Tech Things « Kutitots

Finally, a new blog theme!

26 March 2012 • Comments Off

I was planning to launch this new theme last February 14, but life (and work) happened. In case you’re wondering, I haven’t turned sappy and decided February 14 was such a romantic day it deserved a blog theme launch. Valentine’s Day happened to be the day I bought the Kutitots.Com domain, and saved myself from living with a totally disgusting domain such as pataynadaga.com (can you believe I actually considered that for a blog name? Gah, I surprise myself sometimes).

So what brought about the new theme? Nothing much. The old one was just really — well, old. I grew tired of it. Unfortunately, the web designer side of me trumped the blogger side — I just couldn’t bring myself to blog when I thought my layout was already fugly.

Does that mean I’ll be blogging more? Well, maybe. It took me around two months of almost-regular blogging on the recently-revamped Pinoy Dog-Lover before I got distracted with other things again (ie. work). I guess we’ll just have to wait and see 🙂

Got a few kinks to polish in this new theme. I’ve also kept the design as simple as possible, but hopefully it’ll take a while before I get tired of it again.

Web design “cross-training”

29 October 2010 • 1 Comment

Daily Dose Tech Things

For the past month, client projects and training for my first marathon have been keeping me busy. These have been preoccupying me so much that I can’t help but use one as analogy for the other 😛

So what’s “cross-training?” Wikipedia defines it as:

Cross-training (also known as conditioning) refers to training in different ways to improve overall performance. It takes advantage of the particular effectiveness of each training method, while at the same time attempting to neglect the shortcomings of that method by combining it with other methods that address its weaknesses.

According to coaches assisting me as part of the marathon program I’m in… Whenever you run, you basically exercise a specific muscle group. To avoid injury, burnout, and train strategically, it’s recommended to give that muscle group time to rest. But instead of lying around doing nothing, it’s best to exercise muscle groups that aren’t used in running. Like rowing perhaps. Or swimming, for those who can (definitely not me, I can’t swim :P).

So what does this have to do with my job? Read more

“Just because” surprises

19 May 2010 • 12 Comments

Daily Dose Tech Things

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for female independence, but I’ll be lying if I say I don’t like romantic surprises. My husband Marc is as busy as I am. We run a home-based business, but he’s out meeting clients and client prospects almost on a daily basis. My job involves staying in front of the computer all day, I don’t really get to go out much except for my daily one-hour runs and bike rides. Sometimes I feel the need to set an appointment so we could find time together during work week, Saturdays and Sundays being the only “blocked off” days for our couple time 🙁

I’m not complaining (well, not much, anyway), as this indicates that our home business is doing better. But still… I can’t help but long for the hours when we got to spend a lot of time during the day at home together, and the lunch or dinner dates of “just because” occasions. I am a woman, you know. I may be very practical (sometimes even to the extent of being called “totally un-romantic” by my friends), but sometimes it’s hard not to be lonely here at home even with our hyperactive Shih Tzus running about. Work stress, topped with occasional bouts of loneliness, hasn’t really been good to my temper during the past few weeks.

Our friends can attest to this: my husband is as practical as I am… and probably even more “un-romantic.” :p Just think of it this way… I got Facebook flowers instead of real ones for Valentines’ Day, because, as he said, “it’s the thought that counts!” But he does leave me surprises (like tangible surprises) every now and then — that’s my Marc for you, he can be quite unpredictable. I was feeling cranky last Monday, so many things to do and Marc had to ask me to be the one to feed the dogs their dinner. Imagine my excitement when I saw that little black box lying innocently on top of the dogs’ food container.

Jewelry? No, it’s not what you think. Read more

WordCamp presentation

22 September 2009 • 4 Comments

Tech Things

As promised, here’s my presentation in PDF format for your reference! I also gave a copy to the WordCamp PH crew, so they’ll be have the file ready for download from their site soon too 🙂 This is the first time I’ve used scribd.com for document sharing, so bear with me — I don’t know how to make the file downloadable yet 😀

Anyway, here’s the presentation in PDF. Unfortunately, it doesn’t have the “magical” effects I used during the actual presentation but the info you’ll need are all there 🙂

WP magic with Custom Fields & Conditional Tags

Kutitots now on WordPress 2.7!!!

12 December 2008 • 1 Comment

Tech Things

Pardon the geeky raving, but I am so loving WordPress 2.7! I’ve been looking forward to this release ever since Matt unveiled it at WordCamp Philippines last September.

The User Interface (UI) of the Admin Panel is a huge improvement, and I’m able to customize the Post Editor now as I see fit. Frankly, I never liked the way the Post Editor features of the previous releases were jumbled up together. It got particularly annoying when I created custom fields and “special instructions” for my clients whenever I customized their WordPress to be able to use it as a light-weight Content Management System (CMS). The horizontal tabbed navigation was a pain in the ass as wellâ€”the UI “improvement” the previous releases supposedly aimed for didn’t really improve things, but made finding things worse when they combined stuff. The ways things were categorized into links before gave us a headache when training clientsâ€”you could easily make a mistake creating a new “Post” instead of a “Page.”

With the 2.7 release, things are organized better. And honestly, I’ve always preferred vertical navigation for apps that have a lot of links. It’ll probably take me a few days to get used to this new interface. After all, I’ve been able to adapt to the previous releases’ jumbled up UIâ€”it’s been like a necessary evil I had to live with. But I don’t think that would be much of a problem, since the interface looks awesome anyway 🙂

Performance-wise, I haven’t really tested it much so I can’t say at the moment if there are any improvements on that aspect or not.

Well, let’s see. For now, I’ll enjoy the new UI 🙂

You can download the latest version of WordPress from the Download section of their website. Enjoy!

Nokia N96: The most expensive phone I ever owned (so far)

8 October 2008 • 10 Comments

Family Stuff Tech Things

I turn 27 today. Shopping is usually an ideal gift for women my age, but not me. I don’t get into “latest” trends (which my husband, Marc, equates to “seasonal spending”) or spend much on stuff that would be useless after a few months. I’m practical that way, but like any other person I do have a spending weakness: gadgets! 😀

For my last birthday, my husband surprised me with an early birthday present, a Wacom Intuous 3. He knows how these things make me swoon and regress to childhood. This year he went a step further. Marc got me the most expensive phone I ever owned for my birthday: a brand-new Nokia N96.

I only had my eyes set on a Nokia N82, which I got to play with a bit from the demo Nokia had during the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards Night. You can just imagine how I almost peed on my pants when Marc said we should just get the N96 for me since I’ve been such a hard-working wife anyway 😀 Read more

Bloggers’ Choice Awards now open for voting!

10 September 2008 • 1 Comment

Daily Dose Tech Things

Voting is now open for the Bloggers’ Choice Awards! Check out the guidelines and the list of nominees before casting your vote. As you will see, the voting procedure is much more complicated than last year’s. That was intentional 🙂

Aside from providing online mileage for our kind sponsors (without them, there won’t be an Awards Night for us bloggers to enjoy), we wanted to be sure that the award really and truly is bloggers’ choice. I don’t know why, but last year some people assumed that you are already a blogger and your vote will count just because you put in “Yahoo.Com” or “Friendster.Com” as your blog URL in hopes of getting around our voting system 😛 Read more

WordCamp presentation download

9 September 2008 • 8 Comments

Tech Things

As promised, you can download my presentation at WordCamp Philippines 2008 🙂 I’ve uploaded them at MediaFire; not sure how long the files will be available on the site though, this is the first time I’ve used it. Many thanks to Nina for the head’s up on this site.

DOWNLOAD THE FILES HERE:
wordcamp_gailv.ppt (File size: 27.23MB) or wordcamp_gailv.pptx (File size: 10.41MB)

The content of the two files are exactly the same, except that the effects are not all available in the PPT version, and the Smart Objects are rendered as graphics so the overall file size is twice as big as the PPTX one. If your PowerPoint version is earlier than MS PowerPoint 2007, download the PPT version because I’m not sure if you’d be able to run the PPTX version.

I was at WordCamp Philippines 2008!

8 September 2008 • 31 Comments

Tech Things

I‘m still finishing up my Davao visit post (lots of pictures!), so for now let’s talk WordCamp Philippines! 🙂 But unfortunately, I wasn’t able to take photos at the event 🙁 I dunno, I guess I was just lazy, knowing full well that Melo will be taking lots of photos anyway 😀 I do have three photos in my camera though, pics of me with Mr. WordPress!

I wasn’t able to attend the breakaway sessions in the morning as well 🙁 I was just too sleepy (I wasn’t able to sleep at all the night before due to some pending work needed to be done), and conked out for a few minutes in the volunteers’ lounge instead 😛 My husband Marc had rest, so he just attended the sessions for both of us (he’ll just teach me the new things he learned). Next WordCamp, I swear I will get some sleep before the event! (Aileen and I were witnesses when Matt made Blogie promise WordCamp Philippines 2009! LOL). Read more

I am a delinquent blogger!

20 August 2008 • 4 Comments

Tech Things

Yah I know, that’s not something to be proud of. But hey, I got to accept the fact: I have been (and probably still am) a delinquent blogger.

The I-am-busy-with-work excuse is getting old, and frankly, even I’m getting tired of telling myself that very same excuse. Well, it’s true that I’m still very busy with work and the 2008 Philippine Blog Awards… But I’ll have to admit that I did have some free time to blog. Yet, it took me about 17 days to blog again.

I don’t know why, but somehow, I just didn’t feel like blogging lately. Read more

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