Woohoo! We’re back in business!

So, I’m sorry to say that EpicLensFlares no longer exists on the internets. Long live EpicLensFlares.
In its place is this lovely new blog here, built on a totally new copy of WordPress, with a new name, of which I now plan to simply call ‘my blog’.
Now, at this point, I’m sure you’re a little confused as to what happened exactly… why I basically stopped posting in the middle of last year, and have now come back with a totally new system. There are a multitude of reasons, most of them stemming from my lack of experience, for why I changed everything and I’ll briefly mention them here.

Fresh Codebase
I originally used my own forked version of qTranslate to get the Japanese portion of EpicLensFlares running. Unfortunately, I now know that forking other peoples’ plugins is a very bad move since the next wave of updates that came out (both WordPress and the original plugin) promptly wrecked all of my custom code, so much so that the whole thing stopped rendering in my staging platform. Given that it’s usually a very good idea to keep your WordPress up to date, I got the online blog’s version as far as I could temporarily, and then decided to rebuild the blog using a copy of the latest codebase. Sadly, this meant I had to cut all of my Japanese content, but I realised since I wasn’t using it all that much anyway, I might as well go back to posting my Japanese posts directly on mixi.
So, this version of the blog is a fresh new codebase, and is fully up-datable.

The name
This was slightly embarrassing hehe. Last year, I attended a Perth bloggers meetup, where we all met up in a bar and had a chat about all the stuff we blogged about. Um, sadly for me though, I spent most of my time explaining that the concept of ‘Epic Lens Flares’ was not about photography, but an injoke on CGI artwork. So realizing that the title was maybe a smidge too specialized, to the point where it could be confusing lots of people online, I decided to go back to basics and name it ‘my blog’.

The new style
Over 2009, I’ve had the privilege of meeting lots of new people through social networking things like Twitter. On that note, I got to see a lot of other peoples’ blogs and I was amazed at some of the layouts and designs and Web 2.0 tech they used. Since I was already having to start from a new codebase, I thought I’d give the visual style a bit of an overhaul too using some of the blogs I’d seen as inspiration.

The basic colour scheme is reminiscent of EpicLensFlares but the overall layout has been re-hashed, which I’m hoping has much more efficient use of screen real-estate as well as  reading more legible. In addition, seeing that WordPress came with JS libraries like jQuery, I also added a lot of really cool features like LightBoxes for image thumbnails and a better Twitter widget. After seeing it on many other blogs and reading the recommendations, I also added the Disqus comment system for posts, which should make it way easier and cooler for people to leave comments and receive feedback.

So that’s about it. Overall the revamp and content migration took about 2 weeks of work, give or take. For a much cleaner, usable blog than the one before it, I’d say it was worth it.

Since I haven’t been posting for about 6 months, I’ve built up a list of topics to post about. I’m hoping they’re still relatively relevant since I’ll now see about writing them up from here on.

Anyway, let me know what you think of the new blog, if there’s anything you hate, or anything you’d recommend changing! Thanks for reading!