Pet-Project: Website Coding

So before March comes to a close, I decided to share one of the little activities I've been busying myself lately (that has little to do with work mind you). This is actually a little pet-project I do, though the goal isn't so much as publishing it to the web but still shows up on a web browser. Forgive the irony, but I'll get to answering that weird quip in a second.

I don't often mention that one of my absolutely favorite hobbies is to write stories in the form of roleplays, but when I do, it's always in relation to Kai and we do take some pride and effort to doing it whenever time allows us. Since we've expanded our repertoire of story worlds and universes real and fiction alike in which to portray characters and weave a story of our own, I have this little (okay, maybe not so little) tendency to keep things to some order, so I wanted to have a little space, even just internally, to keep things on record.

While we have the luxury of Dropbox and Evernote besides Blogger (duh) to keep track of some stuff, I wanted to actually apply some of the things I learned (okay fine, mostly self-study) to good use. But then again, there was just that excuse to make the experience a bit more interactive than just clicking on files that probably didn't make as much sense without visual prompts and stuff. Haha.

At the end of it all, I might end up inspired to make my own site again, to which I owe myself of nearly 4 years ago a pat on the back for chronicling this entry else I would have forgotten that title.

Sunday is Do Something Day

日曜日は何に日かです。（にちようびはなにのひかです）Nichiyoubi wa Nani No Hi ka desu. trans. Sunday is Do Something Day.

So yesterday was a lazy Sunday. And just after lunch my dad asked my sister and I if we were interested in helping him revamp the website of his union, since it was kind of bland and he wasn't all that tech-savvy. So we agreed, having nothing better to do and brought down our laptops to work in the dining table.

I was in charge of coding, while my sister was in charge of the graphics stuff. It was actually interesting that I never actually learned any of this stuff in school, but more of self-study, with some help of a book I got for Christmas two years ago. xDD

It took us the whole day, but it's up and running (thanks to an already existing domain xD). Not all the pages are full of anything, but otherwise there we go. Hopefully the higher-ups like it. xP It was nothing fancy nor complicated, mind you.

This made me remember all the time in my hands coding my own website in HTML before when I was in high school. Then I got lazy and didn't bother anymore. So at least with this, I finally put my seemingly wasteful hours of coding to work.

Advert Inflatus

I believe it started in 7th grade when I had first formally learned about the basics of HTML coding did I have a little dream of designing my own website. I guess it paved the way for me to gain a bit of interest in taking up the course I'm currently in.

Throughout most of my high school life, I've been teaching myself HTML, and when I was blessed with it, consulted with friends who knew a lot more than myself to help me out along the way. After attending the CCS Summer Camp in DLSU last April 2007, I was able to meet a number of friends, many of whom I see around the Ateneo campus, others I chat with online.

But I won't get carried away with thinking back about those days. That would most probably have me making a more lengthly post about my experience then. For now, I want to focus on the website I managed to create.

I recall spending countless hours hardcoding the tags and the content. The layout, I had left to two of my friends who knew a bit of CSS that really helped me out. The hosting was where I had a bit of an edgy beginning. Regardless to say, I poured a lot of myself into filling up numerous pages of my website to the brim with various bits of light information except those that were too personal.

The only thing I would really want to focus on for this blog entry was the title I gave my website (and such a title is still reserved for that space on the web when I can develop that to its full extent). The title I chose to go with is Advert Inflatus, which roughly means to 'refer to inspiration'. Thinking back on it, the main thing i wanted to publicize on the web was mainly the poems I had come to write over these past few years. That was how everything came to be: INSPIRATION.

For me, to be inspired is the ability to give birth to something unique; to be inspired is the talent to overcome any hardship until there is only success; to be inspired is to be ignited by the flames of passion, pushing you to exceed your limits; to be inspired is to BELIEVE in something that will come to be.

^_______________^ v