I’m launching this blog today. I was supposed to keep it under wraps until tomorrow January 1, 2006 to give Nicole time to finish her blog so we can announce our new sites together, but she’s run into some delays and won’t make it in time. I’m going to help her out to speed things up.

The reason I made a new blog is because I got fed up of the truckloads of trackback spam I’ve been getting from my old bBlog driven one. It’s really good blogging software, but somewhat underpolished with really slow development. It’s the only robust blogging software that incorporates the Smarty templating system which was a tremendous help in making custom templates and increasing code readability. Although I’ll be looking forward to newer versions of it, it’s just too bad that they don’t have enough time to further develop and improve it now.

I’m using WordPress now which is very polished and easy to use. I was reluctant to switch because I really wanted a Smarty-based system, but after having 400 or so trackback spams dumped on me, I had to take action. I’m not a big fan of setting aside some time from my day to clean up shit other people leave in my yard.

So yeah, here it is. I can’t help but praise myself, gloat, and generally bask in egotistic glory at what I think is a gorgeous (humor me) yet deceptively simple and clean layout. I get extra brownie points for writing it without tables and making it partially web standards compliant (my style.css doesn’t validate, I’ll deal with that problem later). Should a blind man with a screen reader and a standards compliant browser on his internet-enabled PDA happen to chance upon my blog, he can read all my bullshit. Hah!

[/ego]

It’s a pretty blog, isn’t it?

Recently posted at the RF Online Philippines website:

How loyal are you to your race?
Date Posted: December 28, 2005

RFO-Ph goes commercial

First, Sneak Peek.

“Only hand-picked warriors called to join the war on Planet Novus.”

Then, Open Beta…

“Accretians, Bellatos, and Corites gathered warriors to fight on their side. New recruits pledged their allegiance to their chosen races. Armies grew bigger, and the battle, deadlier.”

Now, a development in Planet Novus is about to test the loyalty of these warriors to their races as RF Online Philippines goes COMMERCIAL!

Pay-to-play starts on January 10, 2006!

“Battles will be more deadly and rivalry will be fiercer as only true Accretians, Bellatos, and Corites will remain on the battlefield.” Click here to see the Pay-to-play features.

Save your Christmas earnings, stock up on Level Up top-up cards, and be part of the country’s biggest online game!

Here are the game time rates that will be applied on RF Online Philippines starting on January 10, 2006.

Denomination	Hours
10		0.5 (30mins)
20		1.5 (1h 30mins)
50		6
75 		14

Denomination	Days	Duration
100		5	5 days
350		21	21 days
500		31	31 days

That has got to be one of the most blatant ripoffs I have ever seen. While I understand that Level Up Games may have some agreement or contract with CCR that dictates the ridiculous pricing, they are really shooting themselves in the foot here. Lineage II is priced similarly, but I have tried this game and it is indeed beautiful, massive and epic in scale and detail; RF Online at its current state has nowhere near as much polish or content as this dated game. Hell, the announced fee is practically two-thirds the way to the subscription fee of World of Warcraft but with like one-tenths the quality.

There has already been some dissent among the folks at their forums, seems like the population is split down the middle as of writing. There are the students, casual gamers, and financially-challenged hardcore gamers those who strongly disapprove of the new pricing scheme (read: scam), and then there are the gaming elitists with delusions of grandeur who believe that an expensive fee will effectively give them the playing environment they want and are still oblivious to the fact that RF Online is a bloated and overhyped grind machine that didn’t have much thought put into it.

I’m really going to get a kick out of what’s going to happen to this game in the coming weeks.

Wow, that was a big headache.

Half of my headache was from my attempt at making an XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliant tableless CSS layout, the other half was from hunger. I’ve literally spent half of today translating my custom design into a working WordPress template. I started working on it almost as soon as I got up around noon and I’ve gotten most things in order just now, nearly 12 hours later. I skipped meals until around past 10pm when I decided that I really needed a break.

Seriously, did I really have to do this? I’ll never have blind people with screen readers and people on-the-go checking my blog from an internet-enabled mobile device going through my site. Probably yes, I had to learn how to properly do it because each day people are getting more anal about web standards. Yeah you heard me, you anally retentive web standards people are bastards. I’m already obsessive-compulsive, you fucktards just gave me something new to obsess over.

Argh! From now on I’ll be pressured to do everything this way.