Peter Carl Fabergé's 166th Birthday

On today's Google homepage were intricately-designed ornaments shaped in the form of eggs. These eggs were apparently used to mark the birthday of Peter Carl Fabergé, a Russian jeweller who was known for his making of Easter egg-like ornaments using gemstones and precious metals. These ornaments were then named after him and called Fabergé eggs.

Robert Moog's 78th Birthday

Google has placed quite an interesting piece of doodle on its homepage today. It is made up of three components, a keyboard, some sort of mixer and a recorder. What's interesting about this doodle is that all the buttons and knobs can be played around with to alter the sound that eventually comes out when you press a keyboard button. Furthermore, the recorder can be used to record the sounds that you create and be played back afterwards. They've even incorporated a function which automatically uploads the sound that you've recorded and provides a link to it so that you can share and show your creative talent to your friends. ^_^

W3C Validation

Since yesterday morning after I stumbled upon some article regarding w3c validation, I decided to give my gaming blog homepage, All You Need to Know About Games, a test. What shocked me was that I had a stunning 350+ errors and close to 500 warnings. And mind you please this was just my home page and not my other post pages.

Anyway, with that many errors and warnings, I went on to surfing and hunting for articles regarding how to remove or at least minimize those errors and warnings. From then on until now, I've managed to reduce the numbers down to this w3c markup validation.

But the purpose of this post isn't to brag about the accomplishment. Rather its to inform others about what I've discovered.

Firstly, most of the errors I've incurred were from loosely using the & instead of & in my articles. This is especially important if the & is to be found in a url. Surprisingly, most of this type of error came from the amazon advertisement codes that were generated for me by amazon associates. From now on, I'll be more careful in this aspect, but eventually I should find some time to go through all my previous posts to weed these errors out.

Secondly, another portion of the errors came from the "&max-results=2" found attached to the end of the labels on my home page's sidebar. As I've failed to rectify this, I am forced to remove those labels off my home page. I'm not sure if this will be permanent, but I'm guessing it will be here to stay until I've found a solution to this.

Lastly, I've also found that these few articles from another blogger were pretty helpful as well.

New Blogger Duplicate Content Cure - Fix Duplicate Contents
I've implemented this duplicate content cure thingy on my gaming blog but its only been 1 day so the effect of this implementation will still have to be analyzed. Nonetheless, I think it should be useful judging from the help I've gotten from the other two articles from this same blogger.

W3C Validating Blogger XHTML Template - Blog Validation Errors
For this article, I did not change my xhtml declaration from strict to transitional. But I did remove those "quickedit" thingy from my template and it did help me remove some of the errors and warnings. So far my blog still seems to be working okay, so I guess the suggestions from the article isn't harmful and can be tried. (Just me being cautious. Hehehe.)

Add Compressed External CSS Blogger Template - CSS
By shifting this "b:skin" css to an external location as suggested in the article, I've managed to avoid and circumvent some of the errors and warnings. Furthermore, I think that this also helped my homepage to load faster as well.

One thing to note though, I didn't download and use the notepad++. I simply copied and paste the code into notepad, saved it and renamed it to .css file. Then I uploaded it to google sites as suggested in the article and it worked for me so I guess this notepad++ thingy probably could be skipped if you dislike downloading and installing something.

However, doing so had incurred a tiny problem to my blog though. Very tiny problem. I'm suspecting that it had something to do with my free custom template more than due to this shifting of css to an external site.

And this tiny problem is happening to the "Followers" widget that can be found at the bottom right corner of my gaming blog. Before the shift, the words in this widget were of the same colour as my posts, however after the shift, it has now become black instead. I'm not sure what has happened, but I'm guessing that there's a link between the css code and this widget that has been severed as a result of this shift.

I'm hoping that this will be the extent of the problem and that nothing else major is happening. And up until this point, there are still about less than 150 errors and warnings left to be fixed for my homepage, but some of these problems seem to be more difficult and way over my head, so I might be forced to leave them alone if I cannot find a solution to them.

Oh and before I forget, as far as I know, this whole w3c validating isn't really for seo purposes. Well...it does help a tiny bit though because with the proper codings, the search engines can better "read" and understand your blog and website and thus cache and classify them more properly.

But the main reason for trying to validate your blog and website should be for the readers. As you should know, many of us use various types of browsers and operating systems to surf the internet. As such, these browsers and operating systems might not read a set of coding in the same way. So unless you follow the proper coding methods, your website might not be rendered out for others in the same way as you see them. (Which of course isn't what you want. Right?)

- BuLaDiFu -

Happy Teacher's Day

On today's Google homepage was this cute owl wearing spectacles. I didn't quite understand what occasion this doodle was celebrating until I hovered my cursor over it.

What's surprising though was that I've always thought that Teacher's Day was celebrated somewhere in October and not this early in the year. However, Wikipedia made me realized that it wasn't so.

Well...I guess this old frog in the well learnt something new huh?

Unsubscribing from Digi's Mobile Internet Daily 100 MB

Today, my father told me that he had received some weird smses for the past few days. Upon checking the smses, I realized that he had somehow accidentally signed on to the Mobile Internet Daily 100 MB plan and that it had been deducting RM 3 daily ever since signing on.

He told me that he must have accidentally done so while trying to do a talktime transfer. But I'm curious as to how he could have done so, since pressing *116# and *128# are totally different keys altogether.

Anyway, this plan is pretty insane in my opinion since it just automatically renews your subscription everyday and conveniently deducts the money from your prepaid card. So if you are a handphone/internet illiterate like my father, you wouldn't have known about it and how it charges you every single day even though you don't use the service. (Let alone how to "unsubscribe".)

What's more, the FAQ section provided on Digi's website doesn't state "clearly" how to terminate the subscription. It just says the following:

Q19	How can I terminate my subscription to Mobile Internet Daily 100MB?
A19	Dial *116# and Press 2 to Confirm your unsubscription.

But if you had followed the instruction to the letter, you would have instead subscribed yourself to the Weekly 300MB (RM15) package instead because this plan is numbered 2 in the menu after calling *116#. (There simply wasn't any "unsubscribe" option in the menu at that stage.)

To actually unsubscribe from the Daily 100MB plan, you should select back the same plan by pressing 1 instead (after calling *116#). From then on, there would be an option for you to unsubscribe in the menu. Just follow through with it.

If you ask me, its just plain weird that they make it "sooooo" easy to sign onto the plan and yet so "counter-intuitive" to terminate it. What's more, its "sooooo" user-friendly and "kind" that they would "help" you renew the plan without even asking you about it.

Anyway, I hope that this post would help you in unsubscribing from the service if you or your parents have accidentally subscribed to it.

Status Update on My Blog

Recently, I've been spending most of my time writing up on posts regarding the skills of the various character classes of Aika. I didn't expect it to be so time consuming and taxing on the eyes though.

Each character class had at least 27 unique skills and I had to source out information from various websites. Some of them were in English, some in Chinese and I even went to the extreme of looking at those in Japanese and Korean language which I can't read and had to use Google translate (which translated sentences which are "challenging" to read and involves some guesswork).

Then I have to counter check these information with the ingame screenshots of the skills (at least at level one or two) to see if the description and numbers tally. Seriously, even the ingame skill description requires some polishing imo. Some were clear and simple to understand, while others leave people guessing as to what exactly do they do.

Then I finally have to piece together all the various clues and form a more reader-friendly version of the skills list. Anyway, out of the 6 classes, I've already completed 3 and am in the midst of doing the 4th. After finishing all six, I'll proceed to the explanation of some other features of Aika before tying it all up with some videos uploaded to my youtube channel. Then I'll move on to another game...at least that's the plan I have in mind. ^_^;

In the meantime, please bear with me. Thanks.

- BuLaDiFu -

Happy Mother's Day

Mother's Day is a celebration that honors mothers and motherhood, maternal bonds, and the influence of mothers in society. It is celebrated on various days in many parts of the world, but is most commonly on the second Sunday of May.

To celebrate this special Sunday, Google has placed a simple animated doodle on its homepage.

Howard Carter's 138th Birthday

On today's Google homepage sports a man looking at what seems to be ancient Egyptian artifacts. Upon closer inspection, I realized that this doodle serves to commemorate Mr. Howard Carter's 138th Birthday.

Howard Carter was an English archaeologist and Egyptologist. He was known for his discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun.

Keith Haring's 54th Birthday

Keith Haring was an artist and social activist whose work responded to the New York City street culture of the 1980s. His first recognized pieces of pop art were chalk drawings in the subways of New York. To honor his 54th birthday, Google placed a doodle, that was created using his art style, on its homepage.

Labour Day

Labour Day or Labor Day is an annual holiday to celebrate the economic and social achievements of workers. It is said to originate from the labour union movement which advocated for eight hours of work, eight hours of recreation and eight hours of rest. But frankly speaking, is it still observed nowadays? I doubt so...

Anyway, to celebrate this day, Google has placed a doodle of a classic construction worker with the all familiar red metal box on its homepage.