IT Nexus Website Launched

Just about a week ago, I opened another website about Information Technology, computers, and programming, I named IT Nexus. As the name, I am planning to make this site to serve as an Information Technology Nexus. I know it sounds like a big plan, but I am hopeful that it would be helpful to people who wants to get updated with news regarding Information Technology and Technology itself. It should also contain some helpful tips and tricks that could help some users solve troubleshoot their own computers and learn to solve their computer problems themselves.

This site will be replacing Xion soon. As a matter of fact, I will be migrating some of Xion's content to this website and then archive the former. Xion's link will still be active, but it would no longer be updated.

Astral Meta Network's computer and technology website will now be IT Nexus.

AL2Meta.com acquired, AL2Meta Cafe archived

I have decided to relinquish AL2Meta Cafe, my personal blog that runs on a subdomain, in favor for a new personal blog that runs on its own domain. The old AL2Meta Cafe, however, will not be deleted. Instead, it will be archived and it will continue to run under a different subdomain name. Unfortunately, the transfer has caused some of its functions to go haywire. For which, it may take some time for me to fix its database and restore it to proper working order. On the other hand, my new personal blog will probably start running next week. It will serve as my portfolio.

Restoring Nursing-Resource.com

Astral Meta is now in the process of restoring Nursing-Resource.com back to proper working order after some of its functionality got broken. Among the restored functions is its News Feed delivery system that allows it to conduct automatic news feed updates on its Facebook and Twitter pages. There are still a lot to fix in this site, among them are broken links, some missing images, and some possible updates on the contents. The site was supposedly abandoned when my Ursa Gamma team broke up, but it continued to function as a Nursing News resource site. The site has been very helpful to nurses and medical practitioners who had been relying on it for updates on medical news, and it will continue to do so as long as it is needed.

Nursing-Resource.com is an integral component of the Astral Meta Network.

Super Mario Quest Blog

Super Mario Bros X: Super Mario Quest

This may be too late to announce this but I'll announce it anyway. As promised in a post on my blog, the blog site for an indie game I was developing will be announced here on Astral Meta's Blog. The blog was actually launched last month, which make me a month late on posting this announcement, but as the saying, it's better late than never. The blog address is http://supermarioquest.blogspot.com. It is on this blog where I would be announcing the updates for the SMBX game I am currently working on. The blog design may be simplistic and a lil buggy since it was made from an old xml framework that I made back when I was still a novice. The framework was actually from the Ursa Gamma blog site Nursing Gazette. I was on a rush when I recreated it for the Super Mario Bros X so I didn't really spent much time on it. In the future, however, I may create a better design base on this same skeleton. Anyway, as long as it serves its purpose in bringing updates for Super Mario Quest, it's good for now.

Absorbing Ursa Gamma Websites

Astral Meta Network's number of websites have increased to a total of five after absorbing Ursa Gamma Designs Solutions into the network. Ursa Gamma Designs Solutions was one of my old failed network, which was formerly aided by some colleagues. When we parted ways, the network due to lack of manpower and time, collapsed. Although the Ursa Gamma Designs group disbanded, its websites remain online, still functional under Google's Blogger host. So far, I have annexed one Ursa Gamma website into the network — Nursing Gazette, a Nursing blog. It is the predecessor of Nursing-Resource.com.

You can find Ursa Gamma Designs Solutions blog here.

AL2Meta Blog Redesigned

I redesigned the site AL2Meta, my personal blog site, to take on the form of a new Wordpress Template called Regini — a WP theme created by New WordPress Themes or NewWPThemes. The last template I use on my personal blog was Holistic Teahouse by Rebecca Rings. While Rebecca Rings' design was simply gorgeous, I took notice of some few flaws in the design that not only limited the functionality of my site, but had also gave me problems posting. The most prominent bug I saw perhaps was with the "break" and text alignment, in which several times, I had to force a break to move the text down so it would display correctly on the front end. Another one is that it does not support wordpress menus. Since my personal blog is going to be composed of so many different topics and projects, I feel the need of a menu. Not just a simple menu but a drop-down menu that can extend up to the next two submenus, a kind of menu not found on the holistic teahouse theme.

With the Regini theme, all my problems were solved, but I had to modify some of the default functionality to match my taste. I started with the header. The header, by default, looks big so I had to readjust it to turn it smaller. I did it by reducing the height of the container that contains the logo and the ad next to it. The next move was to remove the ads and replace it with my own. I also remove some of the widgets. And I, of course, added my own logo to replace the Regini logo.

The Regini theme is no doubt, one of the best themes I've seen, but unfortunately, there are some few undesired parts of the design also. This includes the black texts on the comment form and on the archives page. These black texts are hard to read because of the chocolate colored background, so I had to tweak the CSS (Cascading stylesheet) to have those black texts replaced with white. I also did some hacking on the archives php page to solve the problem.

The final steps involve the plugins, the SEO tools, and the site map. I also had to replace the NGG (NextGen Gallery), a photo gallery plugin, with FIAGallery. The reason is because NGG seems to be not SEO-friendly unlike FIAGallery.

Well, there's still too much to be done. While I had solved the template issues, there's still a lot to build up in terms of content, and that is an even more important issue to focus on.

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.