Woke up this morning and found that the upgrade notice of the latest Wordpress 3.0 shown in the back end of the site. The upgrade process took few seconds (weird) and there’s no database upgrade. Guess I may have missed some parts and will check back in a while.

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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.

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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.

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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 ^^

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Friends may know that I have been looking for new hosting server. Right now I’m using DreamHost with other people and the service DH provides are good but not ideal and I use to suffer from downtime a lot (few times a month). In all, DH is just okay regardless of it’s high price. When I’m poking around some website I noticed DH has lanuched a new service theses day. Free hosting at DreamHost Apps.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This is really an exciting moment and I’d like to announce that TheAkiba.com is now using its new theme! Just get noticed that when I first talking about making my own theme, it’s exactly one month ago when I assumed that I could have spend like half an year to learn the skill since I have little knowledge on CSS and PHP. Pretty glad to find myself way ahead of schedule!

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