the category pages. The category page inherited the layout of the homepage and I think this is more user friendly, compared with the old one. While archive pages (archive index, search and tag pages) remain untouched, I’ve also modified some little parts of the theme and tried to make it compatible with IE6.0. The work seems not have paid out yet and I will keep on digging and find a reasonable solution. Meanwhile stilling looking for PNG alpha channel issue on IE6.0. Oops, I guess IE6.0 is just the source of evil but the 25% of the visitors of TheAkiba still using IE6, so I have no way but keep on working ^^

In order to extent the layout, I have to pull back some of the Google Adsenses.Â Apologize for the inconvenience and the ads might be gone shortly, or not. The layout still needs to be polished and there might be some slight change along days.

Some other stuffs, the browser Google Chrome is just fine and it seems to be a little faster than Firefox3. I’ve test and the theme seems ok with the new browser.

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New jQuery Comment Function!

YoU — Sat, 10 Jan 2009 14:53:54 +0000

Some of you may have noticed that when you highlight some text in the post a blue “Respond” bubble will fade in around your mouse. Move over your mouse to click the bubble and it will scroll you directly to the comment box where is populated with an HTML blockquote of the selected text. This is a new trick I got just now from Jim Jeffers who demonstrates the function in helping improving discussion on blog.

Jim uses the jQuery to implement the function and you can have a clear view about how it works on his blog. In Jim’s post, several functions are also mentioned but right now it is only able to highlight the article itself on TheAkiba. This is an open source project and you can check out Jim’s public repository and download the code.

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New Layout Update!

YoU — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 03:52:14 +0000

Okay, what should I say? Nothing I guess but I have to. The layout you see right now is a complete (approximately) clone of Dannychoo.com‘s. May be you will say that I should make it 100% identical to Danny’s but my word is this is the end of the clone and I gonna built my site upon this theme. You might have noticed there’re some detail area (say, the related articles section) has been changed and this would be a sign of a tide of modification. Not sure Danny’s theme is under Common Creative Licese (while the Dannychoo.com Theme by TheAkiba.com is) but I’d like to built upon, basically because there aren’t many good themes (I shouldn’t say good themes but the themes that are suitable for my taste) outside you can rely on.

And about the new layout, what you see on the outside may be identical to the old one, but the code inside is tremendously different. I ran over the code of the mainly template files and clean lots of “dirty codes”, if you compare the CSS file with the old one you may think they’re totally different things ^^. I misused lots of em (font size) and margin tags and I’ve cleaned they up! This really makes me feel good (something like you have cleaned up your dirty room >_<).

And for the old theme (beta one) which you might have in your hands, I’d like to find some time to clean it’s code up and make it distributable later. Let me know if you like the new layout, or just some feedback and comments ^^.

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Important: Theme Bug Fix

YoU — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 02:40:25 +0000

I found a bug in the theme yesterday. With this bug, you won’t be able to feed your posts! When you click on the Feed button, the browser will return a XML error and this is really hurt. The error was caused by the blank line or space before or after the loop and this is not a uncommon error. You can learn more about this error here.

How to fix it?

I’ve reuploaded the theme package and you will have to download it again.

Here

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Dannychoo.com Theme by TheAkiba.com

YoU — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 06:55:01 +0000

Remember when I mentioned few days ago on Christmas Eve that I had been looking for Danny Choo‘s email address to inform him about the theme stuffs? Guess what, I received Danny’s email one day after Christmas, surprisingly, since I hadn’t sent the email yet.

Danny and I were talking about the theme stuffs and we’re now ready to release the theme. I changed the style of theme according to Danny’s requests and made it looks much more identical to Dannychoo.com. Check out Danny’s post here. Also you can check out the original one.

One thing more you should know about, the theme is for WordPress only.

Demo: It’s just what you’re looking at.
Download: here

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