Xion Redesigned

Xion is Astral Meta's tech blog that uses the Wordpress theme "Pixel" by famfamfam or by UK based web developer Mark James to be specific. While I acknowledge that the developer did an excellent job with his design, I find something lacking when you scroll the page down. The design is superb on the top but when it goes midway, most especially in a long post, there is a void that makes the white texts appear difficult to read. Now, I've noted that the Pixel theme uses a background graphic to act as a wall and serve as the design, but most of the containers are somewhat invisible. This background graphic reliance is the problem because without the background image, the Pixel theme would be nothing but a void with white texts.

The background image itself is light amounting only to a few KB (kilobytes) in size, which is good because this does not take longer to load, but the problem is that it could not cover the entire page. The solution I did was simply to enhance the background image so that when meet with a long post, the design could extend to fill the void midway. This unfortunately, resulted in a heavier background image that amounts to more than 100 KB. However, I thought that most internet speeds nowadays are fast enough to handle heavy pages and in contrast the strain with the loading time could be barely felt. So I sacrificed the loading speed for the quality. After all, a page that's hard to read would be the more reason for readers to go away. Until I have more time to modify the design, the current modification should serve for the time being.

You can read Astral Meta's tech blog here.

Added Contact Form

Astral Meta now has a contact form. It was added in order for third party developers to reach me. The contact form can be found on my personal blog at http://al2meta.astralmeta.com/contact/. I had also modified this site's template to include the link to the contact form. Feel free to contact me. I'll try to respond as quickly as I can but I cannot promise to respond all the time. There might also be some delay in response depending if I am busy or not.

Acquiring CO.NR subdomains

Astral Meta Network has partnered with FreeDomain.co.nr. The move's purpose is to shorten some long urls that my network has. For example, the site al2meta.astralmeta.com may be too long and too hard to remember but with the help of freedomain.co.nr, I manage to shorten it into al2meta.co.nr. The co.nr subdomain points to the original long subdomain name making it easier for visitors to access. With this, I had eliminated the problem with long urls. The partnership doesn't cost a penny, but I am required to put a small banner similar to the one on this page and a link back to our partner's website.

Freedomain.co.nr is a free subdomain provider that allows websites to make use of the co.nr subdomain name.

AL2Meta Blog Opened

After a few weeks of preparation, I finally opened my personal blog which I entitled AL2Meta Cafe. In this blog, I plan to write my web design projects, my thoughts, my hacks, my websites, my research, my photo snapshots, my achievements and everything else I can think or work about. Astral Meta Network updates will continue to be posted on this blog, but the personal stuff will go to my personal blog, including some of my literary pieces. And also, my contact information may also be posted on my personal blog as well.