I started on this layout on April 22, 2010, not on my Mac (which has Photoshop), but on my PC. And not in any kind of graphic editing software (I have GIMP on this computer, buuuut I almost never use it). Nope…it was created entirely from scratch in HTML. I skipped the Photoshop stage and went right to the HTML/CSS stage. Mainly because whenever I try to come up with something in Photoshop, it never comes out right…and I was on my PC at the moment and didn’t feel like turning on my Mac (and I already had an idea of what I was looking for and found it easier to created it with HTML to see how it looks). The only time I ever opened Photoshop was when I needed to create the background image (just a gray, lighter version of the background on the previous layout), edit and save the images for the header, the icons for the archives page (most of them were created by me from scratch with the pen tool, please don’t steal them >o<;).

(All the photos used in the headers are mine as well.)

The page titles I wanted to be in the Rage Italic font, which could’ve been done with the new @font-face CSS3 code, buuut since it’s a commercial font, I wasn’t sure if it would be ok to use said for that purpose (since it gives easy access for people to download it, and would go against the font’s license). There doesn’t seem to be any free alternatives to it (that have that awesome cursive, rugged look), so I used Facelift instead. It’s not perfect…there are areas where some letters are cut off by the succeeding letter. o.o But it’s the only thing I could find that I was actually able to get working (could not figure out how to use sIFR…and…yeah).

The header on the home page…yeah…I think I might do something with it later on. For now, admire my Mocha’s photography skills.

The inspiration is restaurant menus…do you feel hungry yet? o.o

They resetted it (after literally 2 minutes of emailing them :O), so now it’s at 500 MB.

Thank yous, Steadfast! ^^

I wasn’t tired of the old one. I just felt like making a new one.

And when I was nearing completion, I thought ‘ehh, let’s put it up’.

I’ve revamped some pages (Art Box page is now a category), and Gaming turned into “Reviews” (not actual reviews, need to think of a more fitting name later on…).

Later on, I plan on recategorizing some entries (adding new categories and deleting others). Like…a web design category! (I posted a bunch of web design things in the past and occasionally now, but have no actual category for them ;o;). Same with web development. Things like…Computers & Internet will be split into Computers & Gadgetry and Internet. Yup. ^^-b

The Name Files - 2010 Ed.

A few things…

• The idea of the red/orange/gray color scheme came from…Portal! Yes, a video game gave me color scheme ideas (even though I didn’t use the same colors Portal uses, there’s a lot of repeated use of red and orange here against a white/gray background).
• Yes, there a grayish “glow” around the entire layout. It only shows up in Webkit (Safari, Chrome), maybe KHTML and Mozilla-based browsers, since it’s a CSS3 feature that IE doesn’t support yeeeeeet… >.>
• The “similar names” list a lot of the name pages have (ex. “John“) is coded really awkwardly. Everything for this is stored on a text file, that I have to edit manually and upload. >.<;; Still looking for a better solution to this.

In other news, a new Giantpaper layout is in the works. I’m not the type who feels like a site’s a layout MUST change every month or so otherwise it’ll go stale (if a layout is REALLY good and great amounts of love and attention has been put into every detail, it won’t go stale :3). There were some thing about this layout that were bugging me, but since I couldn’t wait for the new one to go up, I just went ahead and fixed everything that was bugging me. XD

Some things about it…

• As I told Funkymonk, “it will feature authentic giant paper”.
• It will feature another digipainting of mine (the sketch is old, but the painted part is new :3).
• Color scheme is similar to that of TNF’s (red & orange, and brown/tan instead of gray/white).

Blogging is falling out of favor among the young’uns these days as they move to quicker-moving social networking sites. At the same time, older adults are getting into blogging and teens still aren’t hot on Twitter, at least according to the latest report from the Pew Internet and American Life project.

Only 14 percent of teenage Internet users said that they blogged last year—that’s half the number from 2006. Similarly, teen commenting on blogs is way down from 76 percent in 2006 to just over 52 percent in 2009. It doesn’t matter whether the blog is on Blogspot or buried within MySpace, either—blogs in general are definitely not the new black.

Wow. I am very surprised. When I was in high school, blogging was one of the online activities teens like to do, IIRC. Then again, back when I was high school, I only knew of blogs as a daily journal or some place where you could talk about whatever was on your mind and no one cared how you wrote it.

NOW, news sites are becoming more bloglike, and there are political blogs, health blogs, photologs, professional bloggers and…other ‘grown-up’ blog things and…these ‘rules’ you should follow when you blog, which vaguely reminds me of those English classes in school. @.@ (Which I almost never try to follow in my own blog, because I like the extreme personal touch it has…even though it’s much more sensical* now—I think? 8D I like to blog to as though I’m addressing 2 or 3 people, rather than an entire crowd, WHICH I probably am.)

*And I like to make up words. Thank you.

And look at this!

The modern blog evolved from the online diary, where people would keep a running account of their personal lives.

@ #3

And spammer questioning the lack of bullet-proof pants.

Remember this? It turned into this! X3

(As for the valve, I just talked with funkymonk on IM about it. He thought it was weird too. Glad to know I’m not crazy. ^w^)

The ghosts were digipainted with the brush using these settings in the brush palette…

• Shape dynamics -> Size Jitter: 0% / Control: Pen Pressure, Min. Diameter: 20%
• Other dynamics -> Opacity Jitter: 28% / Control: Pen Pressure
• Smoothing – checked

Also here on Giantpaper!

Well, I was just playing around with the themes, which required a restart of the application. When Steam started up again, the CPU load dropped dramatically. Wine used to take up about 70% of the CPU, now it’s only…17%… Temperature also dropped from 160°F to 125°F (memory usage on the other hand is superb. 120MB from Wine. Not bad).

I REALLY wish I understood Wine or whatever makes it do this. D8

But either way, restart Steam when the CPU load becomes too much? ÔÔ

In other news, the number of hits per day Giantpaper gets is taking a wild rollercoaster ride. Usually it’s about 14-20 hits. Maybe even 30. Just earlier this week for a few days ago, it was 48-50 hits. Yesterday, it was 59. Almost 60! 8D

Most of the traffic comes from Google, but I know it has nothing to do with me writing about Wine, Steam and related problems, since most of the search keywords I get are about merging vector shapes in Photoshop (which I’ve had since January last year) or something about Gaia Online profiles (I think they’re looking for new themes). Most of them are new visitors.

(Yes, I have my IP address blocked, so my own visits won’t count.) I…don’t get why this is happening…

Didn’t expect that. XD

On a related note, I’m thinking of splitting up the entire gallery into sections. Maybe something like…”Paintings, Drawings, Photographs”. :3